Well, my interest in film was basically a fluke. uh in I mean it was the interest wasn’t but me my finding myself here I think was as happens uh I wanted to go to the LA art center and become an illustrator my father would have nothing to do with it and since he had to pay for me to go to school um and knowing that I was basically lazy and wasn’t going to work my way through school um he said you know do whatever you want but I’m not paying to send you to an art school because you know artists are don’t make
money so I said, “Okay, um I’ll go to San Francisco State and um you know, become an anthropology major because that’s really I like that, too.” And then my best friend was going to USC and he wanted me to go to Stockton with him and take the tests and all that sort of thing. And so we’d known each other about three years old and gone to school all the way together.
And I said, “Well, okay. I’ll go and do that.” And I said, and he I said, “Well, what if I well by some kind of miracle, I actually passed and got in, got accepted, and then asked I asked my friend, I said, “What am I going to major in there? I mean, what am I going to do? I mean, do they have an anthropology department?” You know, I don’t think so, but they’ve got a I know you like photography and you want to go to art center and study photography and art.
And that’s said, “So, they got this cinematography school and I think they teach photography.” I said, “Well, okay.” And you say, “That’s supposed to be easier than PE. And I said, “Okay, that sounds good to me.” So I went there and lo and behold, it was a school where they you learn to make movies. Now this is interesting stuff. So that’s what I want to do.
And I like documentary film making. When I actually got to school and I sort of said, where am I? What am I going to do? I liked animation and and I liked everything. But I said, you know, I think what I’m going to do is become a documentary cameraman editor and then make avang guard movies on the side because I was extremely interested in uh non-story non-character movies just pure cinema and as it happened at that particular point at UC their focus was on the Canadian film board the French unit of the Canadian film board which
was all nonverbal non you know character non-story films so I just fit right in And that and obviously my just happened that the thing that I loved is what they were, you know, that was their thing there at that point. In the group that I came through with, we all were very, very fixated on sound.
And of course, I grew up with music and rock and roll and the radio and I grew up with radio dramas. I grew up with uh, you know, watchalong record albums, 40 78 albums. and you’d sort of they do a little beep and you turn the page and uh so I was very connected into a kind of audiovisisual world. When I got to film school it was no different and there was a particular phenomenon about that department uh architecturally which made everybody focus on sound more than you normally would which I’m very grateful for.
But whenever you played a movie there in room 108, which is where the only we only had one room like this. And so when you played it, and they played it all the time, or you played a student film or you were mixing your film, you know, if you had a great soundtrack, everybody in the department immediately rush into the room to see what was going on.
So you became very aware of how powerful your soundtrack could be. And if you had a great soundtrack, you could tell, you know, how successful you were by how many people would stream into the room while you were mixing the film. I was asked to come back to school to uh help my old uh camera instructor to be I was asked to come back and be his TA because at that point was the middle of the Vietnam War.
The Navy was sending uh military personnel there to train them and these were all and it really wasn’t to train them. It was you know guys that had been in the service for 20 years and it was sort of their reward. I think the one advantage to that class was that the Navy had all the cameras and all the film they needed. So I cut the class in half and one half went off and did a movie and I took the other class and we went off and did a movie and that’s when I made THX which was written by some friends of mine.
Then they rejected it and I said, “Well, I’ll make it, you know, I I still like this idea. I’ll take it. I’ll make it into something.” So I had the thing and I made it into a film that won again more reward more awards and I done a documentary and it won awards and I won you know I did a another little film that won I just in terms of the national student film festival and terms of all the festivals you could go to in those days as a student I pretty much took them all.
So, as a result, um, I had won a scholarship, two scholarships. One to work with Columbia Pictures, uh, for Carl Foreman, uh, to do a little behind the-scenes documentary on McKenna’s gold. Mhm. And then, uh, another one to work at Warner Brothers. They had what they call the Sam Goldwin Award, and you got to go there and work in a department at Warner Brothers for 6 months.
There was one movie being shot on the lot which was a seven arts movie and it was being directed by Francis Copela. He was only 25 then but uh we all looked up to him because he was the only person who had made it into the film industry. Only film only film student because in those days basically your chances of getting in the film business was zero.
If you went to film school you were going to be a ticket taker at Disneyland. you were going to go work for Lockheed making industrial films or you were going to go out and find a real job somewhere, but you certainly weren’t going to go into the film industry. No one made it ever. So Francis had actually written a screenplay.
He’d actually directed a film and he was like the student film god at that point. So I sat there for about a week and I I’ I’d gone around the studio to sort of see everything first and then uh was you know sitting there for about a week watching this you know insane ritual they were going through and um got really bored and I went back to the production department.
I said look can I get off this thing? I said I’m not learn I’ve just I I learned everything I can about these kind of movies and I don’t want to do it. I want to get reassigned to the animation department. They said well there’s nobody there. And then Francis heard that your student observer wants to leave. You know, he says it’s boring.
And he and he, you know, immediately came over. We were the only two people. Um I was I don’t know. I was 23 and he was 28 and we both had beards. We were both film students and everybody else in the picture was over 60. Literally, there wasn’t It was a Fred a stair movie. It was the last one he ever did. So it was like, you know, he said, “What? What do you mean it’s boring? I said, “Well, you know, I’ve seen this.
I don’t I have no interest in this and I’m going to go to the animation department and make a movie.” He said, “Well, look, you stick around and you come up with one good idea every day, you know.” So, I did that, you know, and I I had a Polaroid and I would go around get angles for him because, as it turns out, Francis’s real expertise is in the theater working with actors and as a writer and a screenwriter.
the two things I hate, especially in those days. I didn’t even think they were, you know, valid in any way. So, all I cared about was editing and photography. So, that was my area of expertise. So, as it was when I started doing this and picking angles and working in the editing room and all that kind of stuff, you know, he got to sort of realize that I kind of knew, you know, knew what I was doing.
And um and so we meshed very well, sort of two halves to a whole. And uh and actually it was a great mentorship because you know he said well if you’re ever going to direct movies you’re going to have to learn how to write because up to that time I you know I had my writing classes I’d gone through I’d yelled at the instructor he yelled back at me and that’s about as far as it ever went.
But then he started to force me to become a writer and to work with actors and do all the that theatrical stuff that I really didn’t have any interest in. So it kind of was that that sort of pushed me in that direction. So, I had to sit down by myself with no money and write this screenplay. And then I took it around to all the studios. Nobody wanted to do it.
They said, “This is not a movie. This is a montage uh with a lot of music and no characters.” And then they said, “Well, and you cannot tell a story by intercutting four different stories that are going on simultaneously.” You say that just wasn’t done in those days. You just you told one. You had if you have four stories, you tell one, two, three, four.
But you don’t intercut those four stories with four different characters that never that aren’t parallel action. It was just too out there for them. And I went to every single studio in town. Nobody wanted anything to do with it. And so finally I got it picked up by uh the very last vestage of one of these you know 60s youth you know now we call it Fox 2000 but it’s they used to have after Easy Rider they started all these little things which the ZO trope was supposed to be one well Universal had one and they’d made two-lane black top and few
other movies but now they were basically shutting down because it was a really bad idea and I managed to squeeze in at the very last and in the end they said, “Okay, we’ll do this, but you got to get a big star or a big name connected with it.” I said, “Well, it’s a movie about teenagers.
I can’t get a star connected with it.” He said, “Well, we’ll take a bigname producer or somebody.” And Francis had just finished The Godfather. He was like the hottest thing in Hollywood. So, he said, “Yeah, I’ll put my name on it.” And um so that’s how I got American Graffiti done, you know, which at the time it’s it’s funny now because almost all television is done the way the American Graffiti was done.
It’s almost intercutting any, you know, CSI or I mean it’s been going on for quite a long long time now of having two completely separate stories going on simultaneously and intercutting them. But in those days that was like too far out for any studio to even get near. And the idea of using music, you know, existing music and have it run all the way through to have, you know, 110minute movie with 110 minutes music, it was just insane.
It’s again now everything’s done that way. But in those days, it’s funny that they would just not do the movie because of those very specific things that they had in their mind you couldn’t do. After American Graffiti, I kept all these kids kept coming back. Oh, that’s so great. You know, I got so much feedback of how it changed people’s lives and how, you know, I didn’t know cuz, you know, kids were completely stoned and doing whatever.
And they had no idea that there was actually a youth that you can actually be nervous about girls and you can actually you know be normal which is the way it really is because in those days you could it wasn’t like that you know just you know get stoned and fall into bed with somebody even if you’re 14 it didn’t make any difference.
So it’s like all the kind of drama that a teenager normally goes through didn’t exist in those days. So, and a lot of the kids when they came back said, “Oh, that’s what it’s all about. That’s oh yeah, I feel that way inside. It’s just that I never really got to I never really got sober enough to really understand it.” So, I said, “Hey, that’s kind of cool.
” Which is and I was saying, “Well, if I can do anything, if I if I I’ll try to pitch this movie, it doesn’t work, then I’ll go back to doing documentaries and doing what I want to do, and I will have taken this as far as I can.” Uh, but I wanted to do a big studio picture on stages with sets because I’d only shot street pictures and I, you know, in a real studio with real people and a costume department and all the stuff that everybody has.
I said, I’ll do one big Hollywood movie the way Hollywood used to make movies. Um and I’ll do it as a children’s film and I’ll do it using mythological motifs of you know basic psychological underpinnings and things I studied in in anthropology and then I will put it in this uh context of a Saturday mata cereal because I like the idea of starting in the middle and having it just be something that was in the middle in originally the three were going to be on.
So, it was just going to be one movie that just was this one episode of uh some bigger thing that you never got to see. Irony upon ironies. Now, mostly what I do is I write for God’s sakes. I’m somebody who hates writing, hates to develop character, hates to do dialogue. Yet, I’ve been nominated for two Academy Awards as best writer and countless other things.
And I spend most of my time writing. Mhm. But I think it’s because I kind of do it in a in a very crafted kind of way. I you know What do you mean when you say craft? Well, crafted, you know, crafted means you put the climax at the end of the movie and especially if you go back to Joe Campbell and you go back to the archetypes and the old story, you know, you realize that it’s all just one story and it just is how good a storyteller are you, right? It can be something you’ve heard or something you saw or something you lived yourself. And then
it gets kind of quirky, but in order for it to really connect with people, it’s got to have these kind of classic arcs of human tragedy or human desire or, you know, which are very old and very tested. The reason they’re very old and very tested is because it was a an oral medium. You had to sit here like this with an audience and you got paid for it.
So if you weren’t good at it, you didn’t eat because you went from town to town to town and you sat around the fire and you told people these stories and if they loved them, then you got a great dinner and stuff. If you didn’t, they just kicked you out in the rain. So you would watch the audience and when the audience started laughing or reacting, you say, “Well, that works, you know.
” So you add live a little bit every night and then you say, you know, this part here, they’re falling asleep, so I think I’m going to cut that part out. So you have the same story of Troy told over and over. Gilgamish told over and over and over again. But and intuitively in your mind you sort of sense that that’s something you care about.
That’s those are problems that you deal with. So you could click with them. They’re not dispassionate problems. They’re you know I also felt that way about my mother. So you know and I wish my father you know so if you get that and you connect and the story connects and you can tell the story that way and you tell it well and the people connect with it and it goes on.
So that that kind of thing is where you make it work and the story itself you know the first act you just introduce all the characters the last act the second act you introduce the problem third act you solve the problem you know now you can push the first act you can you can maneuver it you can take the so you know and introduce the problem in the first thing you can do what I love to do is come in forget the first act and just throw it out start the second act you you know, and just say, well, you know, these guys and uh or like with
Indiana Jones, you start with the last movie he did and you end that movie and then you start your new movie and you introduce everything. You introduce the characters. So, you start at the end of a movie and then you go to the beginning of, you know, so you can take those, but the blocks are basically the building blocks.
There’s only like four or five of them. So, you just sort of stick around. You can move them around any way you want. You can chop them up any way you want. But ultimately, it’s just a different way of telling the story. I had to build a whole empire simply to make the movies the way I wanted to make them.
Well, but that’s that’s giving a little short trip shrift because one of the things I find so remarkable is again what you’ve done on sound in your films and what you’ve done with THX and the facility that you have to mix there. I mean, it will try to catch up. It’s just But how does it how does it work? It works because I care about movies.
I mean, other people can say exactly the same thing. No one else has the THX system. No one else has the system up there where they’re doing their mixing where it’s it’s just it’s you know it’s it’s different. You’re going to find anybody any good director Steve Spielberg anybody you’re going to find bottom line is they love movies is Stephen a human? Of course he is. You know he’s got seven kids.
He’s got a life. But at the same time there isn’t a second in the day. You know you know the way it works. You know what they say about men is there isn’t a second in the day that goes by that they don’t think about sex. Well, a filmmaker, there isn’t a second in the day that goes by you don’t think about film.
You know, that’s all you think about. I mean, you’re with your kids and you’re doing your stuff and you’re living your life and you know, you’re having sex, but you’re basically thinking about film and that’s your life. And if you could if that’s you, then you’re going to make it because the people that come in and say, “Well, I’m going to be famous or I’m going to make money or I’m going to do this.
” They’re just doing a job and you know and sometimes it’s and this is really a bad job. It’s terrible. You know, you’re dealing with the largest group of psychotic, neurotic, difficult people you could ever imagine on all levels. And I don’t even have to work with the studios and that’s where most of them are. So you you uh you know I say there’s a lot of easier ways to make a living.
There’s a lot of easier ways to become famous. But if you’re absolutely have to make movies, which is like people ask some kids, you know, why do you make I do it because I have to. I wouldn’t be alive if I didn’t make a movie. I don’t know how to do anything. I don’t know how to live my life any other way.
Once I got bitten and fell in love, nothing else existed for me, you know. And then fortunately my kids took over from that and my kids sort of saved me. They sort of made me into a human being or at least a half a human being. But if they hadn’t come along I would I would have no idea what being a human being was all about because I just you know any whether it’s Marty or anybody who is a good filmmaker has that attitude and they would give their life for movies.
From Art School Dropout to Galactic Empire: The Accidental Genius of George Lucas and the Fluke That Changed Cinema Forever
In the annals of cinematic history, few names carry as much weight as George Lucas. He is the visionary architect of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, a man whose work has not only defined genres but has fundamentally reshaped the way we experience storytelling. Yet, in a recent, candid conversation with the American Film Institute, Lucas revealed that his journey to becoming a “student film god” and eventually a global icon was less of a calculated plan and more of a series of fortunate accidents—or “flukes,” as he puts it. From his early days as a reluctant student to his mentorship under Francis Ford Coppola, the story of George Lucas is a masterclass in persistence, creative rebellion, and a relentless passion for the craft of filmmaking.
The “fluke” began with a simple disagreement. Lucas initially wanted to attend the Art Center in Los Angeles to become an illustrator. However, his father, skeptical of the financial viability of an art career, refused to pay for his tuition. “Do whatever you want,” Lucas recalls his father saying, “but I’m not paying for you to go to art school.” Facing the prospect of working his way through school—something the self-described “lazy” teenager wanted to avoid—Lucas pivoted. He considered majoring in anthropology at San Francisco State until a childhood friend persuaded him to take the entrance exams for the University of Southern California (USC). When Lucas asked what he would even study there, his friend mentioned a “cinematography school” that he thought taught photography. “I heard it was easier than PE,” Lucas joked, “and that sounded good to me.”
Upon arriving at USC, Lucas discovered that the school was about much more than just taking pictures; it was about the art of making movies. He quickly fell in love with documentary filmmaking and avant-garde, “non-story” cinema. He was particularly drawn to the work of the Canadian Film Board’s French unit, which focused on non-verbal, experimental films. This interest in the “pure cinema” of visuals and sound would become a hallmark of his future work. Lucas’s time at USC was also marked by a unique architectural phenomenon: the department only had one room, Room 108, for mixing and playing films. This forced students to become hyper-aware of the power of sound. “If you had a great soundtrack,” Lucas noted, “everybody in the department would immediately rush into the room to see what was going on.” This early lesson in auditory impact led to the creation of the THX system and a lifelong obsession with sound design.
Lucas’s breakthrough into the professional industry was equally serendipitous. After winning nearly every national student film festival award, he earned a scholarship to observe a film being shot at Warner Brothers. The director was a 25-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, who was already a legend among film students for being the only one to actually “make it” in Hollywood. Lucas, bored by the traditional “Fred Astaire” musical being filmed, almost quit to go to the animation department. However, Coppola noticed the young observer and challenged him to “come up with one good idea every day.” This blossomed into a deep friendship and mentorship. While Coppola excelled in writing and working with actors—two things Lucas admits he “hated”—Lucas brought an expertise in editing and photography. Together, they were “two halves to a whole.”
It was Coppola who pushed Lucas to become a writer, a task Lucas approached with a craftsman’s precision despite his personal distaste for it. His first major solo success, American Graffiti, was a project born out of sheer grit. Every studio in town rejected the screenplay, claiming that a movie with intercutting parallel stories and a non-stop soundtrack of existing music would never work. It was only when Coppola, fresh off the success of The Godfather, put his name on the project as a producer that Universal finally gave it a green light. The film went on to change the lives of countless teenagers who saw their own anxieties and “normalcy” reflected on the big screen, a reaction that encouraged Lucas to try his hand at a “big Hollywood movie.”
That “big movie” would, of course, become Star Wars. Lucas wanted to create a children’s film that utilized mythological motifs and “basic psychological underpinnings” within the context of a Saturday matinee serial. He drew on his studies in anthropology and the work of Joseph Campbell to craft a story that felt both new and ancient. Despite his nominations for Best Writer, Lucas remains humble about his process, viewing storytelling as a crafted oral medium. He compares a filmmaker to an ancient storyteller sitting around a fire; if you don’t connect with the audience, “they just kick you out in the rain.” This audience-centric approach led him to experiment with structure, such as “throwing out the first act” and starting in the middle of the action—a technique that defined both Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
Perhaps the most poignant part of Lucas’s reflection is his admission of the personal cost of his obsession. He describes the film industry as a “terrible job” filled with “psychotic, neurotic, and difficult people.” For a true filmmaker, he says, there isn’t a second in the day that goes by without thinking about film. “You’re with your kids, you’re living your life, but you’re basically thinking about film.” This singular focus, while responsible for his success, also left him feeling disconnected from his own humanity. It wasn’t until his children came along that he truly felt he became a “human being.” “If they hadn’t come along,” he admitted, “I would have no idea what being a human being was all about.”
Today, George Lucas stands as a titan of the industry, but he remains at his core the student who “fell in love and nothing else existed.” His empire was built not for the sake of power, but for the sake of creative independence—to make movies “exactly the way I wanted to make them.” His journey from a “fluke” acceptance at USC to the creation of a galactic legacy serves as a powerful reminder that passion, when combined with a craftsman’s dedication and a bit of accidental timing, can indeed change the world. As Lucas himself put it, “It works because I care about movies.” And for millions of fans around the world, that care has made all the difference.
