George Lucas
55 quotes
Biography
"All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour, so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology."
"The secret is not to give up hope. It's very hard not to because if you're really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side."
"'Star Wars' is fun, its exciting, its inspirational, and people respond to that. It's what they want."
"No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try."
"Always remember, your focus determines your reality."
"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent."
"We’re a couple of shooting stars, Biggs, and we’ll never be stopped."
"He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven. … He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a really strange relationship. …This is a resource that you can either mine or not. It's not as blatant as we're talking about. You don't think about it that much. You don't immediately realize how old she was at the time. It would be subtle. She could talk about it. "I was jail bait the last time we were together." She can flaunt it at him, but at the same time she never says, "I was fifteen years old." Even if we don't mention it, when we go to cast the part we're going to end up with a woman who's about twenty-three and a hero who's about thirty- five."
"It was insane, I wish I had filmed it. It was like bringing an audience to the Mona Lisa and asking, 'Do you know why she is smiling?' 'Sorry Leonardo, you'll have to make some changes.' At least the audience understood that THX was not a love story set in the 25th-century, which was the way Warners had planned to advertise it. Instead, the company settled for 'Visit the future, where love is the ultimate crime.'"
"The Johnson film wasn't terrible. I just didn't agree with the politics. I'm not a fan of big government and propaganda films are distasteful."
"We say, 'We think you are a talented, functioning person, and we are hiring you because of your abilities, and whatever you come up with, we're going to take.' If we make a mistake, it will be in picking the wrong person. What we're striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released and be completely free to express ourselves. That's very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money to have the power to be free. So the danger is — in being as oppressive as the next guy to the people below you. We're going to do everything possible to avoid that pitfall. But if we fail, it's another saga in the history of man..."
"One of the fatal mistakes that almost every science-fiction film makes is that they spend so much time on the settings — you know, creating the environment — that they spend film time on it. And you don't have to spend too much film time to create an environment. What they're doing is showing off the amount of work that they generated, and it slows the pace of the film down. And the story is not the settings. The story is the stories, plot. You're always surprised with characters, I mean in film it's even more dramatic than it is in writing, because eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him, or her, an enormous package of reality. I mean, Threepio is just a hunk of plastic, and without Tony Daniels in there it just isn't anything at all. In the first film we had maybe 20 colors to paint with, and this time we've had 40 colors to paint with. Well, that doesn't mean it's going to be a better painting. Visual effects are just a tool, a means of telling a story. People tend to confuse them as an end to themselves. A visual effect without a story is a pretty boring thing."
"Don't avoid the cliches — they are cliches because they work!"
"Sound is half the experience of seeing a film. That's why I have been bothered by the poor sound re-production in many theaters and most homes."
"Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives … and you can either help somebody, you can be compassionate toward people, you can treat some people with dignity — or not. And … one way you become a hero, and the other way … you’re part of the problem. And … it’s not a grand thing, you know; you don’t have to get into a giant laser-sword fight and blow up three spaceships to become a hero. I mean — it’s a very small thing that happens every day of your life."
"There is no Episode VII...Not about Luke Skywalker, not about, you know, that group of people and that struggle to bring democracy back to the galaxy."
"Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood."
"The fans are all upset. They’re always going to be upset. Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this? They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it."
"Pleasure's fun. It's great, but you can't keep it going forever; just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe then again, it will come back, and you'll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about your pleasure: it's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion, that is created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else, or something else. And it's a kind of thing that is, in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. You get hung up on pleasure; you're doomed. If you pursue joy; you will find everlasting happiness."
"[P]eople are still asking me if I knew Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit. Yes, of course I knew. We all knew. The only one who didn’t know was George Lucas. We kept it from him, because we wanted to see what his face looked like when it changed expression—and he fooled us even then. He got Industrial Light and Magic to change his facial expression for him[,] and THX sound to make the noise of a face-changing expression. Not only was he virtually expressionless in those days, but he also hardly talked at all. His only two directions to the three of us in the first film were "faster" and "more intense.""
":Category:Films directed by George Lucas"
"I loved photography and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, unless you were related to somebody there was no way in."
"Even in high school I was very interested in history - why people do the things they do. As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to relate the past to the present."
"Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard."
"The secret to film is that it's an illusion."