George Lucas Quotes About Film
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When my films don't work it's usually because I tried some very experimental idea. I tried new ideas and they just didn't work, as opposed to trying to do something conventional and having it be so conventional nobody wanted to see it.
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The secret to the movie business, or any business, is to get a good education in a subject besides film - whether it's history, psychology, economics, or architecture - so you have something to make a movie about. All the skill in the world isn't going to help you unless you have something to say.
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I think that Lethal Weapon-style dialogue is overused, it's a necessary aspect of high action films where you have to have the smart retort. You have to say "I'll be back baby" and stuff. It's not my style.
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I wanted to be a car mechanic and I wanted to race cars and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn't really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools.
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It wasn't long after I began writing Star Wars that I realized the story was more than a single film could hold. As the saga of the Skywalkers and Jedi Knights unfolded, I began to see it as a tale that could take at least nine films to tell - three trilogies - and I realized, in making my way through the back story and after story, that I was really setting out to make the middle story.
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I felt that one of the major issues in the third film is that Luke is finally on his own and has to fight Vader and the Emperor by himself. If you get a sense that Yoda or Ben is there to help him or to somehow influence him, it diminishes the power of the scene.
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Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.
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From the outset, I conceived Star Wars as a series of six films, or two trilogies.
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I made lots of movies while in school while everybody else was running around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish they'd give me some film."
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The first script was one of six original stories I had written in the form of two trilogies. After the success of Star Wars, I added another trilogy. So now there are nine stories. The original two trilogies were conceived of as six films of which the first film was number four.
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If I'd have gone to art school, or stayed in anthropology, I probably would have ended up back in film ... Mostly I just followed my inner feelings and passions ... and kept going to where it got warmer and warmer, until it finally got hot ... Everybody has talent. It's just a matter of moving around until you've discovered what it is.
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I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them.
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I wanted to make a kids' film that would strengthen contemporary mythology.
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I was never interested in being powerful or famous. But once I got to film school and learned about movies, I just fell in love with it. I didn't care what kind of movies I made.
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I like racing. I love the speed and I'm a very kinetic person in terms of filmmaking. I love the movement of film more than anything else.
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I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional, and I still do.
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You have to have a thick enough skin to cope with the criticism. I'm very self-critical and I have a lot of friends that I trust who are film directors and writers and people in my profession.
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Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard. What you’ve really got to do is focus on learning as much about life, and about various aspects of it first.
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A film is sort of binary - it either works or it doesn't work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all.
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As I talk to film students now especially, I say, "The easiest job you'll ever get is to try to make your first film." That's the easy one to get, is the first film because nobody knows whether you can make a film or not.
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I like to say that films are never finished, they're only abandoned.
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All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.
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In my films, all the great things are put together. It's not like one kind of ice cream but rather a very big Sundae.
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STAR WARS is really three trilogies, nine films. The first trilogy covers the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, the middle trilogy the fall of the Empire, and the last trilogy involves the rebuilding of the Republic. It won't be finished for probably another 20 years.
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There's nothing worse than the frustration of having somebody who you feel doesn't get what you're doing, trying to turn it into something else. It's a very, very annoying and sort of frustrating thing and I just never wanted to go through it. I was very fortunate as I came up through the film business that I was able to insulate myself from that.
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After you've done the first feature, then you have heck of a difficult time getting your second film off the ground. They look at your first film and they say, "Oh well, we don't want you anymore."
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I've had much more down in my life than I've had up. And much more struggle. First of all, when I went into the film school everybody said, "What are you doing? This is a complete dead-end for a career."
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No film ever ends up exactly as you would like it to, but with minor exceptions, THX came out pretty much as I had visualized it, thanks to some excellent assistance -- and a whole lot of luck.
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Sometimes people are surprised to learn that most of the films I've made don't work. They've been released but nobody has ever seen them. Maybe 40 percent of them are very successful. That's a very high percentage; most people have maybe 10 or 15 percent of their films work.
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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.
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