He has created a huge industry around 'Star Wars', but now he's ready to hang up his Darth Vader helmet, writes Hugh Linehan
Tomorrow evening, at the Cannes Film Festival, the red carpet will be rolled out for George Lucas at the European premiere of the sixth (or, depending how you look at it, the third) instalment of the epic science-fiction cycle he began three decades ago.
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith will sit slightly uneasily among the auteur-driven, independently financed art movies which make up most of the fare on offer at Cannes over the next week. This, after all, is the film which kicks off this year's season of global summer blockbusters, the hyped-up, over-merchandised, sequel-ridden, effects-driven behemoths which dominate the world's box-office, squeezing out the smaller, more contrarian films which Cannes tends to celebrate.
Revenge of the Sith will land with a vengeance at cinemas across the world, including Ireland, next Thursday, with many midnight screenings already sold out. In parts of the US, they've been queuing since April, which says something about the triumph of hope over experience: the last two excursions for the franchise, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, were widely derided for their emotional sterility, tedious plots and tortoise-like pacing. It didn't stop them making bags of money. On Forbes magazine's 2005 list of the world's 500 richest people, Lucas ranks at an eminently respectable 194, down from 159 last year. He can expect to ascend again with Revenge of the Sith raking in cinema and DVD revenues over the next 12 months. Because, by some people's reckoning, George Lucas is the world's most successful independent film-maker. Unlike his most powerful contemporaries, he does not work for a Hollywood studio when making his films, but finances and owns them himself, and offers only a slice of the profits to their distributor, Twentieth Century Fox.
It's surprising, then, that this is a writer-director who, by all accounts, hates directing and can't write. His dislike of directing live actors has been evident since his first days as a film-maker. On the set of the first Star Wars, he was reported to have two instructions for the cast and crew: "Okay, same thing, only better" or "Faster, more intense". After that film, he didn't direct again for 22 years, choosing instead to produce The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (a decision which may account for the more fluid storytelling and less laughable performances in those two films).
Nor is writing Lucas's favourite activity. He wrote the original script for Star Wars by hand, in his tiny print, with sharp No 2 pencils. The work gave him stomach pains and headaches; in his frustration he took to clipping off bits of his hair with a pair of scissors. The result of this effort was lines the actors often had trouble wrapping their mouths around. "You can type this shit, George, but you sure can't say it," Harrison Ford said to Lucas on the set of Star Wars. Playing Obi-Wan Kenobi to the rubber model of Yoda, Alec Guinness complained about one speech to Irvin Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, with the plaintive suggestion: "Why doesn't the little green thing do this one?"
George Walton Lucas Jr celebrates his 61st birthday today. He was raised on a walnut ranch in the northern Californian town of Modesto. His father, a stationery store owner, wanted him to follow into the family business, but young George had other ideas. During his late teens, he planned to become a professional racing driver, but a serious car accident just after his high school graduation changed those ambitions. Enrolling in the University of Southern California (USC) film school, he became fascinated by the experimental films being produced by avant-garde artists such as Stan Brakhage and Walter Lipsett. These films, with their abstract collages of image and sound, may seem far removed from Lucas's later "popcorn" sensibilities, but they were to underpin a lifelong fascination with the potential of sound and editing.
AT USC IN the late 1960s, Lucas found himself part of the first generation of film school directors, many of whom would go on to become stars of the New Hollywood of the 1970s. He also found mentors such as Francis Ford Coppola. Lucas and Coppola became good friends and in 1969 formed American Zoetrope, which Coppola envisaged as an independent, northern Californian alternative to the hidebound, Los Angeles-based studios. The company's first project was Lucas's THX 1138 (1971), a chilly sci-fi film which was resolutely uncommercial but well-received critically. Lucas formed his own company, Lucasfilm Ltd, and in 1973 wrote and directed the semi-autobiographical American Graffiti, a portrait of small-town America at the end of the rock 'n' roll era. With its nostalgia for the recent past, and its loving recreation of 1950s iconography and music, American Graffiti was deeply influential in setting the tone for an entire strand of American pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
American Graffiti's commercial success and five Oscar nominations gave Lucas the clout he needed for his next venture. From 1973 to 1974 he began writing the screenplay for Star Wars, inspired by the Flash Gordon serials he had watched on TV as a child, and by Joseph Campbell's writings on mythic archetypes across different cultures and religions. In the febrile atmosphere of mid-1970s Hollywood, Lucas's project seemed a curiosity, a retro-nostalgic, irony-free space opera for kids which nobody would take seriously.
Star Wars was turned down by several studios until Twentieth Century Fox gave him a chance. In what in hindsight looks like a stroke of genius, Lucas agreed to forgo his directing salary in exchange for 40 per cent of the film's box-office take and all merchandising rights. When he showed the finished film to his peers, Steven Spielberg and Brian de Palma, it was met with complete silence, causing Lucas's then-wife Marcia to burst into tears.
The rest is history. The movie went on to break all box office records and earned seven Oscars. It codified the term "blockbuster". Lucas made the other Star Wars films and, along with Spielberg, created the Indiana Jones series. It was not all triumph, though. He produced some resounding flops through the 1980s, such as the unfunny comedy Howard the Duck and the less than fantastic fantasy Willow.
So, when he announced his return to the Star Wars cycle in the mid-1990s, his plan for three prequels to the original trilogy, telling the story of the rise of the young Anakin Skywalker and his ultimate fall from grace to become Darth Vader, audiences, especially the millions who had flocked as children and teenagers to the earlier films, were understandably excited. That excitement has been dented by the sheer, yawn-inducing tedium of the prequels so far. Early reports suggest that Revenge of the Sith may be slightly better but, in the sycophantic world of movie journalism, these should be taken with a grain of salt.
Lucas states that Revenge of the Sith will definitely be his final instalment, bringing the story full circle. "It is the end," he says. "The movie starts with Darth Vader as a young lad and it ends with him dying. I don't know where else I can take it." But two Star Wars TV series are in the pipeline. Though Lucas says he's looking forward to "a whole new adventure" as a director of "very out-there" films, he admits that he has faced this crossroads at least once before and chose to go back to what he knew best.
Star Wars is arguably not Lucas's most significant contribution to cinema history. In 1975 he established Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) which has made computer graphics the centrepiece of big-budget movie-making in films such as Jurassic Park and Terminator II. In 1988 Lucas sold his early computer development unit to Steve Jobs, who renamed it Pixar and turned it into the world's most successful animation company (Toy Story, The Incredibles).
LUCAS IS ALSO responsible for the modern THX sound systems found in most of our multiplexes and home entertainment systems, and is at the forefront of developing digital cinematography. The digital editing system that his team of engineers invented in the 1980s has become the core of the technology used to edit most films and TV programmes today.
By the time Lucas got around to making The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, even longtime fans and colleagues started asking if his focus on technology had become detrimental. The recent episodes do often look like advertising showreels for ILM's box of fancy tricks. There's little sense of the technology being put to the service of the story in the manner, say, of Peter Jackson's work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
And what of Star Wars as a whole? Does it really have any of the mythic resonance which Lucas aspired to, and which is claimed for it by hardcore fans? Not really. The story of the rise, Faustian fall and final redemption of Anakin Skywalker (which is what the cycle has turned out to be) suffers from Lucas's dismal failure to invest that character with any complexity or empathy. It's further derailed by its maker's insistence on erasing any ambiguities in the story by tinkering digitally with the original three films and indulging in endless, over-detailed exposition in the prequels. Where the original Star Wars trilogy occasionally sprang to life - despite Lucas's best efforts - because of the sparky contributions of Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher and Alec Guinness, the newer films feature no such minor rebellions from the cast. And Lucas has succeeded in taking his most memorable character - the malevolent Darth Vader - and turning him into a spoilt brat who turns to the Dark Side because he can't get his own way.
Lucas himself has suggested that the Skywalker/Vader character is partly autobiographical, and it's not hard to spot the parallels: the gauche youth who isn't accepted by his fellow knights (that preview screening of the first Star Wars); the sorcerer's apprentice who outdoes his master (Francis Coppola's dream of a northern Californian alternative to Hollywood ended in disaster, while Lucas's empire lives on at the aptly-named Skywalker ranch). And many see Lucas and all his works as representing the Dark Side of modern movie-making: the infantilism, gargantuanism and technological fixation of 21st-century pop culture.
In his unauthorised biography, Mythmaker: The Life and Work of George Lucas, writer George Baxter offers this opinion of the film-maker. "In his hands, cinema became synonymous in sensibility and style with the comic book, the hamburger, the soda." That judgment is unfair only in that Lucas is not solely responsible for the direction film-making has taken in the last quarter of a century. But it would be hard to identify any other individual who has been so influential.