With STAR WARS out of his hands, George Lucas is enjoying his retirement age and doing things he has never done before like attend the Sundance Film Festival. Lucas took part in a panel at the festival alongside Robert Redford and moderator Leonard Maltin where they discussed the film industry and their impression of it amongst other topics. With Hollywood a subject that Lucas has a lot to say it should come as no surprise that the man who essentially invented the modern blockbuster had cautious words about the industry.
After acknowledging that he really doesn’t have interest in scifi all that much and that he once told Francis Ford Coppola that “cinema is pure” and he doesn’t like character driven drama or plots all that much. He likes the spectacle but thinks the studio system now treats directors like plumbers. Lucas admitted he doesn’t like playing by the rules but didn’t have kind things to say about the current state of film.
A lot of movies you see today are circus movies,” the man who sold his company and franchise to Disney in 2012 for over $4 billion said. “Let’s see how much blood comes out when he splats. Its now gotten to be more and more circus than substance. I get blamed for a lot of that. If you go into Star Wars and see what’s going on there, there’s a lot more substance than circus.”
Selling STAR WARS and Lucasfilm to Disney may have just put his saga in the hands of the biggest makers of spectacle out there but I have to believe in J.J. Abrams and the creative team behind the new films and that they will honor what George Lucas really wanted his series to represent. Hopefully they do him justice while also having a good amount of plot and character driven drama. You know, some of us still like that stuff alongside our spectacle.
STAR WARS: EPISODE VII – THE FORCE AWAKENS opens on December 18, 2015.