George Lucas honored at Cannes and talks post-Disney Star Wars films

“I’m a stubborn guy and I didn’t want to be told how to make my films,” he explains. Star Wars Creator George Lucas summed up the secret to his success, speaking to a crowd of fans at a packed Debussy theater in Cannes on Friday afternoon.

The 80-year-old filmmaker was honored at the 77th Cannes Film Festival with a Palme d'Or for his contribution to cinema, and the audience, much younger than one usually sees at these events, screamed and screamed while Lucas walked. The scene. They were delighted as he sat down for an in-depth discussion about his life in the world of cinema.

Lucas says he is “nostalgic” to be back in Cannes, where he presented his first feature film, THX-1138at the Directors' Fortnight in 1971. Its THX-1138 Co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch was in the audience as Lucas reminded that Warner Bros. didn't want to send the duo to France for the premiere, forcing them to raise the money themselves. They couldn't even get tickets to the screening and had to sneak in.

But “we weren't really interested in making money, we were interested in making movies,” Lucas said, speaking about his early career. He spoke of being mentored by Francis Ford Coppola – whose latest epic, Megalopolispremiered in Cannes this year — on the set of the 1968 musical Finian's Rainbow and later helped Coppola create the independent studio American Zoetrope. He explained how he fought to obtain American graffiti made, for only $750,000, and then how he had to fight against the studio Universal Artists to get the film released in theaters. Studio executives wanted to release the film, starring a host of then-unknowns including Ron Howard, Cindy Williams, Richard Dreyfus and Harrison Ford, on television before a series of test screenings to screaming crowds: ” It was like a rock concert. “, Lucas recalls – convinced them to try theater. Released in only a few theaters, the film grossed $115 million in the United States.

Lucas' deal included back-end residuals on the film's net gross, which usually meant no money. “Because they kept adding things to the budget so that it would never get paid back, the net was almost like fool's gold,” the director said. “But American graffiti I was making money so fast that I actually made a lot of it. It was the first time anyone made money online.

The film also caught the attention of Allan Ladd Jr., then head of production at Fox, who approached Lucas after a screening and said, the director recalled, “Do you have any other films?” And I said, “Well, I have this kind of sci-fi fantasy movie, a crazy 1930s-style movie with dogs driving spaceships.” And he said, “I’ll do it.” I’ll do whatever you want”…and he hired me and the rest is kind of history.

Star Wars is the franchise that most audiences came to hear Lucas discuss, and the director did not disappoint. He talked about getting the licensing and marketing rights for the first film, which was unheard of at the time. “The studios didn't have a licensing department… it took longer to design a toy than to make a movie,” he recalls, and how he took control of the rights to the sequel, in part because Fox was on the verge of bankruptcy at the time. . “They didn’t have confidence in the film,” Lucas said. “The studio was bankrupt anyway, they already had a lot of movies and they were desperate.”

Lucas defended his Star Wars prequel films against haters, arguing that critics forgot that Star Wars was never meant to be a film for adults. “It was supposed to be a movie for 12-year-olds going through puberty who don't know what they're doing and are asking all the big questions: What should I be worried about? What is important in life? he said. “And Star Wars there are all these things in there. They're buried in there, but you definitely understand, especially if you're young.

The negative response to his Star Wars According to Lucas, the prequels came from “critics and fans who were 10 years old when they saw the first one” and didn't want to watch a children's film. The public destruction of Jar Jar Binks – one of the first characters to be canceled on the then-nascent internet – reminded Lucas of the original response to C-3PO. “Everyone said the same thing about 3-PO, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him,” Lucas said. “When I did the third one, it was the Ewoks: 'They're little teddy bears. It's a children's film, we don't want to see a children's film. I said it East a children's film. This has always been a children's film.

Lucas also defended his decision to go back and “clean up” his original trilogy, using new digital technology to give the film the look he always wanted.

“I firmly believe that the director, screenwriter or filmmaker should have the right to make their film the way they want it to be,” says Lucas. Fans are hoping for a restored 4K version of the 1977 original Star Wars should not hold their breath.

“We put the original out on laserdisc and everyone got really angry, they said, 'That sounds terrible.' And I said, 'Yeah, I know that's the case,'” Lucas said. “That’s what it looked like.”

Talk about Star Wars sequels made after selling Lucasfilm to Disney in 2012 (for $4.05 billion), Lucas said the company's new bosses got it badly wrong.

“I was the one who really knew what Star Wars was… who really knew this world, because there are many things to do there. The Force, for example, no one understood the Force,” he said. “When they launched others after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in progress [the original] somehow lost. But it's like that. You give up, you give up.