George Lucas Quotes

George Lucas shares grand, imaginative thoughts on film, music and dreaming big, perfect for fans of creative vision and bold ideas.

38 quotes

1. '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.''

2. '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.'

3. '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 in order 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 every possible to avoid that pitfall. But if we fail, it's another saga in the history of man...'

4. 'My primary concept in approaching the production of THX 1138 was to make a kind of cinema verite film of the future -- something that would look like a documentary crew had made a film about some character in a time yet to come'

5. '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.'

6. 'As you go through history, I didn't think it was going to get quite this close. So it's just one of those recurring things: I hope this doesn't come true in our country. Maybe the film will waken people to the situation.'

7. 'When I wrote it [Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith], Iraq didn't exist: We were just funding Saddam Hussein and giving him weapons of mass destruction. We didn't think of him as an enemy at that time. We were going after Iran and using him as our surrogate, just as we were doing in Vietnam: The parallels between what we did in Vietnam and what we're doing in Iraq now are unbelievable:'

8. '[In ancient Rome,] why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew? Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It's the same thing with Germany and Hitler.'

9. 'You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody's squabbling, there's corruption.'

10. 'Being in Washington is more fictional than being in Hollywood.'

11. 'Remember in the end, John, you're not looking at the background, you're not watching the Pods, you're listening to the music.'

12. 'If I had time and a hammer, I'd track down every bootleg copy and smash it.'

13. '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.'

14. A movie is never finished, only abandoned.

15. Dreams are extremely important. You can't do it unless you imagine it.

16. Good luck has its storms.

17. I regret not the things I have done, only those I have yet to do.

18. It's not like the old 'Star Wars'. This one's a little bit more emotional. We like to describe Episode III as Titanic in space. It's a tearjerker.

19. Sound is 50 percent of the moviegoing experience.

20. The secret to film is that it's an illusion.

21. A talent is a combination of something you love a great deal, something you can lose yourself in - something that you can start at 9 in the morning, look up from your work and it's 10 o'clock at night - and something that you have a natural ability to do very well.

22. The story being told in 'Star Wars' is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not.

23. I'm very proud of all the movies I made. I am very happy with everything I've done. I like to watch my movies. Some of them work. Some of them don't. Some of them people like, most of them they don't.

24. If this were a fantasy world, there would be ten of me and we would each be doing what we wanted to do.

25. All democracies turn into dictatorships - but not by coup. The people give their democracy to a dictator, whether it's Julius Caesar or Napoleon or Adolf Hitler. Ultimately, the general population goes along with the idea.

26. I thought it [Star Wars] was too wacky for the general public. Right or wrong this is my movie, this is my decision, and this is my creative vision, and if people don't like it, they don't have to see it.

27. A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

28. 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.

29. If you look at 'Blade Runner,' it's been cut sixteen ways from Sunday, and there are all kinds of different versions of it.

30. 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.

31. If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there's a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.

32. I've never been that much of a money guy. I'm more of a film guy, and most of the money I've made is in defense of trying to keep creative control of my movies.

33. 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."

34. One of the amazing things about 'Seven Samurai' is that there are a lot of characters. And considering you have so many, and they all have shaved heads, and you've got good guys and bad guys and peasants, you get to understand a lot of them without too much being said.

35. Han Solo: Wonderful girl. Either I'm going to kill her or I'm beginning to like her.

36. Don't avoid the cliches - they are cliches because they work!

37. The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

38. You need peers; you need people who are at the same level you are. You never know in life when you're going to need help, and you never know who you're going to need it from.