George Lucas returned to the Cannes Croisette for the first time since 1971 this week to receive an honorary Palme d’Or. So what did the 80-year-old director say about his career as he talked to a packed audience at the Debussy Theater after accepting the prize? Well, to the surprise of no one, THR reports that he mainly talked about “Star Wars.” Along the way, Lucas defended the prequel trilogy, his continual updates to the original trilogy, and lamented how Disney misused his ideas after he sold Lucasfilm to the company in 2012 for $4.05 billion.
For Lucas, “Star Wars” saved him from a precarious creative fate that many directors succumb to. But really, it was 1973’s “American Graffiti” that saved him first. After making the film for $750,000, Lucas fought Universal Artists to get the movie into theaters instead of the studio punting it to a TV broadcast. After successful test screenings (“It was like a rock concert,” said Lucas), UA acquiesced to the director’s pleas, and “American Graffiti” went on to make $115 million in its run. And thanks to the backend residual deal he signed with the studio on the film’s net gross, Lucas made a bundle from the movie, too. “It was the first time anybody had ever made money on net,” he recollected.
And with the money and critical success from “American Graffiti,” Lucas also gained creative freedom in that he was now an in-demand name for other studios to work with. Fox‘s Allan Ladd Jr. tracked him down after a screening. Lucas remembered Ladd Jr. asking him, “’You got any other movies?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this sort of science fiction fantasy, 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.”
That idea was “Star Wars,” and Lucas used his business savvy again to secure licensing and merchandising rights for “A New Hope.” That wasn’t a common business move at the time. “The studios didn’t have licensing departments…it took longer to design a toy than it did to make a movie,” said Lucas. It was also easy for Lucas to secure the sequel rights for “Star Wars,” too, since Fox was bordering on bankruptcy. “They didn’t have faith in the movie,” Lucas continued. “The studio was going bankrupt anyway, they had a lot of movies already, and they were desperate.”
Those licensing and sequel deals proved fortuitous for Lucas, as he built a pop culture empire with the original “Star Wars” trilogy and its various lines of affiliated toys and merchandise. But the filmmaker could never understand a common criticism leveled at the series: that they catered to a younger audience. For Lucas, “Star Wars” movies were never meant to be ones for grown-ups. “It was supposed to be a kid’s movie for 12-year-olds that were 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’s important in life?,” he said. “And “Star Wars” has all those things in there.” They’re buried in there, but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young.”
Lucas thinks his prequel trilogy faced the worst backlash in that regard. From his perspective, “critics and fans who had been 10 years old when they saw the first one” and now they wanted a “Star Wars” movie they could connect to as adults. But an adult-minded space opera was never Lucas’ intention with the series, and he thinks that’s why certain aspects of the prequels, like the character Jar Jar Binks, got so much ridicule. “Everybody said the same thing about 3P0, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him,” Lucas said about the droid who debuted in the original trilogy. “When I did the third one it was the Ewoks: ‘Those are little teddy bears. This is a kid’s movie, we don’t want to see a kids’ movie.’ I said: ‘It is a kids’ movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.”
Next up in “Star Wars” topics: the director’s penchant to continually “clean up” the original trilogy with new digital technology, a choice Lucas defended. “I’m a firm believer that the director, or the writer, or the filmmaker should have a right to have his movie be the way he wants it,” he declared. And “Star Wars” fans shouldn’t expect Lucas to give the original version of the 1977 movie a 4K restoration; he’s happier with the updates he’s made. “We did release the original one on laserdisc, and everybody got really mad,” Lucas remembered. “They said, ‘it looks terrible.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I know it did.’ That is what it looked like.”
As for how Lucas feels about the current climate of the “Star Wars” galaxy, he’s not thrilled with the director Disney has taken his former franchise, but he’s at peace it’s no longer under his control. “I was the one who really knew what “Star Wars” was…who actually knew this world, because there’s a lot to it. The force, for example, nobody understood the force,” said Laus. “When they started other ones after I sold the company, a lot of the ideas that were in [the original] sort of got lost. But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”
So, needless to say, Lucas probably isn’t thrilled with where Kathleen Kennedy & co. have taken the franchise. But the fate of “Star Wars” isn’t a George Lucas problem anymore, is it? Congratulations on the honorary Palme d’Or, Mr. Lucas.