George Lucas Blasts Hollywood’s Obsession With Fan Feedback & Focus Groups: “That Isn’t How You Make The Movie”

Another industry take coming from writer/director George Lucas in a new interview (after sharing his impressions on the future impact of AI) has him blasting Hollywood and studio obsessions with fan feedback and the overuse of focus groups being detrimental to the filmmaking process, suggesting those aren’t helpful opinions when trying to be creative or sticking to a vision. Lucas has certainly seen his fair share of fan backlash over the decades for his “Star Wars” prequels trilogy (granted, “Revenge of the Sith” had a bigger embrace than the other two installments, as the other films are getting re-evaluated in recent years) and the lambasted “Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (he wouldn’t come back as a screenwriter for James Mangold‘s “The Dail of Destiny“) helmed by longtime pal Steven Spielberg.

During his expansive chat with A Rabbit’s Foot, the veteran filmmaker, now retired, has some hot takes on having all these outside perspectives and feedback having a negative correlation with him, sounding like his own experiences with that side of things weren’t exactly thrilling or helpful.

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“I had a group of friends I went to school with: [Martin] Scorsese, Francis [Ford Coppola], Steven [Spielberg]. We were all students at the same time, and we all know each other really well. I know what their prejudices are. When I show them a movie and they make comments, I know where they’re coming from,” Lucas alluding to that being real constructive and useful feedback, while other feedback is not.

“I don’t like focus groups. The audience doesn’t know what they want to see. If they don’t like a character, that’s interesting, and as a filmmaker I want to find out why. But when the studios hear that, they take the wrong message. They let the audience actually make the movie. Of course, now they go crazy with that. Now, it’s all about what the fans think. That isn’t how you make the movie. You make a movie by finding someone that knows how to make movies, that has a story to tell, and is passionate about it.”

That’s not it with Lucas’ gripes as he’s also taking aim at the generation of adult fans and critics that didn’t embrace his recent “Star Wars” films, “The critics and the fans who were 10 years old when they saw the first one and 13 when they saw the second one complained that they didn’t want to see a children’s film…’Oh, that’s terrible. Jar Jar Binks is terrible!’…Everyone said the same thing about R2-D2 and C-3PO. At the beginning, there was a huge push for me to get rid of C-3PO, and then in the third one [“Return of the Jedi“] people said the same thing about Ewoks. ‘What are you thinking? Get rid of these teddy bears, we want to see an adult movie!'” When the director was asked by the outlet whether he was bothered by his more recent films failing to connect with adults in the way other efforts did, Lucas was pretty blunt with his response. “Well, it’s a kid’s movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.”

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To be fair to Lucas, he had some trouble shopping “Star Wars” around originally (a concept that was hard for many studios to get their heads around, a fantasy epic heavily inflienced by old-school sci-fi serials and samurai films) and there were even some moments of second-guessing taking place during the filming and post-production process, famously Lucas’ editor and then-wife Marcia Lucas (recently passed on) had to pull him off a creative cliff by convincing him to keep the Jedi and the Force in the film after the director wasn’t sure it would work with audiences and was on the brink of removing them altogether (we’re all thankful for it being kept in). So, it wasn’t just the sequels that had varying opinions from within the studio and from outsiders, as pointed out by George Lucas himself.