ST George Lucas Quotations Regarding the Sequel Trilogy -- No Discussion

starocean90 · Apr 17, 2015

"I'm gonna tear you a new one," Stephen Colbert told George Lucas at the very beginning of hischat with the Star Wars legend on Friday at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival. "How dare you entertain me consistently since I was thirteen years old?!"
Flattered, Lucas said at one point, "I'm not a fan of celebrity — I wish I could skip that part but I can't." However, when he sneezed mid-answer, Colbert seized the opportunity and told him, "May the force be with you."
he hour-long discussion at Borough of Manhattan Community College covered how Lucas found filmmaking — he initially wanted to be a racecar driver, a childhood dream that is everywhere in his films, he said. "I like speed. … Star Wars had hot rods, only they flew in space."
He recalled how Star Wars wasn't initially favored by the 20th Century Fox board of directors, who first saw the film as a crowd of twenty in a mixing studio. "There is a word out there called the creative industrial complex, which means the industrial part rules everything and they screw around with the creative people," he told the audience. "To think you know how to do it is just full of hubris, it's not real. … There's the corporate world, and they're not creative — they're lawyers, accountants and they think they're creative.
"They refer to it as their movie, even when they had nothing to do with it," he continued. "The guy who actually sweats blood and tears is the one that actually makes the movie. But they don't see it that way at all."
Lucas had trouble getting the first film off the ground. "Star Wars is a children's film, those are the ones that make all the money — wake up!" he remembers telling them. Because of the tough logistical process the first time around, he made sure to secure half the sequel rights to speed up the process, but then came to be pleasantly surprised.
"Never invest in a movie — in the movie business, they call those people suckers because you'll never get your money out ever," he said. "I had my fifty percent, but I'm gonna finance the movie so I get your fifty percent too. And that's how I got to be rich."
Lucas said he's returning to his interest in experimental films and argued for media to stop publishing scathing reviews: "Art is in the eye of the beholder — if you don't like it, what's the point in going around and crashing it? France doesn't publish bad reviews. … I think it's a much better system. They just ignore them, which is what you do with bad films."
He noted that he's looking forward to J.J. Abrams' upcoming Episode VII because "the one thing I regretted about doing Star Wars is I never got to see it," he explained. "I'd seen [the footage in the editing room] a hundred times, so I never got to have that thrill. This time, it'll be very different because they're doing a kind of a different story. I don't know anything about it."
Though he won't be dressing up as his favorite character of the universe to see Episode VII, Colbert, with a white beard, said he will: "I'm dressing up as George Lucas."

Click to expand...

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tribeca-2015-george-lucas-hubris-789690?utm_source=twitter

starocean90 · Apr 17, 2015

George Lucas hasn’t seen the new trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” — he’s waiting until he can see the it on a big screen.
Among the tidbits: Lucas made “American Graffiti” on a dare, Steven Spielberg was one of the only early believers in “Star Wars” and — in a table-turning moment that saw Lucas doing the interviewing — Colbert doesn’t want to be the guy to take over from John Stewart.
Because Lucas is a bigscreen guy, he said he’s holding off on watching the new trailer for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” until he can watch on it on something other than a phone or a computer. He mentioned the possibility of streaming it to his own bigscreen.
“I hope it’s successful. I hope they do a great job,” Lucas said when asked about his hopes — his “a new hope,” joked Colbert — for the new “Star Wars” films. He said the only thing he regretted about making “Star Wars” was never getting to see the films for himself with fresh eyes. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said of the new movie. “This time it’ll be very thrilling.”
In the hour-long talk in front of a packed auditorium in downtown Manhattan, Colbert and Lucas, both bearded, spent as much time discussing Lucas’ overall career and his fierce independent streak as they did talking about “Star Wars.” On that subject, the nuggets dropped by Lucas included the fact that when the filmmaker showed a rough cut of his ideas for the film to his closest filmmaking friends — including Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese — Spielberg “jumped up and said, ‘This is gonna be the biggest movie of all time!'” But no one else agreed.
“Brian said, ‘George, what the hell is The Force?'” Lucas remembered.

He thinks of “Star Wars” as a silent movie — “It really lies in the art of movement” — but that sound is just as important as the image onscreen. “I believe half a movie is the sound,” he said. “The sound is extremely important. But the dialogue is not.”
That led comment led Lucas to acknowledge, “I’m notorious for wooden dialogue.”
“It’s not wooden,” Colbert interjected. “It’s hand-carved.”
Click to expand...

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/george-lucas-stephen-colbert-star-wars-tribeca-talk-1201474961/

Luke02 · Apr 17, 2015

https://www.yahoo.com/news/george-lucas-colbert-why-arent-replacing-stewart-010407585.html

The full quote is he "hopes they go in a different direction."

This is a non story IMO.

Echo Base · Jul 15, 2015

Echo Base said: ↑

Echo Base said: ↑

This doesn't relate directly to the sequel trilogy but this book does give insights into Lucas' attitudes to the Vietnam War while he and John Milius were attempting to make Apocalypse Now. Presumably the same mindset later fed on into Star Wars:

"The film would take a pro-war, action-oriented approach while at the same time while at the same time supporting and clarifying the "unconventional warfare methods" of the U. S. Army Special Forces... What Milius and Lucas was thinking about is suggested by the first scene... The idea is that American troops will have fun and win the war by adopting, Green Beret-style, guerilla methods. Milius later noted that he and Lucas were "great connoisseurs of the Vietnam War"; one imagines young boys with an enthusiasm for all things military."

Source: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UmPdEg5fVkQC&pg=PT117&lpg=PT117&dq="george lucas" pro-war "star wars"&source=bl&ots=9gOp8926QM&sig=GKA6_35GJ-ELeuyN3zHsc7W77WY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mwsrVY7eNovgao7fgcgL&ved=0CEkQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q="george lucas" pro-war "star wars"&f=false
Date: Book published in 2000. Lucas' involvement was circa 1970.
Click to expand...

Again, not direct quotes but here is some more information that discusses George Lucas' apparent pro-war, pro-Vietnam, anti-pacifist views. More generally, they talk about the effect of Star Wars on attitudes towards war, whether intended or otherwise. These excerpts come from two articles for "Mother Jones", an American magazine about social justice issues which is apparently considered quite reputable:

The very day the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973, Richard Nixon also signed a decree ending the draft. It was an admission of the obvious: war, American-style, had lost its hold on young minds. As an activity, it was now to be officially turned over to the poor and nonwhite...

Those in a position to produce movies, TV shows, comics, novels, or memoirs about Vietnam were convinced that Americans felt badly enough without such reminders. It was simpler to consider the war film and war toy casualties of Vietnam than to create cultural products with the wrong heroes, victims, and villains. In Star Wars, Lucas successfully challenged this view, decontaminating war of its recent history through a series of inspired cinematic decisions that rescued crucial material from the wreckage of Vietnam.

[snip]

Mobilizing a new world of special effects and computer graphics, he then made the high-tech weaponry of the recent war exotic, bloodless, and sleekly unrecognizable. At the same time, he uncoupled the audience from a legacy of massacre and atrocity. The blond, young Luke Skywalker is barely introduced before his adoptive family—high-tech peasants on an obscure planet—suffers its own My Lai. Imperial storm troopers led by Darth Vader descend upon their homestead and turn it into a smoking ruin... Luke—and the audience—can now set off on an anti-imperial venture as the victimized, not as victimizers. Others in space will torture, maim, and destroy. Others will put "us" in high-tech tiger cages; and our revenge, whatever it may be, will be justified.

In this way, Star Wars denied the enemy a role "they" had monopolized for a decade—that of brave rebel. It was the first cultural product to ask of recent history, "Hey! How come they got all the fun?" And to respond, "Let's give them the burden of empire! Let's bog them down and be the plucky underdogs ourselves!"

Like Green Berets or Peace Corps members, Lucas's white teenage rebels would glide effortlessly among the natives. They would learn from value-superior Third World mystics like the Ho-Chi-Minh-ish Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and be protected by ecological fuzzballs like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. In deepest space, anything was possible, including returning history to its previous owners. Once again, we could have it all: freedom and victory, captivity and rescue, underdog status and the spectacle of slaughter.

Here, Lucas even appropriated the kamikaze-like fusion of human and machine. In Vietnam, there had been two such man-machine meldings. The first, the bombing campaign, had the machinelike impersonality of the production line. Lifting off from distant spots of relative comfort like Guam, B-52 crews delivered their bombs to coordinates stripped of place or people and left the war zone for another day. The crew member symbolically regained humanity only when the enemy's technology stripped him of his machinery—and, alone, he fluttered to earth and captivity.

[snip]

Not only would George Lucas put "war" back into a movie title, he would almost single-handedly reconstitute war play as a feel-good activity for children. With G.I. Joe's demise, the world of child-sized war play stood empty. The toy soldier had long ago moved into history, an object for adult collectors. However, some months before Star Wars opened, Fox reached an agreement with Kenner Products, a toy company, to create action figures and fantasy vehicles geared to the movie. Kenner president Bernard Loomis decided that these would be inexpensive, new-style figures, only 3 ¾-inch high. Each design was to be approved by Lucas himself.

By the early 1980s, children's TV had become a Star Wars-like battle zone. Outnumbered rebels daily transformed themselves from teenagers into mighty robots "loved by good, feared by evil" (Voltron) or "heroic teams of armed machines" (M.A.S.K.) in order to fight Lotar and his evil, blue-faced father from Planet Doom (Voltron)...

Future war would be a machine-versus-machine affair, a bloodless matter of special effects, in the revamped war story designed for childhood consumption. In popular cartoons like Transformers, where good "Autobots" fought evil "Decepticons," Japanese-animated machines transformed themselves from mundane vehicles into futuristic weapons systems. At the same time, proliferating teams of action figures, Star Wars-size and linked to such shows, were transported into millions of homes where new-style war scenarios could be played out.
In those years, Star Wars-like themes also began to penetrate the world of adult entertainment. Starting in 1983 with the surprise movie hit Uncommon Valor, right-wing revenge fantasies like Missing-in-Action (1984) returned American guerrillas to "Vietnam" to rescue captive pilots from jungle prisons and bog Communists down here on Earth. In a subset of these—Red Dawn (1984) and the TV miniseries Amerika (1987) are prime examples—the action took place in a future, conquered United States where home-grown guerrillas fought to liberate the country from Soviet imperial occupation. Meanwhile, melds of technology and humanity ranging from Robocop to Arnold Schwarzenegger began to proliferate on adult screens. In 1985-1986, two major hits featured man-as-machine fusions. As Rambo, Sylvester Stallone was a "pure fighting machine," with muscles and weaponry to prove it; while in Top Gun, Tom Cruise played a "maverick" on a motorcycle who was transformed from hot dog to top dog by fusing with his navy jet as he soared to victory over the evil empire's aggressor machines, Libyan MIGs.

It took some time for political leaders to catch up with George Lucas's battle scenarios. In the years when he was producing Star Wars, America's post-Vietnam presidents were having a woeful time organizing any narrative at all. In the real world, there seemed to be no Lucas-like outer space into which to escape the deconstruction job Vietnam had done to the war story. The military was in shambles; the public, according to pollsters, had become resistant to American troops being sent into battle anywhere; and past enemies were now negotiating partners in a new "détente."

[snip]

Only with the presidency of Ronald Reagan did a Lucas-like reconstitution of the war story truly begin at the governmental level. The new president defined the Soviet Union in Star Wars-like terms as an "evil empire," while the Army began advertising for recruits on TV by displaying spacy weaponry and extolling the pleasures of being "out there" in search of "the bad guys." In Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the Reagan administration managed to portray the forces it supported as outnumbered "freedom fighters" struggling to roll back an overwhelming tide of imperial evil. This time, we would do the hitting and running, and yet we—or our surrogates—would retain the high-tech weaponry: mines for their harbors and Stinger missiles for their helicopters.

Meanwhile, planners discovered in an intervention in Grenada that, with the right media controls in place and speed, you could produce the equivalent of an outer space war fantasy here on Earth. No wonder that a group of junior officers at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth responsible for aspects of the ground campaign used against Iraq in 1991 would be nicknamed the Jedi Knights.

The reversals of history first introduced in Star Wars were picked up by a fast-developing toy business in the 1980s. Every "action figure" set would now be a Star Wars knock-off, and each toy company faced Lucas's problem. In post-Vietnam war-space, how would a child left alone in a room with generic figures know what to play? Star Wars had offered a movie universe for its toys to share, but a toy on its own needed another kind of help.
About the time Ronald Reagan came into office, Hasbro began to consider resuscitating G.I. Joe, for the world of war play was still distinctly underpopulated on Earth, if not in space. As the toy company's executives were aware, Joe retained remarkable name recognition, not only among young boys (who had inherited hand-me-downs from older siblings) but among their parents. The question was, what would Joe be? At first, Hasbro had only considered marketing "a force of good guys," but according to H. Kirk Bozigian, Hasbro's vice-president of boys toys, "the [toy] trade said, who do they fight?" Hasbro's research with children confirmed that this was a crucial question.
In fact, blasting an action figure team into a world in which, as Bozigian put it, "there was a fine line between the good guys and the bad guys," called for considerable grown-up thought. Although Joe was to gain the tag line, "a real American hero," the G.I. Joe R&D and marketing group ("all closet quasi-military historians") early on reached "a conscious decision that the Soviets would never be the enemy, because we felt there would never be a conflict between us." Instead they chose a vaguer enemy—"terrorism"—and created COBRA, an organization of super-bad guys who lived not in Moscow but in Springfield, USA. (Hasbro researchers had discovered that a Springfield existed in every state—except Rhode Island, where the company was located.)

But teams of good and bad guys weren't enough. Children needed context. A "history" had to be written for these preplanned figures, what the toy industry would come to call a "backstory." Then a way had to be found for each figure to bring his own backstory, his play instructions, into the home. First, "Joe" was shrunk to 3 3/4-inch size, so that his warrior team could fit into the Star Wars universe. Next, he was reconceived as a set of earthbound fantasy figures (rather than "real" soldiers) and armed with Star Wars-style weaponry.

A Marvel comic book series lent the toys an ongoing story form, while Hasbro pioneered using the space on the back of each figure's package for a collector card/profile of the enclosed toy. Larry Hama, creator of the comics and of the earliest profiles, called them "intelligence dossiers." Each Joe or COBRA was now to come with his own spacy code name (from Air Tight to Zartan) and his own "biography." Each "individualized" team member would carry his story into the home on his back.

The new war story it produced had only a mocking relationship to a national story, for all "war" now inhabited the same unearthly, ahistorical commercial space. Even Rambo, transformed into an action-figure team for children, found himself locked in televised cartoon combat with General Terror and his S.A.V.A.G.E. terrorist group. While various Ninjas and Native Americans brought their spiritual skills to the good side, everywhere the "enemy" remained a vague and fragile construct, a metallic voice stripped of ethnic or racial character; and everywhere the boundary lines between us and the enemy, the good team and the bad team, threatened to collapse into a desperate sameness.

In its characters, names, and plots, the new war story relied on constant self-mockery. The enemy, once the most serious of subjects, was now a running joke. The evil COBRA organization, as described by Hasbro's Bozigian, was made up of "accountants, tax attorneys, and all other kinds of low lifes that are out to conquer the world." The mocking voice of deconstruction was alive and selling product in children's culture—as with that mega-hit of the late 1980s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

In the new war play universe, you did need a scorecard to tell the players apart. In the comic book world, for example, the story had become so self-enclosed that it was nearly impossible to pick up an X-Man comic and have any sense of where you were if you hadn't read the previous 20 issues.

Though a sort of story was recaptured and with the help of television made to surround the child constantly, behind the special effects was an eerie inaction—of which, at an adult level, the war in the Persian Gulf would be symbolic.
Click to expand...

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/how-star-wars-saved-american-triumphalism
Date: August 15, 2013.

[G. I.] Joe underwent a slow transformation that Barbie largely escaped (though in the early 1970s, facing the new feminism, her sales did decline). As the Vietnam years wore on, Joe became less and less a soldier. Protest was in the air. As early as 1966, a group of mothers dressed in Mary Poppins outfits picketed the toy industry's yearly trade convention in New York, their umbrellas displaying the slogan, "Toy Fair or Warfare?" Indeed, Sears dropped all military toys from its catalog. According to Tomart's Guide to Action Figure Collectibles, "In the late ‘60s… [f]earing a possible boycott of their ‘war-oriented toy,' Hasbro changed Joe's facial appearance and wardrobe. Flocked hair and a beard were added to the figures. Hasbro liquidated strictly military-looking pieces in special sets, and by 1970 the G.I. Joe Adventure Team was created."

Now, Joe was teamed with his first real enemies, but they weren't human. There was the tiger of the "White Tiger Hunt," the "hammerhead stingray" of "Devil of the Deep," the mummy of "Secret of the Mummy's Tomb," and the "black shark" of "Revenge of the Spy Shark," as well as assorted polar bears, octopi, vultures, and a host of natural enemies in toy sets like "Sandstorm Survival." For the first time, in those years of adult confusion, some indication of plot, of what exactly a child should do with these toys, began to be incorporated into titles like "The Search for the Stolen Idol" or "The Capture of the Pygmy Gorilla." Not only was Joe now an adventurer, but his adventure was being crudely outlined on the packaging that accompanied him; and few of these new adventures bore any relationship to the war story into which he had been born.

This hipper, new Joe was, if not exactly gaining a personality, then undergoing a personalizing process. He no longer appeared so military with his new hairstyles and his "A" (for adventure) insignia, which, as Katharine Whittemore has pointed out, "looked just a bit like a peace sign." In fact, he was beginning to look suspiciously like the opposition, fading as a warrior just as he was becoming a less generic doll.

[snip]

By the time Saigon fell in 1975, children like adults existed in a remarkably story-less realm. The very word war had been stripped out of children's culture and childhood transformed into something like an un-American event. The subterranean haunted and haunting quality of children in the 1950s had risen to the surface. The young were now openly threatening adults. Some were challenging American power with evidence of the destruction of minority children at home or out there ("Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"), while others, whether as political radicals, part of the counterculture, or GIs in Vietnam, seemed in the process of defecting to the Eastern enemy.

[snip]

Director George Lucas had already celebrated his teenage years in American Graffiti ("Where were you in ‘62?"), the surprise hit of 1973, which sparked a wave of nostalgia for the years before Vietnam and inspired the TV series Happy Days (1974). As a moviemaker, however, he had had a desire to reach even deeper into his California boyhood, to return to those moments when he had acted out World War II scenarios with toy soldiers, or watched old Flash Gordon serials, cowboy and war films on television.

Like movie audiences (as box office receipts of the time indicated), he wanted to reverse the cinematic cannibalism of the 1960s. In this, he stood apart from directors as disparate as Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur Penn, Mel Brooks, and his own mentor Francis Ford Coppola, who for years had been dismantling space and horse operas, war and detective films; in fact, all familiar on-screen space.

"There's a whole generation," he would later say, "growing up without any kind of fairy tales." Although he undoubtedly identified with the countercultural politics of the time, his was a conservative vision. Instinctively, he wanted to still the mocking voices and return the movie audience not just to his own childhood but to a childlike viewing state.

Throughout the early 1970s, he struggled to construct a script that would rebuild the missing war story in outer space. The heavens had been empty since, at the end of the 1960s, Stanley Kubrick blasted an American astronaut into a fetal state in 2001: A Space Odyssey; Planet of the Apes took its astronauts on a mocking journey to a post-nuclear Earth where humans were not the dominant species; and the USS Enterprise of TV's Star Trek left the "final frontier" to be mothballed.

In 1975, Lucas signed on with Twentieth Century Fox to produce a space film that (he reassured his wife) "ten-year-old boys would love." To make it, he had his costume designer study books on World War II uniforms and Japanese armor, while he turned to films ranging from Frank Capra's Battle of Britain (1943) to The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) to construct dogfights in space.

[snip]

In early 1977, the almost finished film seemed an unlikely candidate for success. Fox's research showed that the word war in a title would turn off women, that robots would turn off everyone, and that science fiction was a dead category. Fox's board of directors had only reluctantly financed the film...

Not in his wildest flights of fancy did Lucas imagine that his cinematic vision would sweep all before it, that his reconquest of a child audience and of "the kids in all of us" would be crucial to the reconstruction of a narrative of triumph, that he would help give a new look of entertainment to the design of war and reintroduce the spectacle of slaughter to the many screens of America.
Click to expand...

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/gi-joe-real-wars?page=2
Date: August 13th, 2015.

UPDATE: One more piece that expounds Lucas' views. This one contains actual quotes. He consciously makes war film for teenagers and "loves aerial combat" yet in other areas his views are those of a liberal democrat yet not profound in any way:

CHARLIE ROSE: From George Lucas, a new movie, "Red Tails." Welcome.

GEORGE LUCAS: Thank you. Great to be here.

ROSE: My impression is that this is a movie you've been waiting to make.

LUCAS: I've been working on this movie for 23 years.

ROSE: That's waiting to make.

LUCAS: Definitely a labor of love. But I've been working on it for 23 years. It's not that I've been sort of waiting to do it. I heard this story from an aviation and photographer friend of mine 23 years ago. And I said, "This is a fantastic story -- that needs to be told." And more importantly for me is that it sounds like a great, inspirational movie for teenagers.

[snip]

ROSE: What's interesting with a movie like this is how real you can make what happens on the screen to reflect the reality of what it means to have your life on the line in the air, not knowing what's gonna happen and facing instant death.

LUCAS: Well, that's ultimately the story. And now, with digital technology, we can make it much more real. I'm a big fan of aerial combat, obviously, from "Star Wars." I've been doing it most of my life.

[snip]

ROSE: There's also the side of you that's a political animal. I mean, you are, among people who know you, a billionaire who's not that crazy about capitalism.

LUCAS: That's true. (LAUGH)

ROSE: Tell me about --

LUCAS: Well, I grew up in the '60s. I grew up in San Francisco. And so I'm informed in a certain kind of way about, you know, believing in democracy and believing in America. And I'm a very ardent patriot. But I'm also a very ardent believer in democracy, not capitalist democracy. And I do not believe that the rich should be able to buy the government. And that's just the way I feel.

ROSE: Could I show you a list of the 100 best films (LAUGH) and how many of 'em are made by George Lucas?

LUCAS: Yeah, but they're not made to -- they -- yes, they have a political undertone. I mean, especially "Star Wars" has got a very, very elaborate social, emotional, political context that it rests in. But of course, nobody was aware of that. Nobody says, "Oh my gosh." But if you actually watch the movies, it's there. And you subliminally get the fact of what happens to you if you've got a dysfunctional government that's corrupt and doesn't work.

ROSE: As soon as you say this, there's also the cover of Time magazine. And there's George -- there is -- Warren Buffett, talking about why he believes in America, why anybody who writes off America is making a serious mistake, because of some essential qualities that Americans have.

LUCAS: Yeah. Well, a lot of it also, not to be too controversial here --

ROSE: That's O.K.

LUCAS: -- on your show, because I like you. But you know, most of the fault lies with the media. And I know everybody uses the media as a scapegoat. But the things the media focus on. The sensationalism, the kind of simple answers, the -- you know, not really telling the truth, is what creates a society where everybody gets really polarized, where they're afraid. People are afraid.

ROSE: But the interesting thing about you -- you talk -- point the finger at the media. You are the media. You are a person with enormous potential to talk to the public. You know, you don't need the media. I mean, you have --

LUCAS: Yeah, but my part of the media is such a small --

ROSE: You could --

LUCAS: You know, I make a little blip and that's it, but the --

ROSE: No, you -- George Lucas has a powerful voice (LAUGH), and you know that.

LUCAS: It's -- I -- I -- it's sort of powerful --

ROSE: You can enter the public conversation.

LUCAS: Well, I can-- I can make something that entertains people and makes them think...
Click to expand...

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/george-lucas-billionaire-down-on-capitalism/
Date: January 21st, 2012.
Click to expand...

Since I don't post here regularly anymore, I am just dropping by to share a few more quotes I found that give insight on George Lucas' mentality and outlook. Depending on how much influence his story outlines had on Kasdan's final draft, there might be some clues in here regarding where he intended to head with the sequel trilogy:

First of all, once more rebutting the suggestion that Star Wars was a pacifist film or that Finn might be an anti-war figure, Lucas here describes military veterans as being, in his view, heroes:

"These guys [Iraq War veterans] are heroes, and we need to help them," Lucas told ABC News.
Click to expand...

Sourc: http://abcnews.go.com/US/george-lucas-mentors-military-veteran/story?id=16916130
Date: August 7th, 2012.

For what it is worth, Abrams is also very much a pro-military figure, supporting Michelle Obama's "Joining Forces" program which is also supported by various Hollywood guilds and propaganda film makers, as is Abram's former collaborator, Damon Lindelof.

Finally, the most interesting interview to give insight into George Lucas' political views is this piece from the New York Times in 1999. When he talks about a benign dictatorship being his favoured form of government, I wonder if that was his intention for the end of the sequel trilogy. Would the New Republic arise as a benign dictatorship under the leadership of a man or woman who could overcome the temptation of power to corrupt (ie, one of the Skywalkers)?

Here is the interview:

ORVILLE SCHELL. In your films you deal with very futuristic subjects, yet clearly part of you is firmly rooted back in the past.

GEORGE LUCAS. I'm basically a Victorian person. I love Victorian artifacts. I love to collect art. I love sculpture. I love all kinds of old things. But I would say that the primary word for me is romantic. I like the esthetics of the Victorian age and things that are homey and kind of Midwestern -- a very warm, fuzzy kind of reality.

SCHELL. What do you mean "the primary word is romantic"?

LUCAS. In terms of stories, I think the word suggests a humanist perspective on things -- an emotional point of view. That's really the primary focus of everything I do.

SCHELL. But people seem to perceive you as being more interested in technology than emotions. Now you're describing yourself as an emotionally or, as you put it, a "romantically" inclined "Victorian" person.

LUCAS. Well, most people know me from my work using technology. But I think one can tell from my movies that I have a very romantic point of view about technology. I don't hate technology. But at the same time I'm well aware of the dangers of technology. Anybody who knows me knows that I'm not really a high-tech person. I mean I like technology and I enjoy technology, but technology to me is just a tool. It's not something that I'm intrigued by and obsessed by and need to be with per se. I would rather go sit under a tree and read a book than sit in front of a computer, go on line or join a chat room. I would rather have tea with someone.

SCHELL. Is there implicit in this view an optimism vis-à-vis the state of the human race?

LUCAS. I'm a cynical optimist [laughs].
I'm a cynic who has hope for the human race, although I look at human folly and sometimes I get very frustrated. We have, I think, gone quite a ways intellectually. But emotionally the human race has hardly moved at all, which is something I find fascinating. It's dangerous that we're advancing so fast technologically while we're not advancing very fast emotionally.

SCHELL. Does your concern with the emotional side of things have some bearing on your interest in mythology?

LUCAS. Yes. One of the reasons I do the things I do in my movies, and why I've gotten so wrapped up in mythology, is that for me they offer a chance to explore psychological archeology. It really is interesting to be able to cut across cultures and then go back 3,000 years and find what the emotional driving points were then and realize that they're the same now, that they touch the same chords today that they did then.

SCHELL. So how does the mythology of "Star Wars" fit into all this?

LUCAS. Jung was amazed by what anybody who delves into this past is amazed by -- namely, how many psychological motifs are constant throughout the human race and time, which is where mythology comes into it. Mythology is a performance piece that gets acted out over hundreds of years before it actually becomes embedded in clay on a tablet, or is put down on a piece of paper to be codified as a fixed thing. But originally it was performed for a group of people in a way in which the psychological feedback would tell the narrator which way to go. Mythology was created out of what emotionally worked as a story.

SCHELL. But these stories, these mythologies, have evolved over a long period of time, whereas you have created your mythologies out of whole cloth. Is this a kind of distortion of the process?

LUCAS. I haven't really distorted the process. Even though "Star Wars" is a completely new story, it's using the same old motifs. I mean it's still "The Hero of a Thousand Faces." The hero does have a thousand faces and this is just one of them. I'm obviously contemporizing my stories and personalizing them. What I am saying in my films is: These are emotional issues that I care about, that came out of my time, which are the 50's, 60's and 70's. But they embody ageless themes, a distillation of a lot of different mythologies from around the world.
The fun part is that I have been able to work in a worldwide market, and one of the weird and more interesting things about "Star Wars" is that it seems to work in as many cultures as it does.

SCHELL. Does this help explain its popularity?

LUCAS. I'm amazed that people haven't really figured this out. I've talked about it, but people think that it is all this high-tech and special-effects stuff that makes people want to go back and see these films over and over again. The interesting thing for me is that since "Star Wars" a lot of people have made science fiction movies and a lot of people
have made special-effects movies, but nobody has wanted to go back and see them over and over again.

SCHELL. Many of them have turned out to be strangely emotionless, haven't they?

LUCAS. Yes. The one special-effects film that people did go back and see over and over again was "Titanic." Now "Titanic" was anything but a science-fiction movie. But it was a high-tech special-effects movie just like "Star Wars." The old "Star Wars" had about 500 special-effects shots in it and "Titanic" also had about 500. But the story was very romantic and actually runs along the very same lines as "Star Wars."

SCHELL. So where did all the strange characters and ideas come from?

LUCAS. I took off from the folk side of things and tried to stay with universal themes apart from violence and sex, which are the only other two universal themes that seem to work around the world. My films aren't that violent or that sexy. Instead, I'm dealing with the need for humans to have friendships, to be compassionate, to band together to help each other and to join together against what is negative.

SCHELL. You sound awfully Buddhist to me.

LUCAS. My daughter was asked at school, "What are you?" And she said we're Buddhist Methodists. I said, well, I guess that's one way to describe it [laughs].

I've always had a keen interest in education, in how and why people learn. I think that we're in a race for survival and the only adaptable ability we have is our brains. Only we can exchange information. And the test of how accurate the information is will be whether we all die or not. If we all die, then it wasn't the right information. I would rather see us be a positive force in the universe than a cancer. We have the knowledge to be either one. That, in essence, is what "Star Wars" is about. We are both good and evil, and we have a choice.

SCHELL. Enemies are thematically very prominent in your movies. In the way you see the world, does the current dark side have anything to do with the culture of business in a mutated form?

LUCAS. There is a huge danger in corporations which really have no one to answer to except the imperative to make money. There's a great danger here that we're just beginning to confront. I don't want to sound moralistic, but if you create an animal and it's O.K. for it to feed on whatever it wants, then you've got a problem. The key in everything is to find balance.

SCHELL. How do you try to do that? I mean, you are a mogul yourself. You have an empire and are leading lots of people. And how do you temper the corporate threat you've just spoken about?

LUCAS. Well, fortunately, I have compassionate stockholders [chuckles].

SCHELL. But wait a minute! Who are your stockholders?

LUCAS. Me! I'm the only one [laughs]! And it's through me that this organization hopefully tries to take a more compassionate view of its employees and what we do. If we became a public corporation, then that unique aspect would disappear. As the chairman and the president of everything, I, of course, have to make money to survive. But as the stockholder, I can say, "Yes, but, one must have a little bit of honor, good manners and consideration for everybody else." Nonetheless, we live in a world where you have to be reasonably tough in order to be taken seriously. Sometimes you have to be the shark, because you have to live. Between two animals like baboons who cross each other in the forest, it's the one that yells at the others the most that makes the biggest impression. You can't just shy away from that situation. You have to stand up and yell in their language in order to get them to respect you. That's part of the jungle we live in. But it's also my feeling that with the people who work beneath us in our pride or our herd, so to speak, one must try to treat them with compassion and in a nurturing manner.

SCHELL. Would you say that you're now leading a good life?

LUCAS. I would say I am happy. The interesting part of it is that -- and I hate to say it because it's such a cliché -- the good life has nothing to do with the money thing and fortune.

SCHELL. Since you have money, you're probably not quite the right person to say such a thing [laughs].

LUCAS. No, I am the right person! I've been there! I've done it! And I want to tell film students: "If you've gone into films to make money, fame and fortune, just forget it! The odds are way against you. Go into the stock market! Go into something else. You're never going to find money in the film business. Because it's too hard." Well, maybe there's fame, if you're lucky. But you might just as well go out and become a serial killer, because you can get famous much faster that way!

I've got just about as much money as you can get, and I was just as happy 30 years ago. As long as I could make a movie, I was happy. And as long as I still can make movies, I'll still be happy. The thing that makes me unhappy is when somebody else tells me what to make.

SCHELL. The fact that now you don't have to get permission from others to do what you want must make a great difference, and that freedom derives in no small measure from the vast cushion you've got around you to protect yourself.

LUCAS. Sure, the urge toward independence grows out of the frustration that any artist -- a writer, a painter, a sculptor -- faces, which is: you want to get into a position where people aren't distorting or destroying your vision. When you get into opera, architecture or film, you're dealing in art forms that are so large and require so many resources that you can't help but be in a more communal kind of situation. And to dominate such a situation with your vision is much, much harder. Knowing how to get people to cooperate and to build a pyramid the way you want the pyramid built is a much larger social endeavor than, say, being a Picasso and painting in your studio.

I'm not a big proponent of art with a capital A. To me art is just a way of communicating. Once you say, "I hope somebody likes my painting," then you're going to paint for somebody. No matter how esoteric an artist you are, you're still playing for an audience. If you only play to 10 people, then, maybe you're a high artist [laughs].

SCHELL. There also is the question of when the artist, writer or filmmaker has to become more than just artist, and has to become a spokesman on the "Today Show." What I'm driving at here is the role of a public life for an artist.

LUCAS. Well, it's no secret that I'm not fond of public life. But, of course, I want people to like what I do. Everybody wants to be accepted, at least by somebody. But we live in a world now where you're forced to become part of this larger corporate entity called the media, which is devouring as much information as it possibly can get in order to keep itself going. Going on the media becomes a kind of social duty. Sure, some people use it because they want to promote their products or whatever. And in certain cases when I make a movie, I do like to promote my product. You get people to invest money in what you're doing, and then you feel responsible to do all you can to help them get their money back. Since I'm doing the films myself, I don't have quite that obligation. I'd just as soon let my own films
die than have to go out and sell them on a circuit. And I do as little as I have to, to feel responsible.

So why am I doing publicity? I'm doing it because there's a social obligation. I'm not doing it for me. I'm doing it for the media. And the media would feel cheated if I didn't do it. It would feel that I was shunning them, or abusing them in some way. I don't have to make money off this. It'll do fine. But the media has to make money. And they feel I owe it to them to sell their magazines and sell their TV programs as part of society. I do feel part of the society, so I have come to the conclusion that there is a certain obligation that you have as part of the social structure.

SCHELL. Do you think that one reason "Star Wars" works is that, having so defoliated our real world of heroes, we need to project our yearnings for heroism into an unreal world?

LUCAS. Movies have a big voice, and what we filmmakers have to do is to set a good example. There's nothing wrong with that. The story being told in "Star Wars" is about heroes who have the ideals that we as a society would like people to possess. It's a terrible thing to say, but there's a certain part of society that would like everybody to be cynical. But at the same time, another segment of society needs to have heroes -- to have somebody of whom they can say: "This is the kind of person that we should aspire to be."

SCHELL. Where are we going to get such models?

LUCAS. Society creates them. That's why society builds statues.

SCHELL. But, if I follow your logic, you're saying that we are now incapable of resisting putting feet of clay on these statues.

LUCAS. The United States, especially the media, is eating its own tail. The media has a way of leveling everything in its path, which is not good for a society. There's no respect for the office of the Presidency. Not that we need a king, but there's a reason why kings built large palaces, sat on thrones and wore rubies all over. There's a whole social need for that, not to oppress the masses, but to impress the masses and make them proud and allow them to feel good about their culture, their government and their ruler so that they are left feeling that a ruler has the right to rule over them, so that they feel good rather than disgusted about being ruled. In the past, the media basically worked for the state and was there to build the culture. Now, obviously, in some cases it got used in a wrong way and you ended up with the whole balance of power out of whack. But there's probably no better form of government than a good despot.

SCHELL. And, in a sense, is that what you're trying to be here at Lucasfilm?

LUCAS. Possibly. Yeah, at least in my little kingdom. But I rule at the will of the people who work for me.

SCHELL. But let's say you have a leader who's only pretty good and does some shady things. Do you think that the media should be more discreet about investigating and looking into what he is doing? Basically, do you think certain things should be off limits in order to maintain the heroism of a leader?

LUCAS. Yeah, I do. I think that the media should look at the situation in the larger sense -- at what is necessary for the culture as a whole rather than exposing and tearing everything down all the time. That will not bode well for people's confidence in the institution. After all, a society only works on faith. If you lose that faith, then your society will crumble and it will be hard to get a consensus on anything.

SCHELL. But isn't that a slippery slope, one that quickly leads to what we have seen in countries like the Soviet Union and China, where in the name of positive role models it becomes unacceptable to criticize the leaders or the country?

LUCAS. That's sort of why I say a benevolent despot is the ideal ruler. He can actually get things done. The idea that power corrupts is very true and it's a big human who can get past that.

SCHELL. Confucius said that the good ruler should rule so that the citizens bend before his moral suasion like rice seedlings before a breeze.

LUCAS. You try to keep people from being used or abused and listen to their grievances and try to do what is fair. Some people get upset because they want everything. Some people feel that they deserve to have everything, even though there's no reason for it. They just feel it's their right. That's one of the problems of a democracy. You get these individual voices that are very loud, and very dysfunctional. And if you cater to those voices, you end up with a very dysfunctional society.

SCHELL. Have you gotten better at management as you've grown older?

LUCAS. Yeah. Before, I had a mix of insecurity and over-dominance, which was maybe to compensate for the insecurity. But then as you get older, I guess you get less insecure, and thus have less of a need to dominate.

SCHELL. Do the films you make not help imbue the company with a certain subtle set of unifying values?

LUCAS. I would hope so. It's like "the film" is the hero of this company. Of course, employees have other heroes. But "Star Wars" is kind of the overall hero.

SCHELL. And how about you as a hero?

LUCAS. I would say I am probably in the mix in some way, too. So that helps the company. A company, a country or anything, for that matter, has to have some kind of allegiance to somebody or something. People need to believe in something or admire somebody, so that they can say, "I admire this and I am proud to be a part of this."

SCHELL. You have not only created a rather incredible fantasy, but, if our end-of-the-century possesses magic, it must be computer graphics and the sorts of technological tricks that you have mastered.

LUCAS. I agree. You've got a lot of different people here who are very creative in different kinds of disciplines. What comes out is kind of amazing to all of us, not just to those people who see it in the end. We, too, are amazed when we do it! Which is where the fun of it, the joy of what we do, comes from. It's the joy of creativity. We put it together, step back, look at it and say, "Whoa, that's kind of neat!" As corny as that sounds, that's ultimately the primary driving force for us.

Click to expand...

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/032199lucas-wars-excerpts.html
Date: March 21st, 1999.

Lucas' affiliation for benign dictatorships makes me wonder some more about what exactly he was trying to say by including Leni Riefenstahl-esque imagery at the end of A New Hope, particularly given "what some would call the fascist undercurrents in Joseph Campbell." Was it subversive or an endorsement?

Artoo-Dion · Jul 15, 2015

Where can we discuss that last point?

Darkslayer · Nov 1, 2015

Lucas: "The original Saga was about the father, the children, and the grandchildren. That’s not a secret to anybody, it’s even in the novels and everything. The children were in their 20s and everything, so it wasn’t The Phantom Menace again."

Source: http://www.starwarsunderworld.com/2015/05/george-lucas-explains-his-sequel.html

Darkslayer · Nov 2, 2015

Lucas: "The next movies are prequels. It's the story of Darth Vader. Episode One is a pretty light movie - it's the introduction and everything goes downhill from there. The next ones are more about who did what to whom... Finally, there may be three more movies to conclude the epic some years down the road."

Source: http://whills.nu/7/

Log in or Sign up

ST George Lucas Quotations Regarding the Sequel Trilogy -- No Discussion

starocean90 Chosen One

starocean90 Chosen One

Luke02 Chosen One

Echo Base Jedi Master

Artoo-Dion Manager Emeritus VIP - Former Mod/RSA

Darkslayer #2 Sabine Wren Fan

Darkslayer #2 Sabine Wren Fan