In anticipation of the upcoming animated Star Wars feature The Clone Wars, George Lucas has emerged from seclusion at Skywalker Ranch to sit for a few interviews and prime the pump. Not that he’d agree with that characterization. ““Honestly, everyone feels you have to talk about yourself all the time,” Lucas tells The Times of London. “They say I’m introverted because I don’t give many interviews. But I don’t give many interviews because I don’t make many films.”
Lucas goes on to demonstrate that there may be another reason he doesn’t give many interviews: because he has a tendency to say some funny things. For instance, his rather grandiose self-described patriarchy of the Star Wars universe. Lucas is the father – the Creator, you might say – and “the licensing group, which does the games, toys and books, and all that other stuff. I call that the son - and the son does pretty much what he wants.” He laughs. “Once in a while, they ask a question like ‘Can we kill off Yoda?’, things like that, but it’s very loose.” And the holy ghost? Why, I guess I’m part of that right now, since “the third group, the holy ghost, which is the bloggers and fans. They have created their own world. I worry about the father’s world. The son and holy ghost can go their own way.”
As part of his fatherly duties, Lucas is shepherding both an animated series (following on The Clone Wars) and a live action Star Wars series (“everybody’s dead, basically, or hiding somewhere...there are a million stories in the big city — you’ve only seen one of them”). But what about that other franchise, Indiana Jones, still hanging around in a few of the theaters not showing The Dark Knight? “If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven [Spielberg] wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension.” Here’s a guess that Lucas’s whole different place has a whole lot of green-screen in it.
Related:
To Protect His Stormtroopers, George Lucas Brings on the Scary Lawyers
Screengrab Rant: Indiana Jones in 2008