George Lucas

Trivia

• Lucas originally intended Obi-Wan Kenobi to be asian becuase of his love for Kurosawa movies but the studios disagreed with him and he came to see their point of view.
• Lucas's second choice for the role of Princess Leia was Jodie Foster.
• If George Lucas had directed Apocalypse Now as had been originally intended then Harrison Ford would have worked on three films he had directed. American Graffiti and Star Wars would have been the other two.
• Apocalypse Now which George Lucas nearly directed had Harrison Ford amongst its cast. Harrison would later go on to star in Lucas's Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies.
• Lucas was originally going to direct Apocalypse Now before Coppola decided to direct it himself.
• After his tragic car crash, examiners of Lucas's car concluded that if the seat belt that snapped throwing George from the car had worked he would have been killed instantly.
• In 1962, when Lucas was involved in a serious car accident, he was driving a Fiat Biancina.
• Lucas used to read the Landmark history books.
• A lot of the books George liked when he was a kid are 18th and 19th century seafaring novels.
• When george was at school he was much more interested in the social sciences than mathematics and the language arts.

Quotes

• "A movie is never finished, only abandoned."
• "We don't want to make movies. We're about to get into television."
• " I took over control of the merchandising not because I thought it was going to make me rich, but because I wanted to control it. I wanted to make a stand for social, safety, and quality reasons. I didn't want someone using the name 'Star Wars' on a piece of junk."
• "Yeah, I have a few dollars, but when you're getting up to the point where the average movie costs $80 million, anything under $20 million is pretty cheap. Anything under $10 million is almost impossible. And anything under $5 million is Roger Corman."
• " I am very concerned about our national heritage, and I am very concerned that the films that I watched when I was young and the films that I watched throughout my life are preserved, so that my children can see them."
• "I was telling a story about a nice kid who becomes a Jedi and later falls into the abyss".
• "There is a scene, a larger crowd scene, which my daughters are in. And they sort of insisted that I be in it, and so I did it."
• " I needed an actor who could play the boyish young Anakin who is now the impatient, apprentice Jedi but still could carry off this dark side - to have the brooding fits of anger and that sort of thing."
• "It's one thing to create a digital character from scratch but to take a puppet who we already know and everybody loves and you know every little nuance about that - to replicate that digitally was a huge huge challenge."
• "It’s much more dark. It’s much more emotional. It’s much more of a tragedy."