GoKawiil“I had a group of friends I went to school with: Marty 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.” That kind of feedback, he believes, is useful. Other feedback is not. “I don’t like focus groups,” Lucas says. “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.”
Lucas’s solution is to return to first principles. “You go to the movies because the stories move you emotionally,” he says. “Art is an emotional medium.” This emphasis on emotional response aligns with Lucas’s resistance to the hierarchies that separate “high” and “low” culture, a distinction familiar to anyone who has ever wondered why the Star Wars prequels aren’t, in their view, better.
“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,” Lucas says, briefly adopting a high-pitched whine—“Oh, that’s terrible. Jar Jar Binks is terrible!”—before returning to his usual honeyed register. “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 (1983)] 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 asked whether he is bothered by his later films failing to connect with adults in the way his earlier films did, Lucas returns to fundamentals. “Well, it’s a kid’s movie,” he says. “It’s always been a kid’s movie.”