Light & Magic

I grew up on a farm in Modesto.

Like most kids that grew up in the Valley, I had a strong interest in cruising.

I wandered around and spent most of my youth roaming the streets of the town.

Following the path that I was on, I was sort of flunking out of high school.

My mother kept worrying about me.

"He's not going to amount to anything."

My father kept saying, "He's a late bloomer.

"Don't worry about it. He's a late bloomer." (CHUCKLES)

Driving cars, going fast. I really liked that.

I liked the sensation of it.

I wanted to be a car mechanic, I wanted to race cars.

At the time, in high school, I had a very little car,

it was, you know, that big, and I was

turning into my driveway, it was a country road,

and uh, there was this guy.

So he was going about 90 miles an hour.

I didn't see him coming.

I hear a horn honk...

-(HORN HONKING) -(VEHICLE CRASHES)

...and then I'm gone.

They hit me broadside.

My car rolled about seven or eight times, wrapped around a tree.

And when I woke up, the first thing I heard

the nurse saying, "Don't worry, you have all your arms and legs."

I said, "What do you mean?"

Everybody kept saying, "You should be dead."

That's when I decided that, you know, maybe there's a reason I'm here.

My father wanted me to go into the stationery business

and run an office equipment store.

They built it up for me to take over, and I said, "I don't want that."

I'll never work at a job where I have to do the same thing

over and over again every day.

It was probably the biggest disagreement we ever got into.

I said, "Well, I'll just go to school. I mean, I'll go to college."

You know, this is during the Vietnam War.

The only thing I could get into was the junior college.

I took lots of classes in the social sciences,

psychology and anthropology, and I got really hooked on it.

I said, "This is great. I love this."

And one of the books I had to read was The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

And I got very intrigued with the idea of how you build a society.

It was all done by stories, mythologies, heroes.

It really wasn't until my junior year of college that I discovered film.

Ended up at USC.

Suddenly I was seeing all kinds of films that I'd never seen before.

Complete eye-opener. It was just a whole new world.

It's one of those things you eat, sleep and drink movies,

and you love every second of it.

I instantly knew that this was for me, that this was it.

I didn't know what a filmmaker was.

I didn't know what a producer was or a director or anything.

All I knew was that I wanted to make film and whatever that entails.

First semester there, and I started making student films.

Took the Cinema department by storm.

We met in the '60s when he premiered THX 1138,

his short film, during a film festival.

George won first prize.

THX 1138 4EB. This is Authority. You will stop where you are.

I basically said, "I'll never make a movie that good."

One of the things that really bonded us was we made movies for the audience,

even more than making movies for ourselves.

All of my friends,

they were all people who loved movies.

None of them were interested in making money.

They were just interested in making movies.

Lucas is out of school now, working with Francis Ford Coppola,

himself, a recent graduate of the film school at UCLA.

Coppola is directing The Rain People,

his third professional film for Warner Bros.,

and Lucas is making a movie of him making a movie.

The idea is you got to really...

You've got to really want to do something

and then nothing can stop you, I believe.

Would you tell us something about your young assistant, George Lucas?

Well, he's not my assistant, actually, he's an associate.

Okay. -George won an award to come to

Warner Bros. and observe a film being made there.

So we were making Finian's Rainbow, and I see this skinny kid with a beard

and always looking. I said, "Who's that?"

And he said, "He's observing you."

On Finian's Rainbow,

we were the only two people on the set under 50 years old,

and the only two that had gone to film school.

We had an affinity.

We were young and very much against the establishment.

And so in '69, we went to San Francisco.

Both Francis and I said, "This is where we should be."

Not too many lobbies that have a friendly pool table right here.

That's true. We hope that at 3:00 in the morning,

that will be a comfort and an aid when we're working on a film

in the other room. This is the main...

We bought mixing equipment and editing equipment.

We were building a little studio there.

We would do everything ourselves.

I got to take one of my student films and turn it into a feature.

One Coppola production was filmed

in a garage at the San Francisco International Airport.

A science fiction story written and directed by George Lucas, who is 25.

Lucas and his wife are editing the film themselves.

Although Warner Bros. agreed to finance and release it,

Lucas retained complete creative control.

In terms of my film, have complete freedom

to say whatever I want to say.

Right, wrong or indifferent. At least I can say it.

THX is pronounced incurable and shall be held in detention.

With Warner Bros., they didn't come up here and look at what I was doing,

and I don't know whether they even read the script.

We finally showed him the cut, and they were like, "Oh, my God, what is this?"

Evacuate. All magna personnel...

The board didn't like it.

And they chopped it up. They ended up cutting out five minutes

and some of it was really good stuff.

There's nothing worse than the frustration

of having somebody who doesn't get what you're doing

trying to turn it into something else.

And as a result of our disagreements

with Warner Bros. over the final cut of THX,

we ended up losing a lot of our projects that we were gonna be doing for them.

The company we had built together, American Zoetrope, went bankrupt.

So Francis went off and did The Godfather.

He told me, he said,

"Enough of this artsy fartsy, science fiction, strange movies.

"I want you to do a comedy.

"Prove to me you can do a comedy."

The first time that I met George was an audition for a movie that he had

with an indecipherable title, American Graffiti.

I had to look up the word "graffiti,"

because I didn't know what it was, and there were things about George

that I found mystifying as an actor.

He doesn't really do actor speak.

He's a little cryptic.

He talks about an atmosphere, a world.

And I remember it took six auditions over a period of about six months

for all of us to wind up being chosen.

I joked with him about that at one point.

He said, "Yeah, well, it took me that long to pick the cars, too."

I was fascinated when we were shooting American Graffiti

by the freedom he gave the actors, but also by the world creation of it.

And I wouldn't have known to use that term then.

The cars were as important to him.

A lot of it's from my own experience.

At the time, cruising was gone,

and I really felt compelled to sort of document the intimate nature

of man's relationship to machine.

Cruising was a uniquely American mating ritual.

What did you say?

Wait. What did you say?

What did you say?

On some kind of subliminal level,

it obviously clicked with audiences.

It was a big moment for me because I really did sit down and told myself,

"Okay, now I am a director.

"Now I know I can be creative in a way that I enjoy."

One day we had been standing around Mel's Diner,

and I said to George, "What do you think you want to do next?"

And he said, "Well, I like science fiction.

"The advances that Kubrick made,

"I want to apply that to Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon

"kinds of movies, like a movie serial.

"Combine that with 2001 special effects,

"but the ships go real fast."

And that's kind of all he said.

That was about all I had.

I was just searching for a story,

and then I thought "mythology."

The idea that a society creates heroes that they can admire.

But I could see it as a mechanism, a universal reality.

So I said I want to do one of those, only a modern version of that.

Well, first I had to do a story treatment.

I am not the greatest writer in the world.

I'd taken a proposal to a couple of studios,

and they had turned it down, completely confused by it.

Robots and Wookiees.

They couldn't read it and say, "I understand what this is all about."

Science fiction was not something that did well at the box office.

On top of that, it was aimed at young people

and most of the studios said, "Look, Disney does that.

"The rest of us can't do that."

I knew I was going to have to sell it.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I hired an illustrator, Ralph McQuarrie, to draw the characters that I had done.

When he showed me those paintings, I said,

"That's exactly what I want.

"I've got 100 ideas here.

"Do this scene. Do this scene, do this scene."

The paintings inspired me to keep writing the script,

and that's how I got through it.

The picture was going to be

a wonderful visual experience as much as being a story.

It was going to be like a roller-coaster ride.

Full of things that would make the audience go, "Wow."

"Oh!"

At the same time, the new Fox Studio executive, Alan Ladd, Jr.

saw American Graffiti and loved it.

I showed him the drawings and he said, "Wow, what's it about?"

I said, "Well, that's kind of a space opera, old-fashioned feel about it,

"and there's a giant dog that flies with the hero,

"and it's very hard to get what this is."

We had a special effects budget on that movie of $2 million,

which now won't even buy you a shot.