Why hasn't George Lucas directed more films?

[Powerboy]

There are two American Graffiti films!?

Yes. Just looked it up. The sequel was called "More American Graffiti", not "American Graffiti 2". Haven't seen it since it was in the theater over 40 years ago.

[Powerboy]

Really, can we start with Leah remembering her mother and Obi-Wan's age.

It's fine if the inconsistencies don't bother you, but many, many fans watched the prequels saying, "What the...".

There are probably more pages on the internet about them then the ones in the Gospels.

I bought a DVD of all the movies available to that date a few years ago so up to and including TFA. The collection included the original versions of the original trilogy or close. "Star Wars" was not the original from 1977 but the slightly altered version from the next year or the one after, '78 or '79. No "Episode 4: A New Hope". Empire was the original '80 version and Return the original '83 version.

Anyway, I noticed right away Leia telling Luke she had memories of her mother in RotJ. That's definitely not consistent with RotS where Padme died right after the twins were born.

There are other problems like Chewbacca and Yoda knowing each other in the prequels. That's not an inconsistency but, if someone had never seen any of the movies before and watched them in numerical order, they would expect a payoff like Chewie and Yoda meeting in Empire or Return. Also, they would expect Obi-Wan to say, "I thought I could train your father as well as Qui-Gon Jinn could" or some mention of him.

But none of this nitpicking is a big deal to me. Somehow, the prequels just didn't have that magical feeling of wonder that the original trilogy did. And it's not because I was older. I've experienced that wonder at movies long after the original trilogy. And it's not nitpicking little details. Somehow, they just didn't have it, whatever it is, compared to the originals.

I mean, on the surface, that would be hard to argue. But some essence felt different.

[DrNewGod]

In my view, the films for which Lucas is best remembered are American Graffitti and the first installments of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films (although he didn't direct that last one). All of those seem very personal projects, touching on his youth and love of the adventure cinema of his childhood.

Maybe he didn't make more because, having made a bank already, there just wasn't anything else that he felt strongly enough about to really throw himself at.

[Steel Inquisitor]

Am I remembering incorrectly? I seem to recall that between OT and the Prequels, Lucas poured all his energy into developing new cinematic technology at Industrial Light And Magic, from which several innovative tech firms spun off.

If I'm remembering this right, sounds to me like his interest just shifted.

Lucas is more of an Avi Arad than a James Cameron, he's the money not the brains behind that technology. I think he's just got lazy. He's a businessman not a director.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Lucas is more of an Avi Arad than a James Cameron,

When did Avi Arad create characters and stories and decide the aesthetic of an entire film, its look, its sounds, and its design?

Avi Arad bought Marvel Studios, he didn't create the characters.

Lucas created the characters of Star Wars. There is not one Star Wars character in the OT and the PT whose name wasn't decided by Lucas, whose plot arc and function wasn't decided by Lucas, and whose look wasn't also decided by GL.

...he's the money not the brains behind that technology.

People who say this haven't seen the experimental films he made when he was in film school, or THX-1138, or his revolutionary audio and visual ideas that made the most radical innovators in the industry run through a brick wall for him at a time when that wasn't necessarily the most lucrative and achievable thing in the world.

He's a businessman not a director.

All movie directors are to some extent businessmen.

In my view, the films for which Lucas is best remembered are American Graffitti and the first installments of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films (although he didn't direct that last one). All of those seem very personal projects, touching on his youth and love of the adventure cinema of his childhood.

Lucas is remembered also for the Prequels, which sold around the world and are immensely popular to this day.

Nobody is ever going to forget anything Lucas did, so I don't know what you mean by "Best remembered"?

[Powerboy]

Oh cool, another “actually, the Prequels are very good” threads getting started.

These movies have been dissected so many times, and nobody has ever done it and walked away with a compelling case for their misunderstood genius. It ain’t gonna happen here, either.

They’re bad. They’re poorly acted, the dialog is awful, the shot compositions are boring and they’re stuffed to the absolute limit with stuff on top of more stuff with stuff behind it, and stuff running in front of it, to the point that the spectacle of it all contains no impact because it’s just an endless parade of nothing.

On the other hand, maybe their weaknesses can be defined.

I would say that they are almost too thought out but not in a good way. For instance, in the original movie, Lucas described how he often had seconds to make a decision and just hoped his instincts were right. The prequels seem, in some way, overly complex and forced into certain directions.

I'll readily grant that a lot of the problem was that this was telling a story in minute detail after all of the relevant details were already known to the audience. People who see the prequels first seem to react better but often don't seem to get what the big deal is about Star Wars so it's a Catch-22.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I would say that they are almost too thought out but not in a good way. For instance, in the original movie, Lucas described how he often had seconds to make a decision and just hoped his instincts were right. The prequels seem, in some way, overly complex and forced into certain directions.

The flipside to that is that Lucas actually did work in the same way on the prequels as in the original. He prepared extensively on the OT and changed stuff on the spot when it wasn't working. He did the same with the prequels, and in some cases did extensive reshoots of a lot of scenes. He did this on AOTC and Revenge of the Sith, calling reshoots after already editing some of the stuff. He could do that in a way because had more control and detail.

So Lucas wasn't rigidly committed to a schema or anything on the prequels any more than the OT was.

Here's my advice to people who dislike the prequels...You have every right to dislike the prequels if you feel that way. That's fair. What you don't have a right to is your own facts.
-- George Lucas didn't decline in skills as a director from making the OT and the PT. Not at least in terms of what people understand as direction.
-- The PT was made in the same style of the OT in many respects, i.e. in terms of Lucas coming up with details and changing stuff on set.
-- It wasn't the case that Lucas didn't know what made the OT special especially since it's irrelevant because Lucas was aiming for an entirely new visual style and set of priorities.

It's entirely possible that the same George Lucas who made the original films could make a lesser film while still having the same skills. That can happen. Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man 3, and more recently Patty Jenkins directed Wonder Woman 1984, Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises wasn't as great as the middle film, The Dark Knight. Spielberg made a lesser sequel like The Lost World to Jurassic Park. Talented people can and make bad films but that doesn't mean they were never talented to start with. But only in the case of George Lucas do you have a subset of fans disgracefully and ungratefully deny and malign any achievement of the guy who did it. IF you apply that standard universally you would say Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman 1 happened because she had help and didn't have resources and so on. If you apply that to Spielberg, you would say he's not a good director because he made The Lost World, and so on and so forth.

And by the way directors taking hiatuses or long breaks or making a few film isn't that uncommon. Sam Raimi for instance since Spider-Man 3 only directed 2 films in some 14 years or so. Does that mean that Sam Raimi lost his interest in film-making and so on?

I'll readily grant that a lot of the problem was that this was telling a story in minute detail after all of the relevant details were already known to the audience. People who see the prequels first seem to react better but often don't seem to get what the big deal is about Star Wars so it's a Catch-22.

Lucas intended the prequels for the latter audience, and he wanted to use the prequels to give a vision of Star Wars that was closest to how he originally saw it. So it's a much more sprawling scope, a galaxy that's really wide, with each planet being diverse having its own look and style and culture separate from any other planet, and basically doing every science-fiction setting in movies all in one place.

[Steel Inquisitor]

When did Avi Arad create characters and stories and decide the aesthetic of an entire film, its look, its sounds, and its design?

Avi Arad bought Marvel Studios, he didn't create the characters.

Lucas created the characters of Star Wars. There is not one Star Wars character in the OT and the PT whose name wasn't decided by Lucas, whose plot arc and function wasn't decided by Lucas, and whose look wasn't also decided by GL.

Avi Arad was the money to fund those movies, and he did get a say in how they were made. That's what Lucas became.

I wasn't talking about the characters, it was about directors who get involved in making technology for their movies. They don't just sit in their chair and count money, they themselves get their hands dirty. Jon Favreau and Cameron do this. This also ignores how he needs people to tell him no and refine his ideas so they're workable. ANH was a train wreck until Lucas got other people to refine everything for him, from other directors to his ex-wife editing it into something resembling a coherent story. Lucas unfiltered is a disaster, which is why his acumen diminished when he tossed everyone else out in exchange for Yes Men. Lucas was not doing things like Cameron's doing for Avatar by the prequels. The Lucas from OT isn't the one with us today.

Lucas didn't create everything from scratch in the OT. He had help from authors like Leigh Brackett and Gary Kurtz. People who were frozen out of recognition when Lucas made himself the centre of Star Wars.

People who say this haven't seen the experimental films he made when he was in film school, or THX-1138, or his revolutionary audio and visual ideas that made the most radical innovators in the industry run through a brick wall for him at a time when that wasn't necessarily the most lucrative and achievable thing in the world.

Which is so strange how he stopped doing this after he got to Star Wars. It's not like he was on the ground doing everything with practical effects for the OT, that was Joe Johnson. He came up with the ideas, he didn't do the actual work to make the technology. Or at least he stopped doing this less and less as he got older and more wealthy.

All movie directors are to some extent businessmen.

Not like Lucas, they aren't. He pioneered movies cashing in with merchandise, that's a bigger legacy than what he's done with Star Wars.

Lucas is remembered also for the Prequels, which sold around the world and are immensely popular to this day.

Nobody is ever going to forget anything Lucas did, so I don't know what you mean by "Best remembered"?

Exactly, which is why he's taken as seriously as he was from the OT. It's not just about the money, it's about the reception. Michael Bay's Transformers made money, are they classics? No.

[Pinsir]

Star Wars is modern mythology, they're films that transcend generational boundaries and are ingrained in our psyches. In past societies, they quoted Homer, the Bible, the Koran, the Baghava Gita, in ours, we quote Star Wars. George Lucas don't need to make no more movies.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Avi Arad was the money to fund those movies, and he did get a say in how they were made. That's what Lucas became.

But that's not even remotely comparable. Avi Arad was one producer among many on the projects he worked on. He represented Marvel Studios and insisted on character consistency and presentation but the actual producers of Sony and Fox (on the Spider-Man and X-Men) also had a major say on stuff.

Lucas was the whole show.

I wasn't talking about the characters, it was about directors who get involved in making technology for their movies. They don't just sit in their chair and count money, they themselves get their hands dirty. Jon Favreau and Cameron do this.

James Cameron has directed 1 movie in the last 24 years. Jon Favreau is merely an employee and manager for a big company that knows what to do with the stuff he's given (and a talented character actor I might add). He's not an innovator or a risk-taker on the level of the other two.

This also ignores how he needs people to tell him no and refine his ideas so they're workable.

As I said, people are not entitled to their facts. This kind of misconceptions reveals the little people don't know about film-making and the lot that they could learn if they read books by J. W. Rinzler, Paul Hirsch among others. This nostrum that "Lucas had to be reined in and told no on the first film" is basically misinformation and tall tales and not borne out by the slightest evidence on the production of those films.

ANH was a train wreck until Lucas got other people to refine everything for him,

The editor Lucas originally hired, John Jympson (who edited A HARD DAY'S NIGHT) was hired because Lucas felt he would create a gritty look but Jympson (much like many of Lucas' collaborators) hated the very concept of Star Wars and thought it was a comedy movie or a spoof. Jympson worked on the original rough cut of the film. A rough cut by the way isn't the final edit (it's not even the first draft) and Jympson chose the worst shots and ideas much to Lucas' alarm.

So again, the story you tell is a distortion. You make it sound like Lucas was some f--k up from Day 1, rather than a director whose vision was sabotaged by an editor who was not on the level or capable of understanding what he was doing. That wasn't Lucas being bailed out specifically it was people chipping in to rescue his work from a major mess.

...to his ex-wife...

This is a quibble. But he and Marcia Lucas were married during the production of the film. When you say ex-wife you make it sound like they were exes at the time. "Then wife" makes more sense.

... editing it into something resembling a coherent story.

One day if people have the time they should look at the credits for A NEW HOPE. It says edited by "Paul Hirsch, Marcia Lucas, Richard Chew". Look up the Academy Award winners list and you will find that all three of these names got the Oscar for Editing that film. So basically,
-- Marcia Lucas came in after Jympson messed up the rough cut and given the delays in production and the need for VFX to have a rough cut to use as a reference among other things, she fixed and redid the rough cut close to how Lucas envisioned it. On this level, this was crucial and important and saved valuable production time and allowed Lucas to focus on other stuff. So on that level this was valuable and crucial.
-- Marcia Lucas was busy editing New York New York for Martin Scorsese (who takes like a year or so to edit his movies) so her involvement with the editing of Star Wars ended with the salvage of the rough cut, which she did with the help of Richard Chew.
-- The actual final edit of the film was done by Paul Hirsch (who worked with Brian DePalma) and he wrote a book recently on his career and talks extensively of how he and Lucas collaborated on the final cut of the film.

So again this narrative that Marcia Lucas singlehandedly saved the film is a distortion. Lucas was involved in the editing and post-production processes of this film.

Lucas was not doing things like Cameron's doing for Avatar by the prequels.

Yes he did. The technology for the Na'vi was pioneered by ILM for the prequels for Jar Jar Binks. Ahmad Best pointed out that without Jar Jar, "No Gollum, no Navi" one might also add "No Thanos".

Lucas didn't create everything from scratch in the OT.

To the extent that all films are collaborative, and require help, yes. To the extent that a great director is the primary visionary and architect of the film, George Lucas created the OT the same way Hitchcock and Spielberg and Scorsese created their movies. And unlike those three, George Lucas wrote the stories, designed the plots, and created the characters and an entire universe.

He had help from authors like Leigh Brackett

Leigh Brackett contributed a draft but she died midway through ESB and aside from some planet names, nothing was used. The actual story of ESB (including the famous twist) was written by Lucas.

...and Gary Kurtz.

Kurtz wasn't an author, he was a producer and he quit Star Wars before the end of TESB because he ran the project chaotically and made it over-budget and over-schedule forcing Lucas to take out a loan to complete it.

People who were frozen out of recognition when Lucas made himself the centre of Star Wars.

Leigh Brackett died midway in the pre-production of ESB and even though he didn't use most of what she wrote, Lucas still honored her and gave her credit in the final film. As for Gary Kurtz after his own Post-SW career as a producer proved to be a debacle including a big flop with a movie he made with Mark Hamill afterwards, he spent the final decades talking trash about Lucas all the while GL never once said a word against him and kept his side of the story quiet.

The reality is that Kurtz was "let go" because of his mismanagement of TESB's production.

[Joker]

All of it designed and selected by one guy.

I am just going to take a second to address this nonsense because you clearly don’t understand how movies are made, let alone how Star Wars movies are made, which is impressive, because the making of each and every Star Wars movie is just fantastically documented.

Look, you can hero worship Lucas all you want. I don’t care. He’s your boy. Great. But don’t pretend the guy sits around designing every character, space ship, and environment at the expense and erasure of the countless and exceptionally talented people who actually do that work.

Star Wars has never, ever, been the work of a singular genius.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

I am just going to take a second to address this nonsense because you clearly don’t understand how movies are made, let alone how Star Wars movies are made, which is impressive, because the making of each and every Star Wars movie is just fantastically documented.

I am aware because I have read quite thoroughly J. W. Rinzler's account of the production of A NEW HOPE and Paul Hirsch's recent book on his career with a special focus on his work editing the final cut of ANH with Lucas.

But don’t pretend the guy sits around designing every character,

Which he did.

...space ship,

All based on his instructions and stated aesthetic, trying to give a sense in ANH of something being "lived in" and accessible, an extension of the car culture he celebrated in AMERICAN GRAFFITI.

...and environment

Again based on his aesthetic vision and ideas.

Star Wars has never, ever, been the work of a singular genius.

To the extent that we think of say the Eiffel Tower as the triumph of Eiffel's engineering principles, or the works of great architects like Frank Lloyd Wright as belonging to him, as well as any great director like Scorsese and others as singular geniuses, or you know Frank Sinatra (who for the most part never wrote the lyrics of any of his songs or played all the instruments or produced the albums on his own) or Jack Kirby (who almost never had control on inking and lettering or coloring)...Lucas is a singular genius and creator.

If you want to deny Lucas credit for Star Wars you will have to deny a whole bunch of people credit for anything. You know it wasn't Beyonce who directed and did everything for her recent visual albums. She sang but she didn't play all the instruments you know. She didn't do all the technical work for her music videos by herself.

Lucas's say on Star Wars was far greater than Kevin Feige on most any MCU project. Far greater than say Stan Lee on any Marvel comic. There was no Marvel Method on Star Wars.

[Timothy Hunter]

I suppose Lucas had the belief that his time was better spent curating the Star Wars brand rather than continously making movies.

I do wish that George Lucas didn't make Star Wars because not experiencing that rabid success would probably incentivize him to make more movies.

I don't buy into auteur theory, but I can understand why previous posters refer to him as an auteur. As maligned as the prequels are, I really respect how non-commerical and unique some of the aspects of those movies are.

I don't see him being like Kubrick or Scorsese, capable of putting out great film after film, but I do think Lucas had the potential to be like Paul Schrader or Francis Ford Coppola, not always successful, but almost always interesting.

[Joker]

If you want to deny Lucas credit for Star Wars you will have to deny a whole bunch of people credit for anything.

Literally not what I'm doing in either case, but you do you.

[green_garnish]

tyhe originial trilogy was a different, simpler story than the prequels. OT was a fairy tail: princess in distress, hero hopelessly outmatched by the enemy, magic with no explicable reason or source except to drive the story.

The prequels attempted something no fairy tale ever did: explaining how things got as bad as they are. Fairy tales expect you to accept that things are bad, because generally we believe they are (especially when fairy tales were written).

The prequels were better written, largely consistent (why a non-human, science fantasy infant born as a grandchild of the Force couldn't have vague images of her mother I'll never understand) and not a fairy tale - which is to their credit, but doesn't make them better or worse than the OT. They were certainly hampered by Lucas' demonstration that he wasn't up to the task of directing such a complex story.

Lucas was not an editor, special effects guy, programmer, or model maker. But he was a visionary, and that's a large part of what a director is expected to be, especially when creating a reality from scratch. He didn't make the models. He told the model makers what he wanted, they offered input, there was give and take, and they made it. They presented it to him, he told them what he wanted changed, and they changed it. That was the case with virtually all elements of the movies, including to a certain extent the music.

This was true to the extent that he personally made the decision for each and every scene what was to be filmed real, and what what to be SFX. He didnt do that arbitrarily. He had a vision of what he wanted the scene to look like, and knew what would be less expensive to render rather than construct.