George Lucas in 2002.
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Directors Who Matter George Lucas

George Lucas

Age: 61

Most Recent Film: Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith

Best Film: Star Wars

Most Underrated Film: THX 1138

Did You Know: Had a car accident just out of high school that ended his dreams of professional race car driving -- but the life-changing experience led him to create The Force.

Why He Matters: Jaws may have defined summer moviegoing, but Star Wars shot it out of the stratosphere and made it a cultural phenomenon. With every sequel, he upped the ante for future filmmakers. He's also been the biggest proponent of shooting digitally, and his special effects house ILM continues to break new ground with every new film they work on.

Elvis. The Beatles. Star Wars. The three things that continue to endure year after year, from generation to generation. It's company that is not lost on Star Wars creator George Lucas. "They don't come around all the time," says Lucas "They come around once in a while and someone, somehow captures the imagination of the culture. And now it's the world's culture. It's hard to predict that stuff because it doesn't really have anything to do with what the work is or isn't. It just happens to be a cultural artifact that two particular forces connected in a particular time and place to create this craziness among the population."

As Lucas winds down his nearly 30-year odyssey called Star Wars with Episode III-Revenge of the Sith (which chronicles Anakin Skywalker's descent to the Dark Side and his ultimate rebirth as the insidious Darth Vader), he admits he never intended the series to take on the life it has.

"I thought it was going to be one movie, it was just going to be Episode IV," says Lucas. "I wasn't going to tell all of the back story. The three movies were quashed down and put into one movie. That was the movie. I expected that to be it, and then I'd go on and do other things. I certainly never expected this." After Return of the Jedi in 1983, Lucas took time out to raise a family. Yet fifteen years later, after his kids were grown up, he decided to go back, revisit his beloved franchise and direct again.

"I always had talked about doing my own little, personal, artsy, non-linear movies, and I never considered doing the back story [of Star Wars]," says Lucas. "I was fascinated with the back story because it was a story about Darth Vader, but it kind of got lost a little bit in terms of what it was meant to be. It didn't have the impact that it would have if you knew what transpired and who Darth Vader was."

Lucas says he was intrigued because it would change how audiences looked at the last three movies, compared to how the storyline would have been viewed as episodic literature.

"The great thing about literature is that it works completely different in cinema," he explains. "It's completely two different sorts of genres. One sort of activates your imagination through the use of words. The other is a literal visual stimuli that hits you, in that you kind of believe it's real in a dreamlike sense."

And technology finally caught up to his ideas, allowing Lucas total freedom in storytelling.

"I wouldn't have even thought of building this back story if we hadn't created the digital technology that said, 'Oh, now I can actually have aliens that can talk and act and not be rubber masks,'" he adds.

Despite Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace disappointing many fans, Lucas admits that this current trilogy of films had to be different.

"I had to figure them out tonally," he says. "I wanted it stylistically to be the same, but it was darker, and I knew that it wasn't a traditional story arc. It wasn't plot, it was character study."

As the new trilogy has focused more on creating completely digital sets and digital actor replication, Lucas cautions that CGI will never take the place of actors as many people have feared.

"We've never been able to teach a computer to act," says Lucas. "It's talent and it's a skill, something that you're born with. I don't see in the foreseeable future that computers can become human enough in their artificial intelligence to have the same crazed psychology and need in order to relate to other people and get them to emotionally express their ideas. A computer can make a perfect visual representation, but the computer cannot act, and a character is just as good as the acting. The reason that Toy Story works as well as it does is because of Tom Hanks and the great actors in there. Shrek works as well as it does because of Eddie Murphy. Yoda works as well as he does because of Frank Oz. You cannot do it without an actor."

In digital technology, Lucas points out that a lot of talented animators -- who can, in a sense, be considered actors -- are also very necessary.

"They learn the same skills, they have the same talent," he says. "They shift slightly, but in the end, what they're using to do their craft is exactly the same, and a computer just can't do that. It just can't do it."

And in some ways, Lucas is completely surprised at the path his career has taken something he would have never expected when he was that geeky guy back at University of Southern California (USC) film school in the 1960s.

"I would've never believed that I would've ended up where I am now," he admits. "I wouldn't have believed that in a million years. And I went about it completely wrong because I wasn't headed in this direction. I was actually going the other way and somehow I ended up here. That's the way life is. You go north and you end up south."

He says he's basically followed what he wanted to do and where his creativity took him, planning little out along the way, but adding that he was also lucky enough along the way to fall "into things."

"Mostly the things that I was doing that I get the most credit for were things that I was doing, if anything, to protect the films," Lucas explains. "I got sequel rights because I wanted to make the other two films, and not because I thought that the first one was going to be successful. I thought that it was going to be a failure. I thought, 'If this is a failure, they won't do the other movies. So if I get the sequel rights, I can do them anyway, regardless of whether the first films fail or not.' And they thought the same thing that I did, which was that the first film was going to fail, and so why did they care about that stuff. 'In the end all we can do is maybe stop him from doing it and maybe get a few bucks off of the top and make it harder for him.' They didn't care."

Lucas waves goodbye to his franchise for now, although there will still be 3-D versions of the six Star Wars films released to theaters some time in the near future, plus a new TV animated series and a live-action TV series that is set between Episode III and Episode IV. As a director, however, Lucas plans to go off and make his abstract, non-linear art films, and he will still use digital cameras and technology to do it.

"I don't think that [my next films] are going to be FX driven the way that the movies that I've done now are," he says. "But I'm completely digital. I shoot digitally. I edit digitally. And I manipulate the film digitally, and I'm not going to stop doing that. That's like saying, 'Gee, you made widescreen color film with sound now. Are you going to go back and do a silent black and white movie?'"