As far as George Lucas is concerned, his genre-dominating and defining blockbuster Star Wars sci-fi films are ‘not spaceship movies’.
That’s despite them being set in space and on far-flung planets and featuring some of the most famous-ever cinematic spaceships such as the Millenium Falcon and the Death Star, as well as the X-wing starfighters used by the Rebel Alliance pilots.
Of course, the legendary filmmaker was delving deeper into his inspiration for the films as well as their intended audience, which takes the Star Wars franchise beyond just being simply space opera movies.
Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, ahead of being awarded a prestigious honorary Palme d’Or at the closing ceremony, the retired producer and director reminded fans that there was ‘a lot more to’ Star Wars.
‘When Star Wars came out, everybody was saying, “Oh, let’s make a spaceship movie!” I said, “Star Wars isn’t a spaceship movie.” There’s a lot more to it,’ he told the audience, including Metro.co.uk, of Hollywood’s clamour to try and replicate Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’s success in 1977.
‘The purpose of Star Wars was – it was during the Vietnam War, I was going to do Apocalypse Now and I couldn’t do it. So, I took a lot of the ideas and put them into this movie,’ he continued, referencing the famous what-could-have-been if the world had received his version of the film.
Instead it was The Godfather’s Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas’s co-founder at production company American Zoetrope, who took on the project, converting two of the film’s eventual eight Oscar nominations and, co-incidentally, scooping the Palme d’Or in 1979.
Coppola has also been at the festival this year, premiering his sharply divisive mega-budget comeback movie Megalopolis, which was entirely independently financed.
‘Apocalypse done by me was going to be like Dr Strangelove, it was going to be a satire, it was going to be kind of funny. Some of that stuff is still in there,’ Lucas explained before observing that Coppola ‘did it very seriously’, inspired by his love of Heart of Darkness.
‘I was going make it more extreme than it really was.’
Returning to his intention with Star Wars, the Indiana Jones filmmaker repeated his assertion that the franchise was aimed at ‘12-year-old kids’ and that ‘it’s always been designed that way’.
He added: ‘And it’s kids during the Vietnam War, where all of us were about to be drafted, and people were coming back in coffins, friends, and we were marching against [it]. The civil rights movement was going on, there were a lot of things that were very dark.’
Lucas was keen to provide some light and guidance in such troubling times, as well as in general for tweenagers.
‘I said, I want to make something – because [previous film] American Graffiti was so powerful for kids – I want to make another kids’ movie for 12-year-olds that are going through puberty that don’t know what they’re doing, why they’re here, asking all the questions about what should I be worried about, what should I think about, what’s important?’
‘Star Wars has all those things in there. They’re buried in there, but you definitely get it, especially if you’re young,’ he insisted.
The original Star Wars film was followed up by 1980’s Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and 1983’s Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.
Observing that the film series’ original films were all ‘somewhere between 10 and 15 years old’, Lucas acknowledged that that was one of the reasons making the prequel trilogy was so ‘hard’, recalling how fans and critics ‘completely trashed’ Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999.
‘[They] hated it. “That’s a children’s film, I don’t want to see a children’s film! That’s terrible”.’
Elsewhere, Lucas called being awarded an honorary Palme d’Or both ‘a great honour’ and ‘nostalgic’, as he recalled his first trip to the Croisette and film festival in 1971 with THX 1138, his first film.
Other recipients of the award this year included acting icon Meryl Streep, nominee for an Oscar a massive 21 times (winning three so far), and Japanese powerhouse animation company Studio Ghibli.
Lucas noted wryly of his prize, with a laugh: ‘It’s always great to be recognised. Obviously, we have a lot of fans and stuff, but in terms of awards, I don’t make the kind of movies that win awards!’
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