George Lucas Wants to Retire and Make Art Films

Star Wars director and Red Tails producer George Lucas said in a recent interview with the New York Times that he plans on quitting the business of making big blockbuster films so that he can focus on making smaller films.


In the interview, which was published Tuesday, Lucas lays it on the line, saying that after Red Tails, he plans on leaving Hollywood behind. “I’m retiring...I’m moving away from the business, from the company, from all this kind of stuff,” Lucas told the Times.


However, he is still working on a fifth Indiana Jones film, which will act as a last hurrah.


“Once [Red Tails] is finished, he’s done everything he’s ever wanted to do,” Rick McCallum said. McCallum has acted as producer on practically all of Lucas’ recent projects, including the Star Wars prequels and Red Tails.


The Times adds that the films Lucas wants to make are more “personal,” the type of work he believed he would do when he graduated from film school in the late 1960s. Lucas started his career with THX-1138 and American Graffiti, two films that fall under this criteria, but then in 1977, Star Wars changed his path.


A Sept. 1991 piece by Joseph Gelmis in Newsday: “It’s been 18 years since the then-boy genius told me, on the eve of the release of American Graffiti that he yearned to make abstract experimental films that would evoke emotional reactions as powerful as any narrative adventure.”
In a June 1999 piece by Nick Hasted in The Independent, Walter Murch, who brilliantly edited Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and did sound design work on The Godfather II and Apocalypse Now, said of Lucas, “If you look at what happened to George, his oft-stated ‘What I’m doing to do next is small, experimental films’ … well, he’s never done that.”
In a 2005 Wired profile, Steve Silberman wrote, “Now Lucas says he is determined to leverage that security to make the kinds of movies that no one expects from him. He claims to have a stack of ideas piling up on his desk for “highly abstract, esoteric” films even more daring than his 1971 debut, THX 1138 … As a director of “very out-there” films, he admits that he faced this crossroads at least once before and chose to go down the more familiar route of embellishing Darth Vader’s backstory.”
Lucas’s ex-wife Marcia says, in Peter Biskind’s 2005 book about the New Hollywood of the 1970s, “George would have remained an experimental filmmaker if it had not been for [American] Graffiti leading to Star Wars.”
And in this week’s New York Times piece, Bryan Curtis writes:


Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They’ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then Star Wars happened.
Briefly mentioned in the Times piece is that Lucas has wanted to follow the path of fellow Bay Area director Francis Ford Coppola, who has begun to self-finance films. Twixt, which screened at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival and stars Val Kilmer as a third-rate mystery writer who encounters vampires, murderers and intermittent 3-D during a book tour stopover, isn’t a particularly good movie. But it is loose and personal (witness the scenes that flashback to what is essentially a recreation of the speed boating death of Coppola’s son Gian-Carlo) and was filmed on and around Coppola’s Northern California estate.