by Marco R. della Cava.

At his sprawling ranch north of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, producer George Lucas explores a range of film topics with USA TODAY.

Why Red Tails took 23 years to make:

“I wrote the script many years ago, and it turned out just like Star Wars in that it was way too big for one movie. There was the story of how they got trained at Tuskegee (Institute in Alabama), and how Eleanor Roosevelt became their champion. Then there was the battle movie that had piqued my interest initially. And finally the amazing saga of the start of the civil rights movement after the war. So this literally went on for 20 years, trying to get it all into one script, which meant leaving out many things we loved and going mainly with the war story and hinting at the rest.”

Why he financed the film himself:

“Everything I do is defensive. I got into a position (to finance projects) right after The Empire Strikes Back (1980). I didn’t need to have studios telling me what to do, picking movies for me to make, having me change them and recut them. My first two films (THX 1138 and American Graffiti) were recut, and I said I just don’t want that. If I’m going to live or die by my movie, I want to be able to say, ‘Yeah, that was a terrible movie, I made a mistake, sorry.’ I don’t want to have to say I made a great movie but you guys destroyed it.”

Read the rest of this article from USA Today.

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from Wales Online.

Star Wars creator George Lucas says 3D film-making will eventually take over at the cinema in the way colour replaced black and white.

Lucas and fellow technology pioneers James Cameron, the maker of Avatar, and DreamWorks Animation boss Jeffrey Katzenberg pointed out that digital film-making was only in its infancy but would bring vast improvements to how movies were made and seen.

Digital technology in general was revolutionising film-making the way sound did in the 1920s, Lucas said. The new digital 3D craze had hits and misses, but should one day become the big-screen standard over 2D presentation, he added.

“So now when you’re watching a movie and it’s not in 3D, it’s like watching in black and white,” he told cinema owners at their CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas.

Read the rest of this article from Wales Online.

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by Danny Leigh.

Would cinema be better off if George Lucas had ditched the films after American Graffiti and bred koi instead?

I do like a spot of alternate history – the literary subgenre in which a crucial historical moment either turns out entirely differently or never happens at all, at a stroke transforming the here and now into the jarringly unfamiliar. On the page, for instance, the idea of Hitler winning the war famously animated Philip K Dick and Robert Harris into grim flights of speculative fancy.

But you can also treat the concept as a parlour game – one easily applied to film. How would cinema have been affected had Akira Kurosawa made it as a painter and never made Seven Samurai? What if the 1998 best picture Oscar had gone not to Shakespeare in Love, but Gummo?

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This article was written by Michelle Castillo.

“George Lucas may be synonymous with Star Wars and sci-fi nerdom, but he is also known as one of the great pioneers of cinema, filmmaking, technology, and even gaming.

He utilized boundary-pushing graphics and CGI technology to create multiple blockbuster franchises and companies, including LucasArts.

And, he just had a long interview on the stage of the Radio City Music Hal for the first day of the World Business Forum. He chatted a great deal about moviemaking, building technology, Star Wars, his hatred of writing, the iPhone, and who he thinks is the next big director. Here are the highlights…”

Read this article from Mashable.

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