Since the beginning of his Hollywood career, George Lucas has always done things his own way. Almost 60 years later, he hasn’t changed a bit.
Appearing at a 45th anniversary screening of “The Empire Strikes Back” on the opening night of the 2025 TCM Classic Film Festival, Lucas discussed his introduction to longtime friend and collaborator Francis Ford Coppola, his earliest experiences with the studio system and his path from “American Graffiti” to the industry-changing blockbuster “Star Wars.” However, despite the best efforts of host and moderator Ben Mankiewicz, he barely mentioned the film that the sellout crowd was there to see — and only then when he was good and ready.
Suffice it to say that Lucas’ career is one that’s been thoroughly documented and deconstructed; no fewer than eight books have been written about him, along with a handful of documentaries and nonfiction series. Even so, it was fun to hear him recount his grumpy disinterest in studio filmmaking — from that first day on set — and take up the lion’s share of the 35-minute conversation to get around to explaining how, because he’d overwritten the original script for “Star Wars,” he already had the story mapped out and ready to go for “The Empire Strikes Back.”
“I write like a blueprint,” he told Mankiewicz. “It’s not got a lot of detail on it. And when I got the script [for ‘Star Wars’] done, there was a 130 to 180 pages. So I cut it into three parts and said, ‘I’ll focus on the first one, because we’ll never get enough money to make the whole thing.’”
To be fair to Lucas, Mankiewicz may have inadvertently made a tactical error by beginning their conversation with a question about his friendship with Coppola. But to be fair to Mankiewicz, he could not have known that Lucas would provide an unhurried, granular account of his earliest days on the set of Coppola’s “Finian’s Rainbow,” and the subsequent partnership that developed between the two youngest people on the ill-fated musical. “I was 22, Francis was 27. He had a beard, I had a beard. We both had long hair. We’re both film students,” said Lucas. “Everyone else on the crew was like 65 years old.”
Yet after Lucas playfully ignored repeated admonitions to hold the microphone close to his mouth so his answers would be audible, Mankiewicz finally got him to discuss a key detail in “Star Wars” lore: why exactly does Yoda speak backwards? “Because if you speak regular English, people won’t listen that much,” Lucas said. “But if he had an accent, or it’s really hard to understand what he’s saying, they focus on what he’s saying.”
“He was basically the philosopher of the movie,” Lucas continued. “I had to figure out a way to get people to actually listen — especially 12-year-olds.”
Though the chat was otherwise light on details about the production of “The Empire Strikes Back,” Lucas recounted the studio’s lack of support for “Star Wars,” first in hesitating to agree upon the deal memo he drafted. “I said, ‘I’ll do it for $50,000, to write and direct and produce… But I do want the sequels.’ And I wanted the rights because I’m going to make those movies no matter what happens to this one.”
He said he added another condition to his contract that would again be life-changing, both for him and the entertainment industry as a whole. “I said, ‘besides that, I’d like licensing.’ They went, ‘What’s licensing?’” Unimpressed by the film, and colored by the history of movie merchandising to that point, the studio capitulated to his demands. “They talked to themselves, and they went, ‘He’s never going to be able to do that. It takes them a billion dollars and a year to make a toy or make anything. There’s no money in that at all.’”
Underwhelmed by Fox’s promotion of the film, Lucas said he mounted a guerilla campaign to generate excitement, foretelling a future where multiple generations of moviegoers evidence their support first hand for the films and franchises they love. “I got the kids walking around Disneyland and the Comic Cons and all that kind of stuff to advertise the movie,” he said. “And that’s why Fox was so shocked when the first day the lines were all around the block.”
Mankiewicz concluded by lobbing Lucas a softball about which of the two new characters in “Empire,” cuddly Jedi master Yoda or charismatic swindler Lando Calrissian, was his favorite. Again, Lucas didn’t bite. “If you have 12 kids, which one do you like the most?” the filmmaker deflected. The moderator’s effort was noble, but like the film the audience was about to watch, it was one that ended slightly abruptly, and inconclusively. But at age 80, Lucas makes public appearances less frequently than ever, so the opportunity to see him felt like a rare treat — even if the unspoken lesson from the event is that the more eager people are for something, the easier it is to deliver it at your own pace.
