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Founders: #35 George Lucas: A Life

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What I learned from reading George Lucas: A Life by Brian Jay Jones. --- Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in the most: himself.“What we’re striving for is total freedom, where we can finance our pictures, make them our way, release them where we want them released, and be completely free to express ourselves,” explained Lucas. “That’s very hard to do in the world of business. In this country, the only thing that speaks is money and you have to have the money in order to have the power to be free.”George looked at it like a businessman, saying, ‘Wait a minute. The studios borrowed money, took a 35 percent distribution fee off the top. This is crazy. Why don’t we borrow the money ourselves?' Some of the bravest and/or most reckless acts were not aesthetic, but financial.My thing about art is that I don’t like the word art because it means pretension and bullshit, and I equate those two directly. I don’t think of myself as an artist, and I don’t think I ever will. I’m a craftsman. I don’t make a work of art; I make a movie. You couldn’t pay me enough money to go through what you have to go through to make a movie. It’s excruciating. It’s horrible. You get physically

[00:00:00] George Lucas unapologetically invested in what he believed in most, himself. As a result, the film empire he created would empower not just him, but other filmmakers to produce movies exactly as they envisioned them, without a studio imposing its own priorities, grousing about budgets, or micromanaging the process. George Lucas, the small-town son, had said no to the family business, then built a cinematic empire based on his own uncompromising vision of the film industry, not as it was, but as he thought it should be. Much of that vision lay in the possibilities presented by…

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