“The film has to make us believe it really existed,” explained Lucas, “that we’ve really gone to another galaxy to shoot. The success of the imaginary, it’s to make something totally fabricated seem real . . . that everything be credible and totally fantastic at the same time.”44
Interesting: Star Wars seems to be the culmination of the New Hollywood experiment: a fantastical, optimistically upbeat film that America needed, but paradoxically still tinged with the distinct realism of the decade (because of the used universe dictum).
