George Lucas Quotes

“Lucas wasn’t paying for a movie; he was buying his own creative freedom.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“a whole generation has grown up without fairy tales.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“I’d be working all day, all night, living on chocolate bars and coffee,” said Lucas. “It was a great life.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas

“Ultimately, said Lucas, adopting the tones of the radical hippie many supposed him to be, “we learned one rule that came out of the ’60s: Acquire the means of production”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Then we had focus problems on the camera, and the assistant cameraman was run over by a car,” Lucas recalled with a sigh. “Then we had a five alarm fire. That was a typical night.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“The same year, Hasbro—which had soaked up Kenner years earlier—reactivated its option to produce action figures and issued a new line of Star Wars toys under the imprint “The Power of the Force.” A manager at FAO Schwarz in New York was surprised to see that there were more adults than children buying the new line of toys—a”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Next, Lucas began inserting his names and places into a short narrative, not much more than a story fragment, called “The Journal of the Whills.” He envisioned borrowing a storytelling device from the old Disney cartoons, showing a storybook—in this case the Journal of the Whills—“falling”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Eventually, he would abandon the Internet altogether. “I want people to like what I do. Everybody wants to be accepted at least by somebody,” he insisted. “But we live in a world now where you’re forced to become part of this larger corporate entity called the media.… Since I’m doing the films myself, I don’t have quite that obligation. I’d just as soon let my own films die than have to go out and sell them on a circuit. And I do as little as I have to, to feel responsible.”74”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Scrooge’s ethic reflected those of writer-artist Carl Barks, who hailed “honor, honesty, [and] allowing other people to believe in their own ideas, not trying to force everyone into one form”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas

“Work smarter, not harder,” was Scrooge’s motto, and his stories were full of inventive schemes that, more often than not, made him even richer and more successful. In Scrooge’s world, hard work paid off, yes — but so did cleverness and a desire to do something in a way no one had ever thought of before.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas

“Reviews were scathing—most criticized its too-fast pacing, and overreliance on slapstick and sight gags, both of which had been intentional on Lucas’s part. But Lucas brushed off the criticism. “It came out almost exactly or even better than I hoped it would come out,” he told reporters defiantly.149 “I like my movies, and I’m always surprised if they do very well or do terribly. But Radioland Murders was inexpensive and we learned quite a bit.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“At Lucas’s request, ILM had altered the cantina confrontation between Han Solo and the bounty hunter Greedo—which had ended with Han gunning the hapless Greedo down—to instead show Greedo squeezing off a shot first, thus turning Han’s previously aggressive blast into what Lucas saw as simply self-defense. Fans”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Barely two weeks into filming Star Wars, and George Lucas was ready to kill Sir Alec Guinness. “It”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Lucas had narrowed his lead threesome down to two competing groups: in one was Walken, Will Seltzer, and Terri Nunn, a trio Lucas described as “a little more serious, a little more realistic”; in the other, Ford, Hamill, and Fisher, a group Lucas called “a little more fun, more goofy.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Lucas recalled. “I went for the merchandising because it was one of the few things left that we hadn’t discussed.”60 But Lucas also shrewdly recognized that Fox and other studios had underestimated—and, in many cases, wasted—merchandising opportunities to market their films. “We”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“Lucas began filming THX 1138 on Monday, September 22, 1969, shooting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the still unfinished Bay Area Rapid Transit system.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“The young Lucas may have been ambivalent about movies, but there was one entertainment, in fact one place, he was very passionate about. “I loved Disneyland,” Lucas said—and so, it seemed, did George Lucas Sr., who flew the entire family to southern California to be there for the park’s opening day in July 1955.81”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“And sand, it seemed, got into everything, stinging eyes, abrading skin, and getting into nearly every crack and crevice.”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life

“During the first week of filming, it began raining in Tunisia’s Nefta Valley for the first time in seven years and didn’t stop for four days. Equipment and vehicles bogged down in the mud, requiring assistance from the Tunisian army to pull everything out of the muck. It was often cold in the morning and blazing hot by afternoon, and Lucas would begin most days in his brown coat, hands shoved deep in the pockets as he peered through the eyepiece of the camera; as the sun rose higher in the sky, he would shrug off his coat, put on his sunglasses, and direct his actors in a checked work shirt, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. When it wasn’t raining, high winds tore up the sets, ripping apart the sandcrawler and blowing one set, as a crew member put it, “halfway to Algeria.”7”
― Brian Jay Jones, George Lucas: A Life