Love him or hate him, at one point many of us thought George Lucas was the best thing in the world. Then came Jar Jar and things would never be the same.Before a galaxy far, far away Lucas was just a young filmmaker making films any way he could. Quiet Earth found this excellent interview that Binary Bonsai dug up. Check out the Binary Bonsai site as they have lots of info on Lucas and the interview, however to introduce you to it here is a some of the background to it.
It is 1971, THX 1138 was released on March 11, American Zoetrope is spiraling towards certain doom, Lucas has become even more disillusioned with Hollywood than he was during his stint on McKenna’s Gold, and where exactly things go from here for the upstart and its members is all up in the air. And while American Zoetrope and Coppola had slowly started to cause waves — mostly due to THX’s failure as it were, though also because Coppola wasn’t afraid of touting American Zoetrope a state-of-the-art facility which could outmatch Hollywood, and that the company (and thus himself) was the future of filmmaking — Lucas was little more than a promising student who had made an obscure sci-fi film which opened small and died fast.It is almost an hour long, but well worth a watch.
During the summer of ’71, as all of this is happening, Gene Youngblood interviewed the then 27-year-old Lucas for a Los Angeles-based educational TV station, KCET in an hour-long program called George Lucas: Maker of Films.
UPDATE: The original video on Vimeo was pulled but hopefully this new one should work.
