You pass llamas on the way to Skywalker Ranch, the nexus of “Star Wars” creator George Lucas’ universe. Little piglets too — they scamper around the rolling hills while baby deer munch grasses on the side of the road.
Turning off of Lucas Valley Road, named after a 19th Century figure unrelated to the filmmaker, you enter the 2,600-acre property through an unmarked gate and continue up a pleasant, winding road. At a fork in the road, a uniformed male security officer sitting atop a woman’s bicycle with a basket in front waves. Coming up on your left is a baseball field with a recycling bin planted behind the backstop.
By the time you reach the Inn, a Victorian mansion containing 25 units for overnight guests of Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound, you have passed through two security checkpoints. Two-hundred-fifty employees make this trip regularly, though little evidence of them is apparent; the parking garage is hidden underground, and the 10 or so buildings scattered throughout the ranch — which look 100 years old despite being built in the 1980s — have been situated, per Lucas’ instructions, so that few are visible from one another amid the trees and slopes.
Lucas created Skywalker Ranch as his reward for the first three “Star Wars” movies — and his ultimate statement of independence from Hollywood. The place reflects the man, Just as Lucas incorporates silent movie techniques and ’30s serial conventions into his ongoing science-fiction saga, the ranch is rooted in a dream vision of a bucolic past while remaining devoted to the high-tech future of movies.
Here in Marin County, about a half-hour’s drive north of San Francisco, Lucas has committed himself not only to making movies but also inventing and refining the tools of his trade. The goal: complete control. The latest state-of-the-art product: “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones,” the biggest mainstream release to be shot on digital video instead of film.
“I grew up about 60 miles east of here, in the vineyards, and I like this kind of environment,” said the 58-year-old filmmaker, his wavy head of hair still full, his beard neatly trimmed, though the salt has overtaken the pepper in both.
Information sharing
Crisply attired in a charcoal V-neck sweater, peach shirt and round wire-rimmed glasses, the slightly built Lucas is a verbose yet low-key conversationalist, giving long, detailed answers in his somewhat high-pitched voice (think Kermit the Frog minus the silliness) and matter-of-fact tone. He speaks not out of apparent desperation to spill his guts but rather because his noggin is storing a lot of information that he’s only too happy to share.
An original Norman Rockwell painting hangs down the hall from the suite where Lucas sits. The ranch setting certainly is a sharp contrast from Hollywood, where Lucas never felt comfortable, particularly after studios trimmed his first two films, “THX 1138” (1971) and “American Graffiti” (1973), without his consent. While fellow cinematic dreamer Steven Spielberg, whom Lucas produced on the Indiana Jones movies, has joined the power structure by co-founding a studio, DreamWorks, Lucas has created his own alternative industry in Northern California.
“I get sort of angry at the establishment,” said Lucas, who lives off the ranch in Marin County. “You know, [Spielberg is] a few years younger than me. I think I was much more locked into the ’60s than he was, and I grew up here in San Francisco, so I never really became a part of that [Hollywood culture].
“I went to school down there [at the University of Southern California], and I immediately came up here right after school. I had to go down to get the money, which I didn’t like. They distributed my movies and they cut them up, and I didn’t like that. So I’ve always sort of been reasonably independent.”
“Reasonably” in this case translates to Lucas being the best-funded — and thus most powerful — independent filmmaker around. Starting with “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980), Lucas has financed each “Star Wars” movie himself, including “Attack of the Clones” and its reported $120 million budget.
20th Century Fox receives a set fee for distributing them, but Lucasfilm takes the risks and, as has been the case with each movie so far, reaps the massive benefits. (“The Phantom Menace,” for instance, has grossed more than $900 million worldwide.) Lucas’ decision early on to maintain the “Star Wars” merchandising rights also has resulted in windfall upon windfall.
Those monies have gone toward the building of Skywalker Ranch and the establishment of Lucas’ various companies. These include the computer-animation outfit Pixar (“Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.”), which Lucas eventually sold to Apple Computers co-founder Steven Jobs, and Industrial Light & Magic, the industry-leading special-effects company based in nearby San Rafael.
A special arrangement
ILM, which provided groundbreaking visuals to movies such as “Jurassic Park,” “The Abyss” and “Forrest Gump,” created the thousands of visual effects for “Attack of the Clones.” The movie’s head-spinning sound design and mixing were done at another Lucas company, Skywalker Sound, which is based in the ranch’s red-brick Technical Building, also the home of a state-of-the-art movie theater and the original C-3PO and R2-D2 robots. (The building’s front yard is a small vineyard that provides grapes to the Napa Valley winery of Francis Ford Coppola, Lucas’ former mentor.)
All of this empire building has had a singular purpose: To enable filmmakers — and one filmmaker in particular — to re-create on the screen (and out of the speakers) what has been lingering in his imagination. Lucas said he’s getting closer all the time.
“Before, just by the nature of the filmmaking process, I had to self-censor myself, and that was very frustrating for me,” he said. “I had these great ideas, but I couldn’t pull them off because technically you couldn’t do them on film. I was in a photographic medium, and it meant I actually had to have something in front of the camera to make it be real.
“Now I don’t have to. Now I can sort of just pull out my canvas, pull out my paints and make it be whatever I want it to be. Even though I’m using the photographic medium, it’s still much more malleable than it ever was in the past.”
The difference, of course, is digital technology, which Lucas and ILM have been championing for years, both in terms of computer graphics and the use of high-definition video as a replacement for celluloid. He said his decision to return to directing for the first time in more than 20 years with “Episode I — The Phantom Menace” (1999) was based in part on his increased confidence that he finally could portray the worlds that have been in his head for years.
He also wanted to finish what he started.
“I still have in my possession the 12-page outline that he wrote for United Artists for what was then called `The Untitled Sci-Fi Movie’ that basically had all nine episodes at the time of `Star Wars’ outlined,” said Tom Pollock, Lucas’ former lawyer who became Universal’s movies chief and now is a producer. “You’re talking about 1972.”
First, a 12-page story
Lucas, who denies he ever planned to make nine “Star Wars” films, said Pollock actually is talking about a 12-page story treatment intended to get funding for the first movie. “In that version he has, it was Mace Windu [Samuel Jackson’s current Jedi character] and twins, and it was a different story. It was really about the father and the two kids being hunted down by the Emperor.”
Several years and scripts later, Lucas had come up with his story, which was so lengthy that he decided to divide it into three movies, which became “Star Wars,” “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi,” a.k.a. “Episodes IV-VI.” Lucas said he started with “Episode IV” to give viewers the feeling they were watching a Saturday matinee serial.
“It was always intended to be started in the middle of a serial: `This is Episode IV. You missed the first three episodes,'” Lucas said. “I love to start in the middle because when you start in the middle, it’s more interesting. I hate doing the exposition part.”
Yet the exposition part, which Lucas said he initially outlined as the first movie’s back story and never intended to film, became the basis for the current trilogy of prequels.
“By that time we’d done `Jurassic Park,’ and I’d pushed the technology forward in special effects and everything to get to a point where we could do a lot more things that we couldn’t do before,” Lucas said. “So I’d always liked the back story. I actually liked the story of Anakin Skywalker and how he came to be Darth Vader. It was always fascinating to me.”
The rap on Lucas is that he abandoned his experimental-film roots after “THX 1138,” yet the trilogy-in-progress may be his grandest experiment of all: an attempt to alter the way audiences view the most popular film series ever.
“It’s designed to work in order, so a lot of the things that are so great about [the first] `Star Wars’ now won’t be important anymore,” Lucas said. “The cantina scene won’t work because you’ll have already seen all these creatures in the universe and everything. But when Darth Vader walks through that door and grabs the guy by the neck, you’re going to say, `Oh my God, that’s Anakin.’ And when you see Luke for the first time, you’ll say, `That’s his son. Oh, my God.’
“It’s a completely different story. It’s still the same story that was told, but the audience wasn’t let in on the trick, whereas now they will be let in on the trick. It’s just completely reverse of the emotional through-line of the picture, and I’m very curious to see how that works.”
Not only are the chronologically earlier stories now being mounted with more advanced technology, but they’re also being told by a man who has been divorced and raised three adopted kids on his own since “Return of the Jedi.”
Growing period
“He actually has spent a lot of time over the past 10 years on what those of us who are basically children of the ’70s would call personal growth,” Pollock said. “Learning how to express your feelings. Taking up the guitar to express yourself in music. Whitewater rafting to actually do something physical. Raising your children to connect with another person. George always had trouble connecting with other people as human beings. I would say he spent a lot of time working on that and is in fact much more at ease in talking to the press, talking to other human beings, than he was in his 20s and 30s.”
Lucas agreed that he has matured in many ways.
“When I started [`Star Wars’] 30 years ago, I was in a very different place,” he said. “I was a young person sort of looking up. Now I’m an older person sort of looking down. It’s a young man’s story with an older man’s patina on it, and I kind of like that.”
Lucas said he also is enjoying directing more now than he did 25 years ago.
“I choose now to spend 10 years doing this, and I’m older and more mature about it, and I’m independent,” he said. “What I worked so hard to build up during the `Empire’/`Jedi’ years now I get to have the fruits of, which is that I get to do them myself. I get to not have the studio come in with focus groups and say, `Well, I’m sorry, you’ve got to get Harrison Ford in this somehow.'”
Although “Attack of the Clones” contains more visual effects than “The Phantom Menace,” producer Rick McCallum said Lucas had a much easier time making the newest episode.
“We were just on the bleeding edge [of technology] when we started `Episode I,'” McCallum said. “He hadn’t been directing for 20 years. It was not tough for him, but it definitely was more of a challenge than if he had [been directing] over the last 20 years. But this was absolutely effortless for him.”
Samuel Jackson, who plays Jedi master Mace Windu in the first two prequels, said he didn’t notice any change in Lucas from one movie to the next.
“George is always the calm in the middle of that massive storm of `Star Wars’ stuff that’s going on, all the technical crap that’s being thrown around while we’re trying to do what we’re doing and getting ready to do it,” Jackson said. “He’s the one person who’s kind of still and there.”
A faster pace
The biggest difference, Jackson added, was that “Episode II” was shot on digital video, which sped up the filmmaking process.
“You have to do the same things and work in the same way,” Jackson said. “You just get a lot more done. That’s all. Because you don’t have to wait two hours while they change lights and set this up, set that up. You swing a lens, you make it brighter, you make it darker, you keep going. It’s kind of cool.”
For Lucas, the key is to stay true to his own vision, no matter what the the significant “Star Wars” fan base has to say about the much-maligned “The Phantom Menace” or the series’ direction.
“Everybody would like to see a lot of things, but all I can do is end up telling my story, telling the story as I originally conceived it, and you either like it or you don’t,” he said.
Still, Lucas maintains a feeling that his career somehow got sidetracked a long time ago — that he was going to continue in the mode of “THX 1138” until “Francis kind of influenced me into `American Graffiti’ and into theatrical filmmaking and this whole area.” Lucas has made such promises before, but he said that after he’s done with “Episode III” in 2005, he’d like to pick up where he left off 30 years ago, when his plans to make “Apocalypse Now” fell through.
“I’m basically going all the way back to that very beginning crossroads and saying, `OK, now this is what would have happened if I’d gone and done these [more experimental] films.’ If I hadn’t done `American Graffiti’ and I’d done `Apocalypse Now,’ this would be the next movie after that, which in the `American Graffiti’ scenario turned out to be `Star Wars.’ In this other scenario, who knows what it’ll turn out to be? But, hey.”
`Star Wars’ vs. `Spider-Man’? Lucas isn’t worried — for now
Because George Lucas had the misfortune of inviting journalists to his ranch the week after “Spider-Man” opened to record-breaking grosses, he was subjected to the inevitable questions about how “Attack of the Clones” will compare at the box office.
“I know that’s going to be what’s written about in the end because they’re in 8,000 theaters, we’re in 5,800 theaters,” Lucas said with a sigh. “There’s no way we’re going to beat them. It’s going to be the disappointment of `Star Wars’: `Oh, it didn’t come out [on top].’
“I’m more interested in the presentation and making sure that we have good theaters and that it’s got digital sound and the audience has a good experience than I am breaking a record. I’m not a pubic company. I don’t have to worry about my stock price going up. I don’t have to impress Wall Street. It doesn’t relate to me at all, and that’s the only reason you break records.”
But don’t be fooled into thinking Lucas doesn’t keep tabs on this sort of stuff.
“What really counts in the end is what happens at the end of the day,” he continued. “In January when they bring out how much the movies made this year, am I going to be with the top two or three movies? I hope I am.
“I think `Spider-Man’ will be there, `Men in Black [II]’ will be there and maybe some other movie will come up that we don’t know about. I don’t think so. I think those are going to be the top three movies. I’m hoping that I’m going to be in that top three group. If I’m not, I’ll be disappointed.
“But whether I’m No. 1 or No. 2 or No. 3 is not relevant in the end. I think they’re all going to be reasonably close, to be honest with you. I don’t expect any of them to beat `Phantom Menace.’ I’ll be a little surprised if they did. It’s not impossible. I mean, `Harry Potter’ did it, but `Harry Potter’ just barely did it. You never know.”
— Mark Caro
