Tuesday, March 25, 2008

George Lucas Admits He's a Hack

(*Headline lifted directly from the subject of an email from Brent Sallay.)

George Lucas remembers the excitement that grew during the lead-up to "Star Wars: Episode I—The; Phantom! Menace," only to collapse in a flaccid heap of exposition and digital overkill prior to the anti-climax of the film's pod race. So he devised a new marketing message for the upcoming Indian Jones sequel: Don't get your hopes up, folks.

Lucas assured USA Todaythat people shouldn't assume the movie might be good just because Steven Spielberg is directing it. Lucas did have final script approval, after all.


"When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming," Lucas says. "And it's not. It's just a movie. Just like the other movies. You probably have fond memories of the other movies. But if you went back and looked at them, they might not hold up the same way your memory holds up."

Lucas says he learned his lesson about unrealistic expectations when he revived the Star Wars franchise in 1999. "When people approach the new (Indiana Jones), much like they did with Phantom Menace, they have a tendency to be a little harder on it," he says. "You're not going to get a lot of accolades doing a movie like this. All you can do is lose."


Whereby "lose" he means "make a fucking shitload of money. I mean, a giant fucking shitload. I mean, I'm gonna make such a giant fucking shitload of money off this motherfucker."

"We came back to do (Indy) because we wanted to have fun," he says. "It's not going to make much money for us in the end. We all have some money. … It would make a lot of money if you weren't rich. But we're not doing it for the money."


And so comes Vernon Hardapple's question: "If you didn't think it was more than just a movie…why were you making it?"

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