i produced by francis ford coppola, next up american graffiti which to date has crushed over $140000000.00. then came star wars, the pop culture satisfaction, that changed everything and spoke to french eyes i went through u. s. c film school. i didn't know anything about making movies. i was an anthropology major and i went there and my junior year and was interested in photography. i was interested in going to art school and my father wouldn't have anything to do with it. so i figured there was to be some photography in the school set of photography as a part of my school summer. and i didn't even realize you could go to school or how to make movies. and i haven't really paid much attention to movies and you know, i didn't, didn't have television until i was like 10 or 11 years old. but at the time i was sort of getting interested in cars, things. so it's, you know,

it wasn't something i thought about. but once i got there, and i saw what it was, and i got exposed to the movies, i got suppose the process. i realized very quickly that i knew how to do this. and i knew how to do it well, and i loved it. so within a semester, if you have a few months, i was a 5 made a, an award winning movie. and i was on my way. it was something you look at all the student films and whatever, but it was doing and what i wanted to do and i would make a film. and you know, i didn't obviously know that i was that good when i started. but i said literally, within a couple months i'd made a film that one doesn't international film festivals and everybody else. and this was the beginning class. i said, i know how to do this. this is easy. then the next semester i did a couple of more movies. one was uh uh, a beginning project on somebody trying to escape east germany was about

freedom. another one was a little told in palm i was very much into alternative film making again from san francisco. i was very much into the canyon instead of a little bit of that is what i did do. i didn't really like movies and television, but i did come up to san francisco and hang out in kind of the clubs and, and go to canyon sort of films and they were very experimental, very finance kind of phone problems you call them. but sometimes very emotional, interesting. i brought you here. now what i left became an editor, became a cameraman. worked for a while. was unhappy decided to go back to school and see if i could get a masters degree in cinema so that i could also direct movies. so i went back, that'd be voted before i did that, i got a chance to go back to school and teach a class as a teaching assistant in photography. this is, i did that with us navy and in the process of that class, i made a phone call to your checks and that again, all the films,

one of wars with the huge number of rewards. and then after that, i went to school, made a couple other movies for a semester, and then what a lot of scholarships based on the films, based on everything one to work with carl foreman on from accomplishing his goal. the columbia studio is another one to work with. francis copeland at warner brothers studio and film contains rainbow. at that point i had no interest at all. and during the actual films, i was not interested at all. i wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. that's what i wanted to do. that's how it's working. i like to be. i like editing. i like photography. and i wanted to work as an editor and photographer and to send me over to documentaries, which is the new thing at that point. and then at the same time, on the side do these little archie, kind of total home, a non linear, non character driven non story driven films. that was my passion. but i wanted these scholarships and i said, well i should see what this whole thing is all about. i might as well just,

it's an opportunity months we'll take it. so i did, and out of that became francis couples assistant. and from that, i worked with him on the rain people. we came back to san francisco, which is where i wanted to live. that's where i'm from. and we started a phone company up here and managed francis managed to get a deal to make a feature version of t h x. and i figured well, so crazy archie told him home thing, but the industry isn't such term on our i think i might have a chance to actually make it. and i did. i managed to get the film made and they didn't see it or read the script or anything, and then i thought they hated it. but up to that point, i managed to actually get the movie made. the, the original idea was done by a friend of mine warmer in front of his mat robins who are doing their we're going to their senior workshop and they came up with the idea of

a man trying to escape a futuristic city which was about all it was and i, and then they decided not to do it for the senior workshop. so then i had a chance to teach this class and i was like, gosh, i go, i'm going to come up with a movie cuz i split the class on half one part of the class made a movie and then the other part maple with me and i was talking to a little good friends of mine, and i said, i'm going to do a film and they said, well, we got this thing and went about the guy trucks in the city. and he turned around and he can't get out early. it was even on the ground that it was just a guy trapped in a futuristic city. i like that idea. so i said okay, tech was basically a not a futuristic. no. it was about the what? it was sort of a, a, a parable by the way, we're living today the

the american cd again, started with francis saying to me, to accommodate, you know, if you're, if you're going to go stay on the movie business. and i said, well okay, i can, i can do a comedy, i know how to do that. i've never done that before. and it was, but i said, you're not always wanted to do a film about cruising, which is what the way i grew up. but i didn't ask, oh, that's why i didn't when i was in high school. and again, when i took cancer apology, i realize the meeting rituals in the united states were extremely unique. because the same kind of ritual that goes on in most countries where the boys either sit on the benches and watch the girls parade around with the girls that are on the bench and watch the boys parade around. and that's the way they met in the united states that they all did in cars, which you know, in the fifty's and sixty's was unheard of. and the rest, the, well no teenager could afford a car. and so it was very unique kind of thing. so i took that and said, you know,

it would be nice to document this particular thing, this particular ritual that existed really from the 30s up until us seventy's. and so that was the impetus of it. and i loved the music and i love, you know, i loved radio and i love destructors and i, that's how i really came to the store. got it. and. and, and, and, and mom, right. do you think about the 1st film, which was always episode for a new hope in order to write the ex extra i wanted to start in the middle, which i liked to do. i had to write of backstory. i didn't say we're all these people came from. what was the rebellion? what was the empire where the empire came from? who were the jet? i went to the jet. i do. who is darth vader, where did he come from? you know, that's all the story,

but that was all back story. find it right. all that in order just to get to writing the overland script. but i never intended that to be part of the movie. i always intended that just to be how i got there. but then when i had to do this, the film in 3 pieces, it kind of just a dissolved or just a painted. the impact of darth vader is the tragedy of darth vader. people in see because he was such a powerful figure. and so uh, i kept thinking, gee, is too bad, people get. and you'll see the irony of this whole thing that i thought it was there. but then when you spread it out, it kind of displays the point where it's not there. so i said um, and the other part is i wrote the back story. the star wars itself was written very, very carefully around the technology i had that i could make the movie. i knew i would pick like one technological break does that i had to get overcome in order to,

in the case of the 1st. so make it cinematic, make it move. be able to pam a spaceships to be able to create a, a fast paced editorial space battle. but i had to figure out how to do them. but coming from animation, i had some ideas and i thought, i think i could overcome this. but the story was written very carefully of how i was going to accomplish it, financially and technologically. and i each one of those was done that way. back story, i didn't think about that back, but it was written like piece of literature. you know, just blue sky dreaming well and then they go to curse on. there's a $100000.00 spaceships and then there's, you know, all kinds of in, in the quote mores and nothing really bad on you. i couldn't make that into a movie and forget it. like, you know, i can barely get star wars, which it really takes place and like 3 rooms, i mean, doesn't seem lincoln, but that's basically what it is. and it's funny and think about. but then in the process of doing far with advanced technology,

i had started the special effects company and i sort of kept pushing the special effects company. they created more and more technology. i had started with star wars to use some computers. we started to continue to use of the computers. i started a computer company, helped develop the technology to make films. and then we did things like those, you know, young sherlock holmes, which had a digital character. and then we did the terminator movies which had digital characters in pretty well. and then finally, we did drastic park which had which was really a huge breakthrough for industrial light and magic. and we really were making very realistic characters visually. and once we accomplish that, i said, hey, if i wanted to go back now and make that back story, that's actually possible. because before it was just not even think about it, you know, i could probably do this now. so then i started thinking about it and eventually came back. i had what i'd after the return of the jet i,

i just gotten divorced. i had a one year old daughter that i adopted. and i said, i'm really going to retire now. and it was a point in my career, i could have really taken over the world because i was at the top of the direct tauriel heap. i could do anything i wanted. i had kind of, you know, that i had that moment in time. and i just said, look, i'm more excited about raising my daughter than i am about making another movie. so, i took 15 years off, bought to 2 other kids, raised them. and then what is it? okay, now they're old enough to where i can go back to maybe making drinking moves again, which was obviously my 1st level what i wanted to do and uh, that's what i said. well, i can go back and finish the star wars story. now the action of technically i can do it and tell the tragedy of darth vader or i can go and make these are 2 films that i want to make. and i thought long and hard about and went back and forth and finally said, you know, if i don't do the star wars thing,

i'll never get to do it. this is the moment in time and i put it off 2 or 3 years. it will be too late. i just won't be able to do it because this is a 10 year commitment. and so, you know, i'm like, 50 years old, i said, and you know, if i wait until i'm 55 and i won't be done. i'm 65 and you start worried about things like that because i don't care, i'll finish star wars and might as well do it and get or so i think i always want to have done it. so i did that. and that's really how the other 3 star wars came to be. the american b is the kind of documentary film, again, trying to shoot a particular event. the particular kind of ritual re recreate it, but it was shot shot with 2 cameras i shot was available like i shot it very much as if i were shooting a documentary and i staged it like a document or i put the camera's way off and let the actors play their parts and so it was, i thought of it as a documentary of

a particular kind of event has been recreated. the casting on on american city was a lot of work. i spent 6 months seeing actors every day, 8 hours a day. i see them for about 5 minutes and they were all kids. you know, i didn't have any, even of some of the work before, but most of them hadn't. and so i had to make a quick judgment whether that was right for the part number of the part. and then i take various steve possibilities and various lori possibilities and i mix them all up and let them play against each other. because my feeling was it was an ensemble piece, and i really need to see how the actors inter, related with each other, how they reacted to each other, how they fit together, how they play, that seems to going to take a very long time and it was a lot of work and you know, came up with the cast, the. so i thought was fantastic and later turned out to be fantastic. $177.00 tech 2 and started out with the darth vader coming in and killing everybody. and then

halfway through the movie, a sudden realizes that he's the hero, but it's the villain as his father then indeed redeemed his father. that was the movie. well, it got so big that i couldn't do it. so i took the 1st act. when i took the 1st act, i promised myself i would finish the other 2 parts of the movie that no matter what about how much this one failed, i would get that done. and that was my mission. so everything was geared for star wars to fail. and for me up to fight, to get this done. as it turned out is succeeded though i didn't get the other ones done very. rather easily. the shop the movie in $28.00 days or nights we shot only at night. i think it was one day that we shot during the day, and it was really hard because we had,

we couldn't start until 9 o'clock at night and we, it was in july. and at the 5 o'clock the sun came up. so it's not like a movie where you're working during the day and as it gets later and later at night you can sort of save a lot of your close ups and then put some lights in to fix the day when it's the other way around. you can put up a, a curtain and stuff, but you're basically stuck because everything in the background, every year you can't make it go dark. still, you can make it go light, but then if your lights out there, but you can't make it go dark. so it was very, very difficult and i finished the film, it was very difficult for me to cut because there was, you know, the inner cutting for stories and trying to make that work. and i actually ended up cutting an hour and the movie out to the movie itself, not to 2 and a half hours when i 1st did it. and, you know, when last that long i knew. so i had to somehow, but every time i took a piece of it meant all the other pieces had to be taken out to in order to match

everything up. so it's very complicated, but to me and it was also uh, one of the 1st loose ever use. uh, uh, just uh, music from the radio. and ever so you can't do that, you know? but i did it anyway and, and now when movies are done that when the going th x francisco was a producer, we were good friends. he was supposed to be over seeing the picture he did oversee the picture by letting me do whatever i wanted. the studio saw the picture in the, in the desert. this, it was terrible. you know, what are we gonna do about this? and they were mad at francis and they shut down americans, all trump. they made him pay all the costs of everything back. and then when i got to do america graffiti and they let him be a producer because now he was a hot director because he done god, father, he pretty much did the same thing when we were in san francisco. it's a very, very cheap low budget movie. in the studio didn't want to bother to come up here to check on it. they didn't see it until it was finished. and they saw margaret city

was finished. we showed it to, you know, a bunch of people who got sued more constant stuff just to test it. and they just went dessert. they loved the studios that we hated. it's terrible. you can show it to an audience and they were going to put it out as a tv movie for a long time. and then, and they wanted me to call it, which was the 1st 2 checks they wanted me to cut. so we argued back and forth and i'm not gonna touch it. and so that came down to they took out 5 minutes, which made no difference whatsoever. and it just seems like them are very after. star wars wasn't try and hit. i went back to warner brothers and said, i wanna put that 5 minutes back into it before you release it on the h. s. and i got it changed back to the way it was. and i did the same thing. the universal was american fitness. i don't want my 5 minutes back. and after the star wars they let me do it. when i was in junior college, i was a social science major basic then after apology major and i did

a lot of anthropology classes and one of them was on the follow jane. and i became fascinated with the knowledge, but it was very interested in anthropology. why do we do the things that we do? how does this slide construct itself? when i got to the time of the american graffiti, i was developing that script. but at the same time i was thinking about other ideas . and one of them was to do a republic, serial an action adventure film. and i was kind of amused with that was what i have a habit of doing, which a lot of writers have a habit doing is what you're supposed to be running on one script. you end up thinking about another script or somebody don't know when it be great. if instead of doing what you're supposed to be doing. so that was my, what if my sort of affordance project, which was this saturday night and a serial project, which i come up with doing either a space film or flash gordon style. buck rogers sort of thing for

a action adventure film in period, which is like bottom line as well as the navy or compiler is loc and there's a whole genre there probably goes to john or is i was playing with. and when i went to united artist to say, i want to do this movie and really they said, okay, we'll give you the 10 grand to write the script. do you have any other movies which is about studios? do they want to hook you up for the rest of your life if you go there? so i said, well, you know, i got this idea for a kind of a, maybe a space adventure cuz i sort of picked that one out of the 2 that i wanted to do. and they said, okay, we'll make a deal for that too. so i have a 2 picture deal. one i got to do from or cd, but of course when i took american city to them, they said no, we don't want that. and so married then i finished american graffiti. and then before it came out because was sitting, i followed the studio. nobody wanted to have any do, isn't there with her? it was terrible. i said, well, i wanted to star wars now. he said no, no, no, we don't wanna do that now. i said, okay,

so then i had to take it to universal because they have the next 12 pictures i had and i told them, of course they hated me. at that point, i said i wanted to start warranting said, no, we don't wanna do that. but fortunately, i don't that junior 20 century fox had seen him or graffiti and one of the screens . and he said, you got a picture. i think you're really talented guy. do you have something you want to do is while i'm in front of shop around this little science fiction, it's more of a space fantasy kind of thing, soap opera. and they said their space oper. and he said, okay, well, i'll do it. so that's how i got that deal and explained the story to him. is it? look, i don't understand what you're talking about, but i think you're telling a guy and i'll do it. the o art is based on technology. that's the whole point of art. it's just something

that man does, which is it just the same as if you're drawing a cave paintings of pedal and you're doing some black charcoal and suddenly somebody gives you some orange circle. somebody, a black and orange struggle and it just completely doubles your ability to tell stories. all artist bang up against that technology and when you do, it's extremely frustrating fantasy science fiction. these are literary works. these are things that you depend on people's imagination to conjure up dream like other worldly existences. the problem with cinema is you have to make that real for a moment in time, like kind of like fantasy films after i did start was it. this was great and but i was constantly banging up against the technological ceiling and it was frustrating because of a lot of great movies and things that could be done. and. and at that point, the movie industry was trapped in this world of, of basically contemporary movies. you can do contemporary movies. you couldn't do

period pieces because that there wasn't enough in the audience there to do it. so we started breaking through using digital technology to see that we could do digital backgrounds that we could do digital characters. and then eventually when we got the found a minutes that i could actually get the digital characters to act, which is a big leap. it doesn't seem it, well, it was, it was really a dinosaur in georgia banks. and once you did that, then i wasn't stuck with these funny masks, which is, you know, animal tronic figures which were not, we were advancing them because we'd also taken the leap with yoga and created the 1st animal tronic character that could actually be lifelike, contact. but it was limited, you know, i couldn't get him to run around or anything. it was basically a puppet. otherwise you have to put a guy in a suit and it's very limited. but once you get to the digital level, being able to create a current, you can do anything and go anywhere, do anything is fantastic. and certainly that on the whole world of, of new characters, of fantasy films, period pictures where you needed a 1000 troops marching over the hill. all kinds of things when it suddenly opened

up. but you couldn't touch 10 years earlier. and so that was exciting. and we thought progress, you know, every 6 months or so we come up with a new step. we go to the next step and we try another thing. and uh, during that period i was producing some films like willow or pushing the envelope. i would just, you know, say why don't we try this? we'll see if we can get this to work. so a lot of it was experimental, but it was fun because i knew that i was freeing up the medium. so you could sort of think of all kinds of projects and all kinds of ideas and, and be open to big epic projects that weren't going to cost a huge amount of money that you could actually, you know, tell those stories the,

it's hard because there's so many great, fantastic movies. you know, when i was in film school, my favorite movies were things like hard days night and dr. strange love and 7 samurai and breathless and a. and you know, if you said today, i wouldn't know what to say is that was when i 1st got in the movies and my range was very small. i only knew a few 1000 movies, but now i knew 800000 books. and i would say at least $10000.00 more were fantastic . and i want to take more i still love to tell stories. i still love cinema. i still love to work in the medium and try to tell stories using the moving image rather than just words. and experiment to figure out how to do that and how to manipulate the images to do what i want them to do. because it's a very fascinating story telling medium that basically is not been exploited yet. i

mean, 1st 100 years of cinema's. very crude and not very interesting as far as i'm concerned . what's gonna happen a 100 years and i was what's going to really be amazing. the

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