George Lucas Says He Sold STAR WARS To "White Slavers," Elaborates on His Thoughts About THE FORCE AWAKENS

To say that George Lucas has a complicated relationship with Star Wars would be a massive understatement. The franchise has become so ingrained in every aspect of pop culture that I think sometimes people forget that the entire thing sprang forth from the vision of one man, and while he used the basic formula of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, he did it in a startlingly original way. I love The Empire Strikes Back as much as the next person, but my favorite movie in the series is always going to be the original Star Wars, because it didn't have the benefit of being able to build on to characters and situations that have already been established. It was a totally original vision, and a super ballsy movie to make considering the time period in which it was released.

Lucas recently sat down for a nearly hour-long interview with Charlie Rose that I think is worth watching if you have the time. In it, he (maybe jokingly? maybe not) compares Disney to "white slavers," talks about his intended legacy, tells a story about how he was developing a new Star Wars movie of his own before he sold Lucasfilm, and elaborates a little on his thoughts about The Force Awakens. Check it out below:

In case you can't watch the video, here are some highlights:

After calling all of the previous Star Wars movies his "kids," he says “I sold them to the white slavers that takes these things, and [laughs]" before trailing off and answering a different question.

"They looked at the stories, and they said, 'We want to make something for the fans'....They decided they didn't want to use those stories, they decided they were going to do their own thing....They weren't that keen to have me involved anyway — but if I get in there, I'm just going to cause trouble, because they're not going to do what I want them to do. And I don't have the control to do that anymore, and all I would do is muck everything up. And so I said, 'Okay, I will go my way, and I'll let them go their way.'"

"They wanted to do a retro movie. I don't like that. Every movie I work very hard to make them completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships, make it new."

"I've been fascinated with the true nature of the medium — it's been used more as a recording medium, than as a art form unto itself," Lucas elaborated. "...they call them tone poems — in the beginning in Russia, this was a whole movement of: how do you tell visual stories, basically without dialogue, without all the things you use to tell a story, and you just use the film itself. It's kind of esoteric, it hasn't come much further in one hundred years. I'm going to try and take it into something that is more emotionally powerful than most of the stuff we've done up to this point."

Via: The Playlist