George Lucas: The Wizard of ‘Star Wars’
A 1977 interview with George Lucas. I really love it!
“I would feel very good if someday they colonize Mars when I am 93 years old or whatever, and the leader of the first colony says: “I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookiee up here.”
How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.
“Here’s what you should pay attention to: Friendships, honesty, trust, doing the right thing. Living on the light side, avoiding the dark side.”
(George Lucas, SW Celebration 40th Anniversary Panel x)
Ohhhh this is one of my all-time favorite quotes and a very good use of it. Because the white text is a little hard to read on some of the gifs, here’s the whole thing:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
The whole essay is rather appropriate for this moment, actually.
sometimes you fight, not because you think you can win, but because you need to be able to look back later and say, “i fought.”
“In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor
character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely
“First Servant.” All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and
Edmund – have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story
is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such
delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he
understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of
old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it.His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a
moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part:
eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is
the part it would be best to have acted.”– C.S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night”
So Stanford professor Ken Taylor has a whole lecture on this in Hamlet, and the role of defiant resignation (citing Kierkegaard’s concept of resignation) where you are urged to act despite understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, and your belief in what it should be. But Steve demonstrates a lot of this.
When nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do.
Her manner was curiously expressive of a wish for protection and encouragement, a kind of constant appeal which invited sympathy.
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet…