George Lucas Quotes

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Criticism is okay from people who know the finer points of cinema.

I mean, certainly it's the single biggest event, I think, in terms of popular entertainment, or art even, if you say that, of the 20th Century. It's been film. It's the 20th Century's real art form.

I'm a huge Robert Altman fan and don't take issue with his filmmaking, as eccentric as it is. But I just think 'Nashville' was a world he didn't know.

When I first read 'Lord of the Rings,' I wanted to see a film of it. But at that time, the technology wasn't there; there was no such thing as CGI.

When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980.

I didn't realize there are generations who do not know about the origins of film.

Cinema is arguably the 20th century's most influential art form.

I am obsessed with cinema and its history.

I know that 'Tangerine' is getting a lot of attention for pushing the iFilm, but I am really mourning the death of celluloid.

It's very hard for me to go to the movies because I know all the tricks, and I know everybody. I don't watch many at all. And the ones I do watch are generally much older films.

I'm actually very critical of digital cinema.

The first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. That was sort of all technology.

I always try to stay objective, and to remove myself from the process and look at the film again.

I'm not looking for is the audience going to like it [the film during the first screening] or not. I want to hear somebody try to poke a hole in it. I want to hear why they saw the logic was flawed or why that scene was not believable.

If filmmakers are ignorant of the past, they laborto re-invent the wheel in every picture. You sit and think, 'Well,we're back to 1903 here.'

I think in the '80s, when I started making films, we were all suspicious of these technologies. We were all convinced they would filter out any emotion and sense of intimacy, and the films I made during that period reflected that. In fact, what has happened is the opposite. I think we're saturated with a degree of intimacy we would never have expected, and we're trying to sort through this idea of complete access to each other's lives on an ongoing basis. Our emotions aren't filtered out at all. They're actually accelerated.

Steven Spielberg makes Minority Report with the newest digital technology; other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it.

I always have directors who are somewhat frustrated because they'll reference a beautifully obscure film from the '50s or '60s or '70s, and I've not seen it.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

I am trying to remember that things have certainly been crazier in human history and they may get crazier here and now, and [here I am trying to be optimistic] it's even a good thing, to be going through all of this, if only to be reminded that history hasn't stopped - human existence is as fundamentally unmanageable now as it ever was.

All philosophers make the common mistake of taking contemporary man as their starting point and of trying, through an analysis of him, to[21] reach a conclusion. "Man" involuntarily presents himself to them as an aeterna veritas as a passive element in every hurly-burly, as a fixed standard of things. Yet everything uttered by the philosopher on the subject of man is, in the last resort, nothing more than a piece of testimony concerning man during a very limited period of time.

All of a sudden I found myself doing things like 'Robot Monster' and 'Cat-Women of the Moon,' and I didn't know what the devil was going on. But if you're going to do areally bad movie, at least you do one that is at the top of the all-time bad-movie list.

I think that if Essien Udom had something he didn't take it back far enough in history to get at the proper understanding of it.

Los Angeles is Hollywood and Hollywood is Hollywood Blvd. It's the first thing you want to see. It's the only thing really that you know about as far as Los Angeles is concerned. And so you go and you look at Joan Crawford's hands and feet and the whole history of American filmmaking is encapsulated in that one little area on that one street. That street, to me, has always been the street of dream.