George Lucas awarded the Honorary Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

George Lucas, the 80-year-old filmmaker who created the Star Wars franchise and in the process completely altered the face of pop culture and the movie industry, has just recently received a well-deserved tribute during the 77th Cannes film festival.

Being awarded an Honorary Palme d’Or by his colleague and friend, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola (via Deadline), Lucas walked on stage to a minutes-long standing ovation, after which he sat down to discuss his long career in the movie industry. As it turns out, being in Cannes is a “nostalgic” experience for the creative, as the festival is exactly were he presented his first feature film, THX-1138, back in 1971. Back then the studio (Warner Bros.) didn’t send the director and his co-writer Walter Murch to France, so they gathered up money to go by themselves, but even had to sneak into the screening of their own movie as they couldn’t get tickets.

“We weren’t really that interested in making money, we were interested in making movies,” he said, explaining how he continued to make more and more movies, slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the industry as his films started to make money through residuals off the net gross of his productions. This was something unheard off before, as studios “would keep adding stuff to the budget so it never got paid off, net was almost like fool’s gold. But American Graffiti was making money so fast, I actually made a lot of money off it. It was the first time anybody had ever made money on net.”

The birth of Star Wars, and a world entirely changed

His success lead to a producer at Fox gaining interest in working with him, to the point where they called him to ask if he had any other movies in mind. By then he had already been rejected by the holders of the Flash Gordon comic property for an adaptation, so he already had some ideas. “Well, I’ve got this sort of science fiction fantasy, crazy 1930s-style movie, with dogs driving spaceships,’” he said at the time. “And he said ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want’ … and he hired me and the rest is kind of history”

From its debut, Star Wars became an international phenomenon, raking in millions of dollars for both the studio and Lucas himself thanks to toy and merchandise sales, apart from becoming so incredibly popular that it is almost impossible for anyone to not have at least heard of the franchise. But as always, negative criticism was as common as the love for the series.

The director recalled that the prequel trilogy was hated by the very critics and fans who had been “10 years old when they saw the first one”, calling it childish, movies for kids built only to sell toys. Talking about how poorly received Jar Jar Binks was at the time (and for may years after), he said: “Everybody said the same thing about 3-PO, that he was irritating and we should get rid of him. When I did the third one it was the Ewoks: ‘Those are little teddy bears. This is a kid’s movie, we don’t want to see a kids’ movie. I said: ‘It is a kids’ movie. It’s always been a kids’ movie.”

In the end, Star Wars has evolved not only thanks to George Lucas, but also because the franchise is now under the control of Disney. The creator laments that many elements of the world he created have been changed or lost ever since he sold the company, including many of the original ideas he had for how the Star Wars universe and its mythology was set to work. “But that’s the way it is. You give it up, you give it up.”