I was a terrible student in high school, and the thing that the auto accident did — and it happened just as I graduated, so I was at this sort of crossroads — but it made me apply myself more, because I realized more than anything else what a thin thread we hang on in life, and I really wanted to make something out of my life. And I was in an accident that, in theory, no one could survive. So it was like, “Well, I’m here, and every day now is an extra day. I’ve been given an extra day, so I’ve got to make the most of it.” And then the next day I began with two extra days. And I’ve sort of — you can’t help in that situation but get into a mindset like that, which is you’ve been given this gift and every single day is a gift, and I wanted to make the most of it. Before, when I was in high school, I just sort of wandered around. I wanted to be a car mechanic, and I wanted to race cars, and the idea of trying to make something out of my life wasn’t really a priority. But the accident allowed me to apply myself at school. I got great grades. Eventually I got very excited about anthropology and about social sciences and psychology, and I was able to push my photography even further and eventually discovered film and film schools.

I decided to go to film school because I loved the idea of making films. I loved photography and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, unless you were related to somebody there was no way in. So everybody was thinking I was silly. “You’re never going to get a job.” But I wasn’t moved by that. I set the goal of getting through film school, and just then focused on getting to that level because I didn’t — you know, I didn’t know where I was going to go after that. I wanted to make documentary films, and eventually I got into the goal of — once I got to school — of making a film. One of the most telling things about film school is you’ve got a lot of students, in those days especially, it’s not quite so much today, but — wandering around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie.” You know, “I can’t get in this class. I can’t get any this or that.” The first class I had was an animation class. It wasn’t a production class. I had a history class and an animation class. And, in the animation class they gave us one minute of film to put onto the animation camera to operate it, to see how you could move left, move right, make it go up and down. It was a test. You had certain requirements that you had to do. You had to make it go up and had to make it go down, and then the teacher would look at it and say, “Oh yes, you maneuvered this machine to do these things.” I took that one minute of film and made it into a movie, and it was a movie that won like, you know, 20 or 25 awards in every film festival in the world and kind of changed the whole animation department. Meanwhile all the other guys were going around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I was in a production class.” So then I got into another class, and it wasn’t really a production class, but I managed to get some film and I made a movie. And, I made lots of movies while in school while everybody else was running around saying, “Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish they’d give me some film.”

(George Lucas directed his first film while a 21-year-old student at USC film school in 1965. Look at Life, shot on 16-mm film, won awards for its innovative photo montage.)

George Lucas: I had a very, very difficult time with my first two pictures. And when I started working on Star Wars, my second film, American Graffiti had not come out yet. So, in the beginning it wasn’t something anybody was interested in, and I had taken it to a couple of studios, and they had turned it down. And then one studio executive saw American Graffiti and loved it, and I took him the proposal. He said, “You know, I don’t understand this, but I think you’re a great filmmaker, and I’m going to invest in you. I’m not going to invest in this project.” And that’s really how it got made.

I came from a very avant-garde documentary kind of filmmaking world. I like cinema verité, documentaries. I liked non-story, non-character tone poems that were being done in San Francisco at that time. And that’s the filmmaking that I was interested in. Francis Coppola, who was my mentor, sort of — he’s a writer and works with actors — stage director — and he said, “You’ve gotta learn how to do this.” And so I took him up on the challenge and wrote my own screenplays, learned to write and work with actors.

American Graffiti was really my first attempt at doing something mainstream, so to speak, and even it was so — one, it was in a genre that was looked down upon but I loved when I was a kid. It was about my life as I grew up, so I cared about it a lot. And then on top of it, it was in a style that was different from what everybody was used to. It was intercutting four stories that didn’t relate to each other, which nobody had really done before. Now it’s sort of the standard fare for television. And it had music all the way through it; not just the score but actual songs from the period, and that is something that nobody had done before. And they just sort of described it as a musical montage with no characters and no story, and so it was very, very hard to get that off the ground, and on top of that it was a B movie. I almost got it set up at American International Pictures, where they liked doing those kinds of movies but it was too strange for them in terms of the style. And Star Wars was kind of the same situation where it was a genre they weren’t that interested in. Science fiction was not something that did well at the box office. It dealt with robots and Wookies and things that — generally most people — they couldn’t read it and say, “I understand what this is all about.” They just were completely confused by it. And really on top of that, it was aimed at being a film for young people, and most of the studios said, “Look, that’s Disney’s. Disney does that. The rest of us can’t do that, so we don’t want to get into that area.” So I had so many strikes against me when I did that. I was lucky that I found a studio executive that just believed in me as a filmmaker and just disregarded the material itself.

I was working with an editor I hadn’t worked with before — I started out as an editor — I was working with a British editor and the scenes would come back, and I’d go on the weekends and look at the scenes with the editor, and they just weren’t working. And I was very down about the whole situation. So I went in myself on Sundays and started re-cutting the movie. The editing wasn’t obviously bad but it just wasn’t working. I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on. I mean it was either I was doing a terrible job directing this thing, or something else. As I started to cut the film together, I realized that I was making cuts that were, you know, a foot away from where the editor had been making them. And I had been using the same takes that I’d given him, but I was just slightly moving it ever so slightly in one direction, and it suddenly clicked and it started working, which was a great relief to me because up to that point I was feeling very desperate about the whole situation.

When I was doing American Graffiti I was still struggling with my “I don’t want to be a writer” syndrome. I had some good friends of mine that I wanted to write the screenplay, but it took me like two years just to get the money to do a screenplay. And I got a little tiny amount of money and — which I had to go actually to the Cannes Film Festival to get on my own. So finally I got this money. I called back and I said, you know, “I got the money. We can start working on the screenplay.” And they said, “Oh, we don’t want to do that now. We’ve got our own low-budget picture off the ground and we can’t write it.” I said, “Oh no.” I said, “What am I going to do? I am in Europe and I’m not going to be back for like three months and I want to get this thing off the ground.” So they recommended another student from school that I knew pretty well. I had a story treatment that laid out the entire story scene by scene, so I called him over the phone from London and I said, “Do you want to do this?” And he said, “Okay.” The person I was working with at that time as a producer made a deal with him for the whole money because there wasn’t very much. It was so tiny that he could only get him to do it for the whole amount of money. When I came back from England, the screenplay was a completely different screenplay from the story treatment. It was more like Hot Rods to Hell. It was very fantasy-like, with playing chicken and things that kids didn’t really do. I wanted something that was more like the way I grew up. So I took that and I said, “Okay. Now here I am. I’ve got a deal to turn in a screenplay. I’ve got a screenplay that is just not the kind of screenplay I want at all and I have no money.” And, I spent the very last money I had saved up to go to Europe to make the deal, so I had nothing. That was a very dark period for me so I sat down myself and wrote the screenplay.

I kept getting phone calls from producers saying, “I hear you’re great.” I had made a film called THX, which had no story and no character really. It was kind of an avant-garde film. And so I had all these producers calling me saying, “I hear you’re really good at material that doesn’t have a story. I’ve got a record album I want you to make into a movie.” Things like that. And they were offering me a lot of money and — but they were terrible projects. And so I had to constantly turn down vast sums of money while I was starving, writing a screenplay for free that I didn’t like to write because I hated writing. But, I did finish it. I did write the screenplay and eventually I got a deal to make the movie. And then after I finally got that, then my friends came back in and did a rewrite on it, but it was a very dark period, and I could have very easily just taken the money and gone off and done one of these really terrible movies. I don’t know what that would have done for my career, but you know, when the times are hard like that you simply have to say, “This is what I want to do. I want to make my movie. I don’t want to take the money.” And you just walk forward, step by step and get through it somehow. And I got through. It actually only took me about three weeks to write that script. I just every day would sit down at eight o’clock in the morning and I’d write until about eight o’clock at night. And I just said, “I’m going to finish this, as painful as it is, and I’m going to ignore these phone calls of lure of riches and get through this.” And somehow I did it.