George Lucas breaks down his “Star Wars” mythology for those who still aren’t sure what his story is truly about.
The “Star Wars” creator spoke to Charlie Rose about the empire he’s created and what ultimately inspired him to tell the story. Lucas explained he wanted to make a film that would instill values from mythology for a modern audience in the 1970s.
Lucas explained back in the days of Ancient Greece, poets would visit homes and tell these grandiose stories to make a living. They would adjust their story as they went along to keep their audiences intrigued and the oral tales get passed on from generation to generation.
The most important part for storytellers were to keep the stories interesting in order to get their message across to give people guidance as to what was right and wrong.
“It’s about good and evil, but heroes — what makes a hero, what’s friendship, what’s the idea of sacrificing yourself for something larger?” Lucas told Rose.
“They’re all really basic things, you might say you don’t have to make a movie about that [because] it’s very obvious, but it’s actually not. It’s not that obvious to a lot of people unless you have somebody tell you, every generation, that this is what our country believes in.”
Lucas explained he wanted to be able to do the same by taking these myths and placing them in a futuristic setting.
“With Star Wars, it was the religion — everything was so taken and put into a form that was easy for everybody to accept so it didn’t fall into a contemporary mode where you could argue about it. It went everywhere in the world.” Lucas said.
Watch the “Star Wars” filmmaker’s full interview with Charlie Rose in the video below.
