The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [62]
Or ‘The Crimson Pirate’ with Burt Lancaster or ‘The Magnificent Seven.’
Yeah, but there aren’t any. There’s nothing but cop movies, and a few films like Planet of the Apes, Ray Harryhausen films, but there isn’t anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in the culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing, because I had also done a study on, I don’t know what you call it, I call it the fairy tale or the myth. It is a children’s story in history and you go back to the Odyssey or the stories that are told for the kid in all of us. I can see the little kids sitting there and just being enthralled with Ulysses. Plus the myths which existed in high adventure, and an exotic far-off land which was always that place over the hill, Camelot, Robin Hood, Treasure Island. That sort of stuff that is always big adventure out there somewhere. It came all the way down through the western.
The western?
I saw the western die. We hardly knew what happened, one day we turned around and there weren’t any westerns anymore. John Ford grew up with the West, the very toe end of the West, but he was out there where there were cowboys and shootings in the streets, and that was his American Graffiti, I realized; that’s why he was so good at it. A lot of those guys were good at it. They grew up in the Tens and Twenties when the West was for all practical purposes really dying off. But, there was still some rough-and-tumble craziness going on. And the people now, the young directors like me, can’t do it because there isn’t anything like that anymore.
So you do a ‘Star Wars’?
I was a real fan of Flash Gordon and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, “This is a natural.” One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, “Why?” What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts of 2001 and get on the romantic side of it. Nobody is going to colonize Mars because of the technology, they are going to go because they think maybe they will be able—it is the romantic aspect of it.
You firmly establish that at the beginning of ‘Star Wars’ with the words: “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away . . .”
Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space.” I just wanted to forget science. I didn’t want to make a 2001. I wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all the real heroes.
So that was the mainspring of your decision to make ‘Star Wars.’
Right. I had done sociological research on what makes hit films. It is part of the sociological bent in me; I can’t help it.
How do you explain a Wookie to a board of directors?
You can’t, and how do you explain a Wookie to an audience, and how do you get the tone of the film right, so it’s not a silly child’s film, so it’s not playing down to people, but it is still an entertaining movie and doesn’t have a lot of violence and sex and hip new stuff? So it still has a vision to it—a sort of wholesome, honest vision about the way you want the world to be.
What was your actual salary for directing?
I think in the end my actual salary was $100,000, which again was still like half of what everybody else was making.