Of course, digital effects technology can be very cumbersome as well. When did the technology become streamlined enough for you to see that the future of filmmaking was ultimately digital?
Lucas: When I went into the [Young Indiana Jones] TV series. On the [feature] film end, it just cost so much to do everything, because film has about seven times more resolution [than video], which brings it up to roughly 10 times the cost. But on the TV series, I was able to work in a much lower-res medium; we were able to move things around much more quickly and cheaply, so I could use [digital technology] more often. I said 'I want to be able to do a couple hundred shots in every hour-long episode and still have a budget that's under $50,000.' I wanted to be able to play with this stuff and see how it worked. In the end, we made 22 'feature films' in the space of five years, and we experimented with all kinds of things. Some things worked, some didn't. We learned a lot in the process, and that's what I'm using now. The TV show was really a testbed for the Star Wars Special Edition.
At the same time, with ILM we were pushing digital animation, which really reached its culmination with Jurassic Park. That was when we sort of jumped the fence and said, 'My God, we can do this.' And since then, the issue of digital animation and creating characters and being able to manipulate and move things has completely changed the way we think about film. It's just a completely different medium than it was before, and that's very liberating; it's a better, more efficient way of using the resources.
So now your technological revolution has made the prospect of directing attractive to you again.
Lucas: Yes. One of the things that disturbed me before in directing was the level of compromise you had to cope with to get what you wanted. I guess that's the impetus for me going back and finally fixing the original Star Wars films. Twenty years later, I'm still bugged by the things I couldn't do or couldn't get right, and now I can fix them. I was able to go through and do things I wanted to do back then, but wasn't able to because of time, money and technology. Smoothing them over and making them more effective, more of what I originally envisioned, has been a very satisfying experience; another reason I've done it is that I knew I wouldn't have to put up with the same level of compromise that I did before. That's bothered me to this day, but now I can go through and enhance everything to a level that I just couldn't achieve before. Now it's all just part of the post process.
It's remarkable that your love of editing and your longtime commitment to computer technology have begun to streamline filmmaking, and all of its separate tools, into one tool.
Lucas: Even though I started out mostly in photography, editing has been my life. Over the years, I've torn many sprockets; chipped my nails trying to peel Scotch tape off of film; and spent hours looking for a trim I knew was at the bottom of the bin. But eventually I got tired of wasting time; I wanted to be able to cut to the chase much quicker. I wanted to be able to manipulate things endlessly without having to say, 'I'd like to make this change, but God, what a mess it's going to make, so let's just forget it and leave it the way it is.' I hated that kind of compromise. I was always very frustrated that I couldn't deal with the ideas, see what I was doing and then make a creative decision, rather than just moving on. There was so much stuff in between—like keeping everything in sync, which to me was like clerical work. So I had a big impetus to [develop]—a non-linear editing and integrated post system, which we're just starting to get to with the new Avid Droid and the new Audiovision combo. We'll end up with complete digital post, which is where we need to be.
Film used to be the stringing together of images—photographs—and editing was just rearranging the photographs on a board. But non-linear editing to me also means non-sequential filmmaking, and I'm very pro on that issue. When I started out, I thought I was going to end up being a cinema verite¢ cameraman and an editor. I was used to going out and shooting a lot of material, coming back into the editing room and then figuring out what I was going to do with it, working within the constraints that I had. When I went out to shoot, I knew I had to capture as many moments as I possibly could, and then turn them into a film that worked by using whatever stylistic devices I could. I think everybody struggles with what happens when they actually get into [the editing room] and try to make a movie out of what they've shot.
Before, once you photographed something, you were pretty much stuck with it. Now, it's more like painting. You can have complete control over it just like an artist does, and that to me is the way it should be. It's so much more liberating in terms of changing things in the frame. It's not just moving frames around; you can actually change each frame to give it more unity, more clarity, and more symmetry.
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