I was lucky enough to be able to go to San Francisco on Sunday night for a screening of Star Wars: Clone Wars. On Monday, Warner Bros. took us out to George Lucas’ Big Rock Ranch for an interview with Lucas himself, along with director Dave Filoni and producer Catherine Winder. However, it pretty much turned into The George Lucas Show, and given his newfound love affair with television, that might actually become a reality. As long as it doesn’t become a reality show, I’d be okay with it. Some highlights from the interview include:

• Is there an entertainment industry inside the Star Wars universe?
• Why The Clone Wars, why now, and why make it animated?
• More about the live-action Star Wars television show they’re working on.
• Why George might only work in television from now on.
• Some skinny on the next Indiana Jones movie.

Read the full interview after the break.

So what do people do for fun in Star Wars? I know we’ve seen that pod race, but do they watch movies, play video games, and have Internet?

Well, they like pod races. They like gambling. They like card games. They go out and shoot at wamp rats in the canyons with their local… tractors. There is an entertainment industry, but you won’t find that out until you get to the live action show in a few years. I mean there is an entertainment - I mean, they go to the opera.

The Star Wars saga always been steeped in mythology and Jungian archetypes. What sort of mythological territory the Clone Wars series and the live action series will eventually travel to?

Well, the mythological arch of the saga doesn’t really continue into these other things, because that is a story. It has a beginning, middle and an end. It’s the story of one man’s struggle against evil and redemption by his son and that sort of thing.

So, this is more like episodic. It’s more like Indiana Jones actually. You have themes and things still go through, and there are issues like that. But, it’s not what it’s based on. It’s bigger… we get to go more places.

And the fun part about animation especially and The Clone Wars in particular is that we’re allowed to go and do stories about clones. We get to know them, and find out what they do for recreation. And what Jabba the Hutt’s family is all about. And do all kinds of things that don’t have anything to do with the main character.

The film itself, the series itself, and the epic is basically about one man, so it’s very, very narrow. And you pass through a lot of things, and you look, “What’s that over there?” But, you never get to look. So, this allows us to go look at all that stuff, because we’re no encumbered by this mythological uber-story of the physiological underpinnings of why somebody turns to be a bad person.

Why an animated movie now? Can you talk about the stylized look of the characters themselves? Why did you choose to go with the styled characters as opposed to making them look realistic/photorealistic?

Photorealistic is what live action moves are. Animation is an art. This is an art philosophical discussion. You either like photorealistic art that looks exactly like a photograph - and you like to hang out in the Museum of Modern Art - or you like something that actually tries to find the truth behind the realism.

And to me, animation is an art. It’s all about design. It’s all about style. It’s not about making it look photo real. I’ve been making photo real movies all my life. They have a lot of animation in them, but they’re still photo real. And that’s not what animation is. Animation is something else entirely. It’s a completely different medium. So, that’s why we didn’t do it photo real. When we did Revenge of the Sith, I lamented the fact that I had to jump over the Clone Wars. I jumped over the Clone Wars because it had nothing to do with Anakin Skywalker. He’s just another player; it’s not about him. We had a very narrow focus on talking about him personally. And so I couldn’t do that.

But, the other part of “why now”…? Basically, I started out in animation. I studied animation when I was in college, and produced and worked with a lot of, hung out with a lot of animated films and stuff in my career. And I’ve always been interested in it.

I said, “It’s just too bad, because it’s great … I mean it’s like World War II. It’s a huge canvas there to be mined.” So we decided we would do a little five minute animation series for Cartoon Network using anime, manga and those kinds of ideas that I’ve always wanted to work in. And we hired a really great director, Genndy Tartakovsky, to do it for us. But, that sort of got me going to say, “You know, we could do a really regular TV show - a big one. A half hour show and it could really be great. It could use all the new techniques we’ve developed in CG animation and that sort of thing.”

And I said, “When I finish Star Wars, I’m going to start this, and I’m going to do it.” And so that’s basically what happened. I got to fill in a blank, and go around in a universe that is not restricted and therefore not quite as dark. We can have a lot more fun with it. We can enjoy it. It’s a little more lighthearted. We ended up doing a TV series. When the first few shots came back and I looked at them on the big screen, I said, “This is fantastic. This is better than we ever imagined it would be.” And, “This is so good it could be a feature.” So I said, “Why don’t we make a feature?”

We have Ahsoka, one of our main new characters, and I said, “Why don’t we make a feature that introduces her, that actually introduces one of the main characters from the television show?” So we did that, but it’s purely something I wanted to do in terms of exploring animation - doing something I enjoy doing.

I’ve sort of moved from features to television. Again, I’m in this position where if we’re doing something, even as television, that turns out to be good enough to be a feature, then we just switch it over. We don’t have a business plan where things are pegged to do one thing or another. And so, a lot of the techniques and things that we used, because we want to make the best television series that’s ever been created, and it ended up being good enough to be a movie. I’ve got about maybe 50 projects in here. And I have to sort of say, “Well which one works now?” And it makes sense for me to do these TV things. I love television; it’s a lot more fun than giant movie productions.

Did you feel, with this film, that you had to give yourself a bigger challenge than maybe previous works you’ve done in the Star Wars genre in the live action?

It’s challenging. Art is a technological medium. All art is, and so a lot of it has to do with engineering and trying to figure out how to create what you imagine. It’s also a medium that is dictated primarily by the amount of resources you have available to you. If you’re a Pharaoh you can build pyramids. If you’re a shaman, you really only have a few pieces of chalk and a wall in a cave. You have to work within that.

Probably the most daunting thing we were trying to do, because we wanted to really push the limits of what started out as a TV show that was really beyond anything you’ve ever seen on television. To take feature animation, which costs 20, 30 times what TV animation costs, and do that for television? Do something that actually looked like feature animation for television. That was a challenge.

Given enough time and money, anybody can create anything. But, given a very, very, very restricted budget and very, very restricted resources it’s a challenge. So, we had to build studios. And we had to build a studio from scratch, train people from scratch, the artists, develop new techniques. We did not make this in the normal way you make an animated feature. I took my Padawan here [director Dave Filoni] and said, “We’re not doing that anymore.” Now you’re entering the world of live action features, and we’re going to treat this like a live action feature. We’re going to rely on editing rather than storyboarding. And there are a lot of techniques we used that completely shifted the paradigm.

And it makes a different kind of animated film that relies more on cutting and editing than it does on storyboards. And longer shots, and that sort of thing. So, it was a challenge, and we still have a challenge. I mean, everybody wants to go to what they know and to change is really hard. And to create something from scratch with new technologies is really hard.

You know, we’re trying to do the same thing to live action. We’re trying to do a live action TV show. This was a test for that. If we can do something that will stand up to a feature… and we did. I put it up on the screen and said, “This is a feature.” I said, “We did it, in spades.” Much better than we thought it would happen. And so, now I’m trying to take Star Wars, which is a $50 million an hour adventure, and do it for like $2 million an hour. That’s a trip. That’s a hard thing to do and have it look the same.

Some of the actors who appeared in the live action Star Wars movies such as Samuel L. Jackson reprise their roles in Clone Wars. Why weren’t some of the other primary actors who were in the movies in this film?

Well, we do it all over, all the time. We need people available every week, and you can’t really afford multi-million dollar actors to do a television series. A television series is… The license fee on the average television series is about $200,000. It’s nothing. Those guys make more during their coffee break.

So when we decided to do the feature, when I said, “Hey, this is great. Let’s do a feature, “then we went back to the actors and we said… OK, we told them we were doing the TV series, just as a courtesy. But, then we said, “Look, we’re doing a feature. Would you like to do to the voice in the feature?” And some of them said, “Yes”. Some of them were off doing features. This was all done, again, fairly rapidly. It wasn’t like we said, “OK, next June we’re going to do this.” Its like, “Could you come in a month, in four weeks and do this? They’re more like “We have two days.” Some of them were all over the world. And some of them said, “Yeah, OK. Great. I’ll come in and do it.” And some of them couldn’t.

It used to be in animation you’d just had actors play the parts. The secret is a lot of people, especially in television animation, didn’t hire really great actors. And even in features they didn’t. So, the idea of hiring a really good actor, Tom Hanks to play the thing, was a really revolutionary idea. It was mostly Jeff Katzenberg who said, “We need really top actors.” Well, there are a lot of top actors who aren’t movie stars. Partly they did it because they are great actors. Partly they did it because they wanted to use them for publicity, so they could sit up here and talk to you.

And to be very honest with you, as much as I love you guys, I don’t think I need to hire an actor, a big movie star, to go and publicize my movie. If the movie works, and you like it and you love it, that’s fine. But, I don’t need Angelina Jolie here to have you guys come and say, “I’m only going to this press conference because Angelina’s going to be there, and I want to get her autograph.” That’s what it comes down to in the end, and that’s what they do. They simply use them. They have two days in the studio or three days in the studio, and then they have two weeks doing press. So, they’re mainly paid for the press stuff. They’re not really paid for doing the movie. I’m sure I’m going to hear from Jeff about that.

Can you talk about the inspiration behind Ahsoka and Ventress? It’s really great to see them both in there.

Ahsoka was primarily… I wanted to develop a character that would help Anakin settle down, because at the end of Episode Two he’s kind of a wild child, and he and Obi-Wan don’t get along. So, the idea was to see how they become friends, how they become partners, how they become a team.

One of the ways to do that… because when you become a parent, when you become a teacher, you have to become sort of more responsible. It sort of forces you into this adulthood thing. And so what I wanted to do is take Anakin and force him into this kind of, “Now I have to teach somebody.” And, “Now I have to be slightly more responsible.” So it was that juxtaposition.

I happen to have a couple daughters, so I have a lot of experience with that particular situation. And I just said, “Rather than making it another guy, why don’t we make her a girl,” because that’s fun and I have a lot of girls. They’re just as hard to deal with as teenagers as boys are.

Can you tell us about the prospect for another Indiana Jones film, given the success of the current film?

That’s one of those things that sits on the shelf there as one of 50 projects that I have to deal with. And if I can come up with a story… it’s very hard to come up with a story, too, I think. It’s really impossible. It has to be real; it has to be something that actually happened that people know about. And it has to be supernatural. It’s a really difficult research project, which we’re researching now. I mean, it took us 14 years to come up with the last film.