But, you know, it turned out extremely well and what I envisioned. I mean, it was mostly done, so it wasn’t like they had to put up a whole bunch of money to finish it. And so I just did it and hoped that Kathy and everybody who has been working on the film and everything would follow through and Disney would put up the money to finish it. I want to retire now.’ Time is more important to me than money. But I said, ‘Well, I still want to retire. It’s a project that I’ve been doing for a long time and then when it came to sell the company, I realized it wasn’t really finished. I had a little group of guys and girls working on this thing. I’d go out and shoot and this would be put on the shelf for a while. I was directing Star Wars while I was doing these. So I said, ‘Well, maybe I could do one like this but is slightly more female-centric.’ It’s really a story that hopefully will work for everybody, but it was really something I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll do this.’ And I just wanted to have fun. The 12-year-old boy one worked for everybody from eight months to 88, boys, girls, dogs, whatever, it really worked. Star Wars was for 12-year-old boys, I figured I'd make one for 12-year-old girls. LUCAS: Well, originally I had two daughters, I ended up with another daughter. ANIMATIONS MAGIC MOVIEThe three-hour Strange Magic, you know, we can’t do it.Ĭould you expand on why you turned down directing another Star Wars movie to work on what’s been described as a passion project? For instance, it’s like the three-hour American Graffiti. ‘What you were doing in 15 minutes, we can now do in 2 minutes and we’ve gotta get this down from …’ My biggest problem in life, or any filmmaker really, is the film comes out way too long. Originally I wanted it to all be music, like an opera, no talking, and when we got to that phase, everybody sort of beat on me really hard and said that's not gonna work. It just would not stop and it was very hard to make it actually connect. And obviously when I went through it, I had a gazillion songs and I narrowed it down, narrowed it down with the story and then over the years we narrowed it down, narrowed it down and then when we started actually doing storyboards and putting things in and Steve and Marius came on, we recorded a lot of music that's not in the movie because we would pull one song out, then we had to pull another song out. It was more like a Rubik's Cube than a jigsaw puzzle. Was it challenging to find the right songs to match the story, like a jigsaw puzzle? But it’s really something that says, ‘Hey, kids need to be told this every generation so that they understand that that’s really the way it works,’ and with a little, slight 60s, 70s twist, which is, you know, true love and happiness really is not with the pretty boy. In that case, it’s much more like Star Wars, instead of mythology, it's based on fairy tales, whether it’s as simple as The Ugly Duckling. It’s for young kids to say, ‘Hey, let’s just get beyond the cover of the book.’ And again, it's a story that's been told over and over again. If you fall in love with a football star, that’s not gonna last. If you fall in love with a boy band, that’s not gonna last. What the person looks like will not, and that’s the point. It’s somebody you have a common ground with, you share the same values, you share the same interests, you share the same humor, you share all those things that are things that will last you the rest of your life. LUCAS: It was simply a matter of, the story is about the difference between infatuation and real love, and real love is on the inside. And then it was the last five years where Gary, Marius, Steve and all the other guys came in and we started casting and putting actors to the thing, but the driving force was, can the lyrics tell the story? And obviously what the story was, it was determined by, ‘Well, this is a scene between the Bog King and Marianne.’ And then it was, Marius said, ‘Well, let’s do this as a duet.’ He mushed the whole thing together so it would work. So, the first 10 years were spent developing the characters and trying to get the animation to do what we actually wanted it to do and take it to the next step, and also trying to weave all this stuff together. ANIMATIONS MAGIC ARCHIVEGEORGE LUCAS: Well, it’s from the same collection, archive I should say, and then the issue ultimately really has to do with the fact that what I wanted to try to do was tell a story using the lyrics from existing songs. Can you talk about that and if the film has a connection to some of the things you thought about for American Graffiti?
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