George Lucas claims, in an uncovered 1969 interview, that he had no idea what a filmmaker was until he was studying in college.
That interview clip was shown in episode 2 of the Disney Plus series Light & Magic, accompanied by Lucas now explaining that he decided to go to college after having a major argument with his parents about his future. His mother even told he would never amount to anything. They wanted him to run the family’s office supply store (is that really amounting to something, anyway?) but Lucas hated staplers (just kidding!). Actually, he says had no desire to dedicate his life to “doing the same thing over and over.”
So, he enrolled at Modesto Community College in California and took classes in social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and other subjects.
Interestingly, that’s where much of his love for mythology was born that would later inspire Star Wars.
“One of the books I had to read was The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” Lucas discusses in the episode, “and I got very intrigued with the idea of how you build a society. It was all done by stories, mythology, heroes.”
Mythology wasn’t the only thing college introduced to George Lucas; filmmaking, something he apparently had no knowledge of, began to take over his mind and ultimately led him to transfer to the University of Southern California on the suggestion of a friend, because the university had its own academic film division, known as USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Lucas claims, “It wasn’t until my junior year in college that I discovered film. Ended up at USC. I instantly knew that this was for me. This was it.”
Suddenly, Lucas had found his passion and ran with it. He says that he could only think about filmmaking as it basically took over his life.
The episode then shows an interview clip from 1969 of 25-year old George Lucas saying, “I didn’t know what a filmmaker was. I didn’t know what a producer was or a director or anything.”
He adds that once he discovered it that he knew he wanted to live it. “All I knew was that I wanted to make film and whatever that entails.”
Present-day George Lucas added to his old comments about USC by saying, “My first semester there, I started making student films and it took the cinema department by storm.”
Of course, Lucas made the short film THX 1138 which was later turned into a feature film. He would soon make American Graffiti, which helped him in his contract negotiations for a new space opera film.
Now, Star Wars fans everywhere can be grateful that Lucas had no love for staplers.