Creativeness and creation

1. Genetic Imagination?
2. Things to say
3. The pictorial metaphor
4. Means of creation

You will find in G. Lucas’ interviews some developments relating to his creative process. I have found them particularly interesting, particularly since a parallel can be made between them and other creative people’s.

I. Genetic imagination ?
When one sees the complexity of the Star Wars world, and particularly its extraordinary coherence, one can wonder about the imagination which created them. Where on earth does G. Lucas get all this ?

I don't know where anybody gets their imagination. I think it has a lot to do with genetics, to be very honest with you.¹

Is this some kind of joke ? Or simply the conviction that it just ‘comes up’ ? Anyway this concept derives directly from Lucas’ idea about talent, this natural ability that simply needs to be discovered. Furthermore, the producer will compare himself to competitors whom one will allow to fill in their trolley in a supermarket as much and as quickly as possible.

To me, it's like one of these contests where you get five minutes in a supermarket to take anything off the shelves you want and try to fill your cart up as much as you can. That's the way I look at my work. I have a supermarket full of ideas and the challenge is how many ideas can I get in my cart before I'm gone².

But the ‘spontaneous’ generation of imagination cannot be separated from intellectual work. A thorough documentary research precedes the writing of scripts, and the theme development proceeds step by step, by approximation. This process remains mainly visual.
‘I am more a visual than a verbal person’, says the producer repeatedly.

My struggle is, there's a movie there, I can see it, only I can't see it in order and I can't see it very clearly. You try to look through the fog and suddenly, there is a scene or two and you put it down, and then there's more fog, and pieces aren't always in the right place. Then you begin to realize, "Oh, this piece goes over here, that piece goes over there," and you begin to see it as a whole.(...) If you stay at it long enough, and work at it hard enough, you can actually see the movie. Once I finish the screenplay I can run the movie in my head. I've already "seen" the movie

I find this description of Lucas’ creative work exceptional, because it fits in with others, e.g. in music. I read a totally parallel text both with Mozart and Beethoven, relating to the global audition of the work, before its completion. It is an exceptional phenomenon, where creators recognise each other. With, later on, the same reluctance when confronted with their creation.

The difficulty is, the real movie doesn't end up as good as the movie in your head. There's a lot of frustration about the compromises you have to make, or things that didn't turn out the way they were supposed to turn out. You have to live with a lot of that, and you have to learn. Even in writing you have to learn that once you start writing something, the characters begin to talk back to you.

This is nothing compared to problems linked to the direction, either a credit limitation, an actor’s bad mood, an unexpected storm :

I think a lot of making movies is your ability to adapt instantaneously to overcome certain challenges that you face every morning when you go to work.

II. Things to say

I think film being exciting is something that's just a personal thing for me. It's extremely hard work. And it's not very glamorous, and it ultimately is simply a way of expressing ideas. For me, I think, the excitement is the fact that I found a way of telling the story as I want to tell it, in a medium that I could master.

Lucas expresses repeatedly his initial difficulty to write, his reluctance even. Francis Coppola will impose the burden of writing scripts on him ; a heavy-going but necessary burden, unavoidable even, he admits later.

In order to direct, you have to write. And it's very helpful, because the whole core of the idea of making a movie starts with the script, and starts with the idea. If you can do that, you are your own studio. Nobody can stop you, because all you need is a pencil and a tablet, or a laptop, or whatever, and you're on your way. And you can just create. (...) Over the years, I've learned to like the entire process. Now most of my time is spent writing, and very little of my time is spent doing anything else.

Finally, let’s note that, for Lucas, film writing generates an ethical requirement.

Some of us are in occupations and professions that allow us to have louder voices than other people. And therefore we should be doubly aware of what we're saying because it does influence people, and it's especially true of the media as much as it is of the entertainment business. But I think for every single human being you've got to be aware that you are teaching somebody something. Not necessarily about what you're saying, but by the way you conduct your life.³

III. Pictorial metaphor

Picture metaphor is a frequent example with Lucas, both to express his creative process and also to justify the options he has taken. This is too recurrent to be meaningless
For someone who presents himself above all as a ‘camera/editing/visual’ person, all artistic creations rely on technology : the most basic of which is probably the paper-and-pencil, which mainly serves the writer, but you can also mention the brush-and-pencil for the painter.

The movie business, I mean, the act of creating in the art form of movies, the craft of movies, is completely technical, and that's all it is -- as opposed to writing a book or something, which is only partially technical. (...) In the first movies, they just put up a camera and had a train come into a train station, and everybody was amazed. And that was technology. Just "Look at the technology!" But as it grew, it grew into more of an art form, much more sophisticated than that.
And what we've been doing ever since then, whether we add sound, or whether we add color, or whether we use digital technology, is simply a way of broadening the canvas.⁴

This colour theme, as connected to painting, has often been exploited.

A lot of painters in the past were very adept at mixing colors, and coming up with new colors, so they could express things in new ways. Michelangelo, for example. The technology of brushes, and all those things, were very important to how they applied their craft. It's the same thing in movies

Therefore, the digital revolution simply allows to go beyond, it frees imagination.

We are moving into a different era in terms of cinematic experience. I liken it more to move from painting frescos in the mid-15th century -when you had to finish that piece of plaster that day otherwise you couldn't go on. Now we've moved into the era of oil paintings, wich gave the artist more control and more time to think about what they're doing^5.

Lucas compares himself to a painter, working slowly, adding layer by layer onto his canvas. Digitisation frees the artist in an extreme way. This is how, in the ‘Phantom Menace’, he was able, until the very last minute, to adjust angles of view, modify elements, change the place of actors. And, particularly, to let his imagination speak freely.

This is the one time I was able to sit down and basically let my imagination run wild and not be hampered by, oh I can't do this, I can't do that, I can't go to Coruscant, I'll never be able to do the buildings, I can't do a pod race because that's impossible. I dreamed up whatever I wanted, and I was, for the most part, able to pull it all off.⁶

IV. Means of creation

This liberation literally fills Lucas with enthusiasm.

On several occasions, indeed, he complained about the frustration caused by the limitation of means, during the shooting of the Trilogy. The film never really corresponded to his expectations, and remained imperfect. The realisation of this discrepancy between the foreseen film and its direction is the main reason to explain the long hiatus between the Star Wars films and their prequels. Lucas was prisoner of his perfectionism and his inflexibility, which one can compare to the painters who go through a more or less long period of fruitlessness, because the means to express their art no longer correspond to their need to express themselves.

This more or less voluntary interruption enabled him to conceive the tools which would allow him to express himself in a much more creative way. Firstly, with his firms. They are not a means in themselves, but they have become the condition for cinematographic creation, as conceived by Lucas – financially independent - firstly and most importantly ; but also, and particularly, by using technology which enables as accurate a translation as possible, within a specific medium, of imagination-created visual images ⁷.

Compared with the profusion of images, there is no use criticising the weakness of the scenario. Images constitute Lucas’ creative process, as the extracts mentioned above will obviously show. From the moment he finds the correspondence between the ‘dreamt’ film, or more exactly ‘mentally conceived’, and its concrete plastic conception, he believes he has reached his goal.

Critics who reveal the digital ‘overuse’, emphasise the special effects, wonder about their creation, stop at the technicalities, and finally remain (and this is perhaps the role of critics, after all) out of the work. To come back to the picture metaphor : it finds itself in the position of an art historian who, with his analytical tools, focuses on the structure of the work and misses its essence – i.e. its contemplation.