Cinema: Of Myth And Men

A conversation between Bill Moyers and George Lucas on the meaning of the Force and the true theology of Star Wars

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MOYERS: Joseph Campbell once said all the great myths, the ancient great stories, have to be regenerated in every generation. He said that's what you are doing with Star Wars. You are taking these old stories and putting them into the most modern of idioms, the cinema. Are you conscious of doing that? Or are you just setting out to make a good action-movie adventure?

LUCAS: With Star Wars I consciously set about to re-create myths and the classic mythological motifs. I wanted to use those motifs to deal with issues that exist today. The more research I did, the more I realized that the issues are the same ones that existed 3,000 years ago. That we haven't come very far emotionally.

MOYERS: The mesmerizing figure in The Phantom Menace to me is Darth Maul. When I saw him, I thought of Lucifer in Paradise Lost or the devil in Dante's Inferno. He's the Evil Other--but with powerful human traits.

LUCAS: Yes, I was trying to find somebody who could compete with Darth Vader, who is now one of the most famous evil characters. So we went back into representations of evil. Not only the Christian, but also Hindu and other religious icons, as well as the monsters in Greek mythology.

MOYERS: What did you find in all these representations?

LUCAS: A lot of evil characters have horns. [Laughs.]

MOYERS: And does your use of red suggest the flames of hell?

LUCAS: Yes. It's a motif that I've been using with the Emperor and the Emperor's minions. I mean, red is an aggressive color. Evil is aggressive.

MOYERS: Is Darth Maul just a composite of what you found in your research, or are we seeing something from your own imagination and experience?

LUCAS: If you're trying to build an icon of evil, you have to go down into the subconscious of the human race over a period of time and pull out the images that equate to the emotion you are trying to project.

MOYERS: What emotion do you feel when you look at Darth Maul?

LUCAS: Fear. You wouldn't want to meet him in a dark alley. But he's not repulsive. He's something you should be afraid of, without [his] being a monster whose intestines have been ripped out and thrown all over the screen.

MOYERS: Is the emotion you wanted from him different from the emotion you wanted from Darth Vader?

LUCAS: It's essentially the same, just in a different kind of way. Darth Vader was half machine, half man, and that's where he lost a lot of his humanity. He has mechanical legs. He has mechanical arms. He's hooked up to a breathing machine. This one is all human. I wanted him to be an alien, but I wanted him to be human enough that we could identify with him.

MOYERS: He's us?

LUCAS: Yes, he's the evil within us.

MOYERS: Do you know yet what, in a future episode, is going to transform Anakin Skywalker to the dark side?

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