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Confessions

The Last Picture Show: a conversation with George Lucas

July 2, 2026 · By Andy Hazel

In a rare interview, the Star Wars creator and cinema technology pioneer opens up about what could prove to be his most personal and grandest legacy of all, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art.

On a mild morning in Cannes, not long after receiving an honorary Palme d’Or from Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas is thinking about a patio. “I remember one of the times I was here,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward La Croisette. “I got to sit next to Fellini at the hotel on the patio there. It was a big thrill.” The memory makes him smile, but Lucas, now 81, does not linger in it. His attention moves elsewhere, towards a project that has consumed him for more than a decade and that, unlike any of his films, cannot be revised in post production.

In Los Angeles, in Exposition Park, The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has reached its final stages of construction. A vast, curving structure resembling a sand-blasted spaceship, the director’s colossal institution is a billion dollar wager that the most disposable art of the twentieth century—comic panels, pulp covers, film concept illustrations—belongs at the centre of its culture. “I always thought art is in the eye of the beholder,” Lucas says. “You can’t have people deciding what is and isn’t art.” It is a familiar sentiment, though here it is less as a defence of artistic freedom than as the organising principle that will attempt to make that argument at scale.

The building itself is enormous. Three hundred-thousand square feet, 35 galleries, and a collection that now exceeds 100,000 paintings, illustrations, photographs, and artefacts from cinema history. It has taken years to arrive at this point.

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George Lucas inspecting a model of the Death Star for Star Wars: A New Hope (1977).

Earlier iterations faltered in Chicago and San Francisco, undone by a mix of civic resistance, political pressure, and, at times, Lucas’s own inflexibility. Los Angeles, with its long accommodation of spectacle and patronage, proved more receptive. Yet as the date approaches, a different kind of uncertainty has emerged. In recent months, two of the museum’s senior curators departed abruptly, and Lucas installed himself as lead curator. Their exits have put the focus on how a museum built on a singular vision will accommodate other voices

After all, Lucas’s success, and that of his heroes, relies on an almost ruthless faith in their own judgement. “I’m a stubborn man,” he told the Cannes audience. “I didn’t like people telling me how to make my movies.” The line, delivered as an anecdote, is also an insight into his methods. When Lucas encounters institutional resistance, his response is to invent his way out of it. Faced with studio pressure over Star Wars (1977), he insisted on retaining the merchandising rights to his characters, a decision that reshaped modern filmmaking.

Unable to achieve the visual effects he imagined within existing systems, he founded Industrial Light & Magic. Later, constrained by the limits of analogue editing, he pioneered its digital equivalent. “I didn’t want to run equipment companies,” he says. “I just wanted the equipment.”

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George Lucas directing at Elstree Studios, 1976, London for Star Wars: A New Hope (1976).

Growing up in Modesto, California, a small city he later immortalised in American Graffiti (1973), Lucas wanted to be a racing driver. A near-fatal accident ended that ambition but gave him more time to explore his other passions, photography and the study of other cultures. Modesto was an agricultural town with two movie theatres, one for A films, one for B films.

“B films were all the Roger Corman films cheap films,” Lucas recalls. “Once I could drive, I could sneak into San Francisco and see films that were very different, like Fellini’s. Sometimes these films were seriously experimental, and I liked that. I said, ‘This is great. I can do this.’” Before he considered filmmaking, Lucas thought he might become an anthropologist, a student of how societies organise meaning. The museum, in this sense, returns him to that earlier fascination, albeit with different tools.

“What I found I was really interested in,” he says, “is making movies about primitive societies.” To do this, Lucas moved to Los Angeles to study at the University of Southern California, not far from where his museum will stand. Los Angeles is also where Lucas began buying the first pieces that he will soon share with the public. “When I was in college, I started collecting what I could afford, which was comic...