WIRED: You've been working on Star Wars for almost 30 years and now it's finished. Do you feel a sense of release?

LUCAS: Yes. I've enjoyed Star Wars enormously, but it's great to be able to look forward to projects that I've wanted to do for a long time. [See "Life After Darth," issue 13.05.] I get to go back to what I was doing before this big thing happened.

__What are you doing to reconnect with who you are, apart from being the guy who made Star Wars? __

I try to stay in touch with that part of myself, especially when I'm writing. Unfortunately, when I was supposed to be writing Star Wars, I would end up doing more reading and thinking than writing. When you're writing for three or four months, you go places where ordinary human beings wouldn't care to go, unless you were a Tibetan monk. Most writers spend a lot of time trying to avoid that, so you make excuses as to why you should read this or that book. Usually I come up with lots of ideas for films that I really want to do.

None of the films I've done was designed for a mass audience, except for Indiana Jones. Nobody in their right mind thought American Graffiti or Star Wars would work.

But the second trilogy certainly had a built-in audience.

Yeah, everyone says the second trilogy was a slam dunk. But there was a lot of controversy around here about the fact that I wasn't doing the obvious – I wasn't doing the commercial version of what people expected. People expected Episode III, which is where Anakin turns into Darth Vader, to be Episode I. And then they expected Episodes II and III to be Darth Vader going around cutting people's heads off and terrorizing the universe. But how did he get to be Darth Vader? You have to explore him in relationships, and you have to see where he started. He was a sweet kid, helpful, just like most people imagine themselves to be. Most people said, "This guy must have been a horrible little brat – a demon child." But the point is, he wasn't born that way – he became that way and thought he was doing the right thing. He eventually realizes he's going down the dark path, but he thinks it's justifiable. The idea is to see how a democracy becomes a dictatorship, and how a good person goes bad – and still, in the end, thinks he's doing the right thing.

It's common these days to talk about good and evil in terms of gray areas, but in your films, good and evil are more strictly defined.

It's the more old-fashioned version of good and evil – the version that those of us who grew up in the '40s and '50s had, when there was a strong sense of good and evil because of World War II. That's one of the few times in history when the bad guys were very clearly delineated for us. There really was a fight for survival going on between pretty clearly good guys and bad guys.

The story being told in Star Wars is a classic one. Every few hundred years, the story is retold because we have a tendency to do the same things over and over again. Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not.

Did you always intend to make a second trilogy?

The original story is really the first three films. I never thought I would get to tell the backstory, because I had to design Star Wars in a very limited way to fit it into the technology I had at the time. I did the same thing with THX 1138 – I had to create a futuristic world without special effects and without sets. With each film, I pushed the envelope of technology. For Star Wars I had to develop a whole new idea about special effects to give it the kind of kinetic energy I was looking for. I did it with motion-control photography. I had a lot of experience with animation, so it was a matter of taking the technology of animation and moving it into effects. For The Empire Strikes Back, I had to create an actor who could do a believable performance and still only be two-and-a-half feet high. I had the whole center of the film resting on us being able to pull that idea off and not have Yoda look like Kermit. If I had failed at any one of those things, the films would have died a horrible death. I had to make it all believable somehow, even though it was completely ridiculous. I had to say, "This is real. We fly around in spaceships with Wookiees – this is all real stuff, real people." That was the hardest part.

After Return of the Jedi, I said to myself, "Now I'm going to take some time off and raise my kids, and later on, I'll come back and do my personal films, because that's really what I want to do."

So why did you come back to Star Wars instead of making "personal films"?

Fifteen years later, we had made such advances at Industrial Light & Magic, especially with Jurassic Park. That was the watershed of being able to create realistic characters using digital technology. So I thought about it again. I could do cities like Coruscant, I could do a pod race, I could do other things that up to that point had been impossible. The defining factor was the Star Wars Special Edition, where the thing was to create a real Jabba the Hutt. Not a big rubber thing, but a digital actual character. I figured if I could do that, then I could do everything else. When we brought out the Special Edition, we didn't really expect it to bring in much of an audience. We had a sense that we hadn't sold very many VHS tapes – I think about 300,000 – which is nothing compared to the 11 million that E.T. did. So I said that this would be an experiment, and hopefully we'll get our money back.

The success of that rerelease not only told me that I could create these creatures and build better sets and towns than I could before, but that the Star Wars audience was still alive – it hadn't completely disappeared after 15 years. I decided that if I didn't do the backstory then, I never would. So I committed to it, and here I am finished. So now I'm going to do what I thought I was going to do back then.

__In addition to the experimental films that you say you want to make now, you've expressed an interest in making historical films. __

Yes, but I don't want to get into situations where people say, "That's not historically correct." History is fiction, but people seem to think otherwise. The thing I like about fantasy and science fiction is that you can take issues, pull them out of their cultural straitjackets, and talk about them without bringing in folk artifacts that make people get closed minded.

Give me an example of what you mean by a folk artifact.

Fahrenheit 9/11. People went nuts. The folk aspects of that film were George Bush or Iraq or 9/11 or – intense emotional issues that made people put up their blinders and say, "I have an opinion about this, and I'm not going to accept anything else." If you could look at these issues more open-mindedly – at what's going on with the human mind behind all this, on all sides – you could have a more interesting conversation, without people screaming, plugging their ears, and walking out of the room like kids do.

And you do that by –

By making the film "about" something other than what it's really about. Which is what mythology is, and what storytelling has always been about. Art is about communicating with people emotionally without the intellectual artifacts of the current situation, and dealing with very emotional issues.

Life and death.

Life and death, or "I really want to kill my father and have sex with my mother." It's hard to talk about that kind of thing in a family situation without somebody getting upset. But in art, you can deal with those issues. You begin to realize that other people have had the same experience or go down those same paths deep in their minds. Most stories are really told for adolescents, which is why Star Wars was aimed at adolescents. Societies have a whole series of stories to bring adolescents into adulthood by saying, "Don't worry, everybody thinks that way. You're just part of the community. We don't quite talk about it, but if you act on some of your notions, here's what will happen: Zeus will reach down and smash you flat like a bug or the entire Greek army will come and crush your city and burn everybody inside of it, including your heroes." These lessons are continually handed down from generation to generation. I love history, so I create an environment – in the past, present, or future – that allows me to tell the story, but in a way that's not incendiary.

A film like Casablanca was an instructive fable designed for adults, and there were lessons in it about choices and love that I couldn't possibly have understood as an adolescent. Do you aspire to make films that do the same things for adults that Star Wars has done for adolescents?

Once people get out of college, they're set in their worldview. With a film like Fahrenheit 9/11, you can affect people who already believe that way, and they can say "Right on," but you can't affect people who have made up their minds the other way. I'm caught in this world where I'm an entertainer. A movie is a big deal. You either have to have unlimited resources or you have to make movies for an audience.

The movies that are the most interesting don't even make a million dollars. A million dollars means what? That maybe a couple of hundred thousand people saw it.

A film like Being John Malkovich was fairly experimental, but was able to reach –

Yeah, I like those movies. They're inspired, and they did fairly well. I mean, I come from San Francisco. Stan Brakhage is esoteric. Being John Malkovich was sort of unusual. Eraserhead was esoteric.

What other films have you liked in recent years?

Am�lie was great. But the best thing that's happened since Fahrenheit 9/11 is that now we can actually get documentaries in theaters. I have a little documentary unit now that's doing stuff for The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, but we're not going to stop there.

When the Biography Channel makes its documentary about you in 2050, how do you want to be remembered?

I'll be remembered as a filmmaker. The technological problems that I solved will be forgotten by then, but hopefully some of the stories I told will still be relevant. I'm hoping that Star Wars doesn't become too dated, because I think its themes are timeless. If you've raised children, you know you have to explain things to them, and if you don't, they end up learning the hard way. In the end, somebody's got to say, "Don't touch that hot skillet." So the old stories have to be reiterated again in a form that's acceptable to each new generation. I don't think I'm ever going to go much beyond the old stories, because I think they still need to be told.