Lucas has also looked longingly at the career of Francis Ford Coppola, his onetime mentor. After years of tussling with the studios (and making his own flops without their interference), Coppola began self-financing movies like “Twixt” that find tiny audiences and often get brutal reviews from critics. Coppola loves the idea of Lucas’s joining him in creating these kinds of films. “Now that he’s demonstrated his commercial moviemaking abilities,” Coppola wrote in an e-mail, “it’s time to show his other side.” He said Lucas’s personal films — a combination of light and music and crack editing — are his “real gift.”

But you wonder if this view — the commercial versus the personal, the blockbuster versus the experimental art film — is as reductive as the 1970s model. In fact, Lucas has always made personal films, just not in the traditional sense. The very first time Lucas showed “Star Wars” to friends, with World War II movie dogfights standing in for the unfinished effects, Spielberg is reported to have said, “That movie is going to make $100 million, and I’ll tell you why — it has a marvelous innocence and naїveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.”

That was without the Star Destroyers — it was just Lucas’s corny self up on the screen. Luke Skywalker’s battle with Darth Vader was given emotional heft by Lucas’s own relationship with his father, who owned a stationery shop and wanted George to join the family business. When Luke left his backwater planet for greater glory, he did so with the same resolve with which Lucas left his hometown of Modesto, Calif., a note Lucas struck perfectly in “American Graffiti.” (“Steve Bolander is an insurance agent in Modesto,” reads the “Graffiti” postscript — it sounds like Lucas’s nightmare.) Even 1984’s “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” is a kind of personal film. “I was going through a divorce, and I was in a really bad mood,” Lucas told me. So he dreamed up a villain who reaches into men’s chests and pulls out their hearts. Did he really intend to create a metaphor that direct? “Yeah,” Lucas said glumly. The period is hard for him to think about.

Critics have said that Lucas’s personal flourishes are elemental and unsophisticated. But, as Spielberg put it, that is George. He ushered in what you might call the personal blockbuster. Amid the dead-eyed sequel-makers who haunt the multiplex, there are directors who have figured out how to insert themselves — their kinks, the fears, their passions — into $100 million crowd-pleasers. In the Batman movies and “Inception,” Christopher Nolan works out his obsession with privacy and the sanctity of our minds; David Fincher burrows into the heads of loners (Lisbeth Salander, the Zodiac Killer, Mark Zuckerberg) on society’s fringes. When Tim Burton makes a bad movie (like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”), the problem is often that it’s too personal; we’re locked in Burton’s head when we could use some popcorn.

Lucas talks reverently of a certain category of megadirector — James Cameron (“Avatar”) and Peter Jackson (“The Lord of the Rings”) — who, like him, shepherd personal, seemingly ridiculous visions to the screen, only to watch them connect with a mass audience. “Those to me are some of the more interesting movies,” Lucas said. It’s because, under even the strictest 1970s definition, they’re personal films.

When Lucas talks about how excited he is to leave behind the rigors of blockbuster filmmaking — how he is “retiring, in a way, from my past” — he is, in the manner of a Lucas character, searching for his true self. A pesky “Star Wars” fanboy might suggest he already found him.

RIDE OFF, CUE SUNSET

Lucas doesn’t think the studios were being racist in rejecting his all-black action adventure. They were merely confused. Just as with “Star Wars,” they were being shown a movie that didn’t fit their marketing schema. “What’s it like?” Lucas asked, slipping again into a Socratic dialogue.