George Lucas recently spoke with Charlie Rose, and the 50-plus-minute talk is fascinating on a number of levels, from how Hollywood changed in an unfortunate way after Star Wars, to how he feels about the new film, and where he sees his career now:

Video is no longer available: www.hulu.com/watch/886675

Here are just some of the most interesting points from the interview:

He Never Wanted to Be Involved in Hollywood Movies

This is something he's reiterated a number of times. While he's become synonymous with Hollywood, his goal was to always make small films that were motivated by visuals rather than plot — "tone poems" as he refers to them. In many ways, the original Star Wars could not have been made in the current climate. With a few exceptions, there aren't many large-scale original movies being made today. Star Wars was actually hated by the board of directors at Fox, which is a testament to just how different of a film it was at the time. Lucas considered it a space opera or space fantasy, and not science fiction, and it's one of the reasons people had a tough time grabbing on to it.

My ambition was ultimately to be Michael Moore.

A little bit later in the interview, Lucas admits that his "ambition was ultimately to be Michael Moore." He wanted to make visually interesting films and documentaries — but obviously his career took some major turns after American Graffiti and then Star Wars.

Star Wars

Lucas mentions that Coppola told him to "stop with the artsy fartsy stuff" like THX 1138 and to try to see if he could make a comedy. He eventually went and made American Graffiti, a film that the studio originally wanted to shelve. It became a hit, and changed the direction of his career forever. He then wanted to focus on making a film that was geared more towards kids, and combined elements of mythology and serials of the day, like Flash Gordon. Star Wars was meant to be new mythology for kids trying to find their way in a bigger world, and he felt that some of that was lost when westerns stopped being popular.

He tried to get the rights to remake Flash Gordon, but was not able to do so — which actually worked out in his favor, since Star Wars became a bigger hit than any Flash Gordon movie would have been.