Here are two just absolutely brilliant quotes from the recent Wired Magazine interviews with George Lucas:
With film, if you get a million people to see your movie on the first weekend, you’ve made about $5 million. That basically will not end up on the top-10 chart,” he told me. “You have to get 10 million people on the first weekend. And if you don’t do it in two days, you’re basically out of the theaters and into the DVD market. There’s just an ecology there. If you’re a mouse, don’t expect to kill a lion, because it ain’t gonna happen. If you want to have that kind of power, it’s better to be a lion, because the mice are fine – you can have a life and everything – but the lions are the ones out there prowling and scaring the hell out of everybody.
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.