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Neat interview here
A few snippets:
TB: It's impressive to note the number of times in the exhibit that scientists say they themselves were inspired by "Star Wars" as children.
GL: The original film was designed to allow young people to think outside the box. It was designed for 12-year-olds, adolescents, kids who were starting to think outside the box anyway, as a way of saying, "Let your fantasies run free, because this is the time to do it." That was one of the original purposes of "Star Wars."
TB: When you created this world, were you scientifically curious about it, or was it mostly about the plot and characters?
GL: I'm not much of a math and science guy. I spent most of my time in school daydreaming and managed to turn it into a living. When I was making "Star Wars," I wasn't restrained by any kind of science. I simply said, "I'm going to create a world that's fun and interesting, makes sense, and seems to have a reality to it." And a lot of it came from our literary history, our social history, like robots and whatnot. Part of it's based on mythological motifs, the politics are based on history. There's a lot of cultural reality to it that isn't necessarily scientific but is more social.
TB: What's neuro-anthropology? I'm not familiar with the term.
GL: It doesn't exist. [laughs] It's sort of an extension of neuropsychology, which does exist. But the next step is neuro-anthropology.
TB: The nervous systems of social groups?
GL: Yeah. A friend of mind is writing a book on the social interactions of people based on brain research and how the way we interact with other people is affected by the development of our brains in terms of how the synapses and neurons work. You know, like how married couples influence each other just on a neurological level. What I'm interested in is what happens when you take that to the next level. How do the social institutions reflect the neural activity of the individuals. But that's an outgrowth of how, in the case of "Star Wars," I've taken psychological motifs from 4,000-year-old stories and put them into a modern vernacular. The reason they worked then is that they were told verbally over and over and over and handed down from father to son. Because they were tested by an audience for thousands of years, they have a certain emotional integrity to them, and you can take those little modules and stick them into a story as they are. They work well because emotionally we have not shifted all that much in the last 4,000 years, whereas intellectually we have. |
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