• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

GEORGE LUCAS: MONUMENT VALLEY, ARIZONA & UTAH I first came in contact with Monument Valley when I was in college and won a scholarship to work on MacKenna's Gold. They gave the students a Land Rover and a camera, ​ ​ and we were supposed to make documentaries about the making of the movie. I had seen Monument Valley in John Ford westerns, and it was beautiful. After the documentary, I decided to stay on and make my own movie about the desert. So I spent two months sitting out there, pretty much by myself, watching the sun rise and the sun set, and the clouds go by and the shadows on the mesas, and the bugs crawling across the ground, and the wind blowing through the grass - every conceivable sensual element of that environment. And I fell in love with it. It was peaceful; it was meaningful. I had grown up in farm country, on a walnut ranch in Modesto, California, next to vineyards and a peach orchard. The ranch in front of us had horses and alfalfa fields. So I was outdoors a lot, and I like fresh air. But the desert is like a multiple of ten of the place where I grew up. It's just a picture-perfect environment, all the time. I loved watching everything change with the sun. So I made a short, abstract film, called 6-18-67 because that was the date when I started shooting it. It's kind of a tone poem, showing all the things I saw out there. There's a certain kind of peace that comes over you when there's nothing happening, or at least very little. If you stand in the desert for only a second, you don't see much. But if you stand there for a long time, you get to see all the details—all the little things going on, the movement and the changing shadows, the changing light, the different smells. There's a certain smell in the desert. It's hard to describe, but it's basically fresh air. And then there's the smell right before it starts to rain. Monument Valley was very moving. It was one chance I had to just be at peace. By that time, I was a crazed student, doing stuff and running around and having a busy life. But fortunately, for a couple of months, it just stopped. I was able to observe and to capture various images and thoughts on film. In my later films, the desert comes up quite regularly. If I have a choice of shooting in the snow or the desert, I pick the desert. A lot of people like to be in the mountains, and that's their place of peace. My peace is the desert. I sort of communicate with it. I think part of it is the desert's expanse. And the simplicity of it. I have a bit of an Asian-Japanese sensibility about space. I like minimalist reality, and that's kind of what the desert is. A lot of horizontal lines, not many verticals. Maybe a well-placed rock in the middle of the landscape, or some cactus standing up here and there. The landscape is a combination of Buddhist and Krazy Kat-two of my favorite things. At one point, I was up on a hill, shooting clouds, and I could look down on a lot of the mesas. They were so beautiful. When you're down on the desert floor, you don't get much of a perspective on it. But that one image always sticks in my head-up high where you can see for miles and miles, just mesa after mesa, and it seems like it goes on forever. I think the most significant part of being in a special place is that it allows you to get inside yourself. It puts you in a restful, peaceful state, where you're not threatened and you don't have anxiety, but the beauty just washes over you in a very quiet way. It's not that it gives you that much; instead, it allows you to give yourself something. And that is how I would define a special place: It allows you to be yourself. COMPASS POINTS Where: Monument Valley lies on the border of Arizona and Utah, within the Navajo Indian Reservation. Backdrop: A traditional Navajo prayer asks the blessing of the Holy People who created Monument Valley: "May it be beautiful before me. May it be beautiful behind me. May it be beautiful above me. May it be beautiful below me. May I walk in beauty." Monument Valley has been a location for numerous movies, starting with John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and since then ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Mission: Impossible II. Gregory Peck and Omar Sharif starred in Mackenna's Gold (1969). The valley's great monoliths were formed during the past 1.5 million years; caps of hard rock protect the softer sediments underneath from erosion. Visitor Information: Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park: www.navajonationparks.org: www.utah.com/monumentvalley By fusing timeless storytelling with advanced technological innovation, George Lucas has created some of the most successful movies of all time, including American Graffiti and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Star Wars set new standards in visuals and sound, winning eight Academy Awards. His company. LucasFilm, includes Industrial Light and Magic whose pioneering visual effects created the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the skeletal buccaneers in Pirates of the Caribbean, and other memorable digital images. Lucas has received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest award for technological achievement. The George Lucas Educational Foundation (www.edutopia.org) encourages innovation in schools. .

Load more

  2

Copy Link