In 1977, this visionary filmmaker transformed 20th century cinema with Star Wars. Now, the director of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace looks ahead to the coming century of moviemaking.

Cinema is the art of the moving image; the moving image isn't any more truthful than are cave paintings, or hieroglyphics, or the Sistine Chapel. What the artist finds is the truth behind the "truth".

Two of the most important things human beings do are expressing themselves and communicating with others. How they do that and how clever they are in doing that have always been some of humanity's major accomplishments. Children learn to scratch on rocks just as the cavemen did. And even though the technology is extremely simple — it's a stick and a rock — part of human nature is to innovate, to figure out better ways to do things.

I'm not that keen on technology. I'm a storyteller, but to enable me to tell my stories, I've had to develop the necessary technology. After all, to do a moving portrayal on a cave wall of a dying bison, early man had to invent red paint.

While doing Star Wars, I was very limited in what I could achieve in terms of the story's scope. I couldn't show large street scenes; I couldn't have alien characters that were not anthropomorphic walking around on the streets. I couldn't have them as characters. Throughout the making of the Star Wars films, I was struggling with such questions as, "How do I create a Jabba the Hutt? How do I create a Yoda, who's only a foot and a half high, and have him play a scene?" I could imagine these characters, but I couldn't realize them. It took a lot of effort and talent on the part of many people to manipulate the puppets, latex, and remote-control systems that allowed us to create these creatures. Even then I was unable to move them around to any significant degree.

With the digital technology available today, I've finally reached a point where I can move such characters freely on a set, and I can get better, more dramatic performances out of them. That's been my challenge. It's the same with sets. In the past, I couldn't afford to go to a place in the story that would involve a very large set. Now I can expand the environments in which I'm able to place my stories, which is obviously important in the fantasy genre.

I put the brakes on my imagination when I was writing the original Star Wars, because I wanted to write only what I knew I could realize on film. And even then, I was writing things that I wasn't quite sure I could render onscreen. And therein was a large risk. I have taken those risks on all the Star Wars movies, and I'm taking them on Episode I — The Phantom Menace. Can I pull this off? But the idea of being able to explore my imagination and make it literal is exciting: It moves me forward to try to get my visions onto the screen.

The Digital Era

In the 20th century, cinema was celluloid; the cinema of the 21st century will be digital. Movie theaters are going to have better presentation, seating, and entertainment services. And the quality of the experience in terms of the sound and the images onscreen will increase — especially when theaters become all digital. You'll have a better, clearer, more realistic moviegoing experience.

Digital technology will bring down the cost of making movies. More people will have access to rendering epic or fantasy stories. It used to be that literary genres such as science fiction and fantasy couldn't be portrayed adequately on film because they had to be shown as opposed to suggested in words, as they are in books. The gap between those two media is going to close up.

In the very near future — it's going to happen very quickly — film is going to be photographed and projected digitally. The recorded image will go automatically into a computer, and most postproduction will take place in a computer. Many people in the film medium are going to have to learn new creative processes and techniques. But we made it through the silent era to the sound era, and from the black-and-white era to the color era, and I'm sure we'll make it through to the digital era. Black-and-white silent movies will still be made, even in the digital era, because there are a million ways to tell a story. The creator's palette has been continually widened. It was the same with painters during the Renaissance, most of whom were technologists of sorts because of the huge emphasis on creating new colors and different ways of dealing with plaster and metal. Artists have always been coping with the limits of technology.

When French director Georges Méliès showed men on the moon in 1902's A Trip to the Moon, it was the first time anyone had tried to make the unreal real in a moving photographic medium. That magic trick was the start of an art form. King Kong, in 1933, was a landmark in stop motion photography. The art of moving puppets was then perfected in the '60s and '70s with Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts and Sinbad series. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in 1968, represented the state of the art of special effects up to that point. In 1977, Star Wars shifted visual effects to a different medium by introducing the use of computers. The pivotal moment in the digital cinema was ILM's realistic dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. But this achievement was inspired by all those that came before, from King Kong to Harryhausen's puppets. In the animation medium, John Lasseter's Toy Story team delivered extraordinary acting in an entirely CG feature. I believe the next milestone will be Episode I, because it will have digital characters interacting with real actors.

A Question of Limits

There will be limitations on what this new technology will be able to accomplish. As long as our minds have the capacity to imagine new possibilities, there will be difficulties in trying to realize them. At this point, the possibilities with digital technology seem almost limitless, but we have only started to imagine them, because we haven't really used the medium. As time goes by, our minds will open up, and we'll be able to imagine things that will hit up against the boundaries of the medium.

Computers are run by humans. It's science fiction to think that computers could make movies by themselves, or that digital characters aren't created by people. Because digital cinema is a much more sophisticated form of moviemaking, filmmakers need both sophisticated backgrounds and plenty of inspiration. And you'll still need actors to do the voices and to perform, and whether those actors are literally actors or an animator's creation — or a combination of the two — it's still humans communicating with humans.

Film is a communications medium. And digital cinema is, essentially, the same communications medium: One human being is communicating ideas to a number of other human beings, most often through the depiction of human beings. Whether you do it digitally or photographically, it amounts to the same thing. People have said, "Gee, digital cinema isn't like real cinema. It's phony. It's not real." Well, that's one thing you can depend on: Film is not real.

Nothing you see on a movie screen is real. It never has been, and it never will be. The images have been manipulated by some filmmakers to be what they want them to be. Cinema is a highly technical medium: By running celluloid through sprockets and exposing it to light, you have a chemical photographic process that is manipulated a million different ways. In movies, the characters are just actors playing parts, and the sets have been built by a crew. They're phony; they're backdrops. Nothing in a movie is real.

And a digital backlot is not different than a real backlot. You're just using numbers instead of two-by-fours. The stories are what you're trying to communicate: They have to have some insight into human behavior — the way we live, and most importantly, our intellectual and emotional ideas. These things — whether you're using a stage or music or words or paint on a cave wall — are always the same.