Great works - and I think Star Wars is a great work - are easily susceptible to multiple plausible interpretations. Some of them are pretty nutty, but the idea that we should see it as profoundly feminist, or as a deeply Christian tale, or as a Freudian exercise... I think all of those have some truth.

I'll tell you an explanation that I find commonly overrated and speculative in the extreme: the idea that things that succeed in popular culture do that because they hit the temper of the times.

My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules.

Groups become more extreme and entrenched in their beliefs and polarized from others when members only exchange information that reinforces their views and filter out all else or never learn of alternatives. Thus they narrow their options, and magnify each other's prejudices and misconceptions. This trend leads to blind spots in decision making and to extreme behavior, even terrorism.

The opening scene in A New Hope, when you see the huge ship, it goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on... that is like a joke of awesomeness.

We often see a temper of the times connection, and it's just like a fairy tale. It's not true.

The hero of the beloved Star Wars trilogy is Luke. The principle dynamic is the complicated relationship between Luke and his father. Not coincidentally, George Lucas' last name sounds a lot like Luke. That's the one he identified with. George Lucas had a tumultuous relationship with his own father, and people who know him say that you can't understand the backstory of the movies without knowing that his dad was occasionally difficult but also very loving. They had a big break between them. In those movies, he's very focused on sons and fathers.