George Lucas going indie for the rest of his filmmaking career? I’ll believe it when I see it, but hey, that’s exactly what the director/lightning rod has revealed as his plan going further.

In a profile in the New York Times, the filmmaker’s producing partner, Rick McCallum, reveals that “he will have completed his task as a man and a filmmaker,” with Lucas departing from blockbuster titles and going on to make films that are described as being “..small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They’ll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem.”

This comes after Lucas faced constant rejection from movie studio executives he showed his newest title, Red Tails, to (including one who didn’t even show up to watch it), forcing him to pay for everything just to make sure the movie—which he’s been working to get made for over two decades—was finally released.

Now, while this is rather hard to believe, given the fact that Lucas has said on many occasions that he’d retire and has yet to do so, even going as far as to ridicule filmmakers for going the very route that he’s been said to be tracking going forward. Oh, and he’s even said he wants to do a sequel and prequel to Red Tails if the film does well, and he also left that Indiana Jones 5 door open, as well.

That said, I would love to see this actually happen. Lucas was at one point a genuinely gifted filmmaker, and one with a fresh take on the medium. Now, while it appears as though that has all been vacated for a cash mongering megalomaniac, it would be really fun to see this Lucas attempt to take on far smaller projects. One can wish, right?

[Source: NY Times]