George Lucas has spent his career doing things people told him could not be done. Building his own museum may have been the hardest.
“This has been a long haul,” the 82-year-old filmmaker said Wednesday during a surprise appearance at a press preview of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. “Seventeen years between getting kicked out of cities and trying to get this built, which has in itself been eight years.
“Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian,” Lucas continued. “I don’t like to do things that people think can be done. I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done. And even when you do it, they say, ‘Well, that’s not any good. You can’t do that.’”
Then came his blunt assessment of the undertaking: “I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”
The approximately $1 billion museum, co-founded by Lucas and his wife, business executive Mellody Hobson, opens to the public Sept. 22 in Exposition Park, across from Lucas’ alma mater, USC. Earlier attempts to build it in San Francisco and Chicago collapsed amid disputes over location, design and public land. Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began the following year, only to encounter pandemic shutdowns and supply-chain delays.
