15 Movies That Say More About Their Makers Than They Realise

10. American Graffiti - George Lucas

The creator of Star Wars has, perhaps unsurprisingly, never been a filmmaker who dwells on the present very much in his movies. Whether it's the space opera fantasy of Star Wars, the dystopian misery of THX-1138 or even the high adventure of Indiana Jones' period exploits, Lucas tends to look into the future or the past, but rarely the here and now. That characteristic is never clearer than in American Graffiti, his second major production as director and certainly his most unashamedly nostalgic. A saccharine-sweet portrait of 1950s small-town teenagers and the antics they get up to (largely drag racing and hanging around at diners, much like the youth of today), it's cringeworthily obvious that Lucas thinks of this time - the period when he himself was growing up - as the best, most hopeful time imaginable, despite the looming cold war and suburban repression of the time. Though perhaps American Graffiti isn't the most incisive of films to compare with its director; the aforementioned THX-1138 might reveal even more about Lucas, focusing as it does on a society that has done away with emotions and love. Anyone close to the filmmaker will tell you that he's not an especially warm man, even to his own wife, and anyone who's seen the Star Wars prequels will tell you that they couldn't possibly have been made by anyone with any kind of understanding of human emotions...