Hollywood's Master of Myth: Joseph Campbell - the Force Behind Star Wars

MAN: Throughout human history, there has been a deep cry for myth.

We need the stories because we need some kind of access to the sacred,

or access to ultimate questions.

Yet, even more, we need some kind of experience of mythic events.

SLOW CHORAL SONG

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

I got a ticket. I got it!

Here it is.

This is not just a night out at the movies, this is a party.

Star Wars is fulfilling something like a religious urge that people have.

There is something very intense about the primary experience of going to the temple, waiting in line,

and being with your fellows

all in the same costume and sharing this intense experience.

So powerful is the cult surrounding George Lucas' Star Wars films,

it's hard to imagine that not such a long time ago...

the director was struggling to find form for his original story.

What I was working to try to do was to write a modern fairytale.

I'd become intrigued with mythology

and fairytales as a form of psychological archaeology.

You can understand the psychology of people who lived 3,000 years ago by the stories they told.

So I was trying to pull things down,

to find common threads that went through lots of different mythology.

I became friends with Joe Campbell. That's the research he'd been doing.

MUSIC: Star Wars theme

Joseph Campbell didn't own a television. He rarely went to the movies.

But 12 years after his death, he's a hero to many in Hollywood.

Some of the most successful films ever were shaped by a book he wrote half a century ago -

The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

It was The Hero With A Thousand Faces that just said,

here is the story, here is the end and the focus - it was all there.

It had been there thousands of years, as Dr Campbell pointed out.

If I hadn't run across it, I'd still be writing Star Wars today.

What inspired the young George Lucas was Campbell's idea

that myths followed an archetypal pattern involving a hero's journey.

In a couple of sentences, the high concept of the hero's journey

is that the hero leaves a somewhat comfortable, ordinary world,

maybe with the help of a mentor.

-What is it?

-Your father's light sabre - the weapon of a Jedi knight.

Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster. An elegant weapon.

'He goes on a journey to a special world, which is different and dangerous.

'There he encounters great forces, monsters,

'or villains or enemies of some kind,

'that put him through life-changing experience of death and resurrection.

'Then, finally, the hero has to come home,

'return and give closure to the story

'by bringing back something from that special world to share with everybody else.'

DIFFERENT MAN: The hero's journey is not an easy one.

They take on not only their problems but the rest of the world's, too.

And all this is in Campbell.

And when you say "Campbell",

it's a distillation of virtually all the storytelling

of mankind.

That's what he represents to me.

He distilled them into pure ideas.

You're a winner, Max.

I'm not gonna lose you because of some crazy notion of quitting.

You say people don't believe in heroes any more?

Well, damn them!

You and me, Max. We're gonna give them back the heroes!

Why The Hero With A Thousand Faces?

Well, because there is a certain, typical,

hero sequence of actions, um...

It can be detected in stories from all over the world

and many periods of history.

And I think it's essentially the one deed done by many, many different people.

Joseph Campbell's model of an archetypal hero's journey

wasn't written with movies in mind.

It was the product of years spent studying,

and comparing myths from different cultures from throughout time.

Scholars for at least 100 years

had carved out glorious careers

by showing how different... people, ages, were.

Campbell announced his theme in the preface to Hero With A Thousand Faces.

He said, "I'm going to look for the correspondences and the analogues."

"What is the secret of the timeless vision? From what profundity of the mind does it derive?

"Why is mythology everywhere the same,

"beneath its varieties of costume?"

Campbell believed that myths were the masks of God.

Myths are the sacred stories that changed from one culture to the other

like masks in a great play.

But behind the masks is a divine play. The great forces of the universe are played out in the myths.

So to bring it closer to Campbell's first and probably most famous book,

the hero is the one who personifies that struggle.

There's only one story.

It is the story human beings have been telling each other

since they sat in caves, and that story could be called "the quest".

The Holy Grail for contemporary writers is the secret of story structure -

the key to creating compelling narrative.

It is what the story is always, somehow, about.

What was encouraging about reading A Thousand Faces

was that I realised it is possible to discover a universal form.

I took the methods of the principles that Campbell was using

and applied it to all stories. And it's amazing

how they resonate back and forth.

Myth is a part of story, so the elements of myth correspond to the elements you find in ALL stories.

That is story in a nutshell.

And it is the same story we've been telling one another for tens of thousands of years.

We were looking for a location in the centre of Australia

for the third Mad Max.

A place called Katajuta is a sacred site to the Aboriginals.

It's like a cathedral to them.

So we had to go and speak to the tribal elders

and see if they were interested.

People said we wouldn't have a shot because McDonald's had made a commercial

using Ayers Rock as a bun with an aeroplane flying over the top and there was a big stink about that.

So our location manager went and sat down with the tribal elders and he showed them our storyboards,

and through a translator told them the story of the Mad Max trilogy.

And at the end of it,

they not only were very excited

but got up and, sort of, sang him a song at the end of it.

And, er... we got the location.

What happened was that George said that they recognised many of the motives in our story.

They recognised that this had a mythological content,

that it was larger than the mere contemporary issues of the time.

So they understood that we were basically storytellers, we just used different techniques to them.

The movies are the perfect medium

for expressing a mythic experience.

I was really struck with this recently. I went to a museum in Berlin called the Pergamon Museum.

They have reliefs that they looted from a temple in Asia Minor.

They are just like a storyboard for a great special effects movie,

about the battle between the gods and the giants.

It's the same energy being expressed in a different medium.

"The logic, the heroes and the deeds of myth

"survive into modern times.

"The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the romance of Beauty and the Beast,

"stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue

"waiting for the traffic light to change."

Campbell thought of myths

as the stories that bind people together.

For the Jews, it could be the story of the Ark of the Covenant - a tribe-binding story.

For Christians, it could be the myth of the crucifixion. It's a universal motif.

The hero in cultures all over the world dies and resurrects.

And as he or she does this, somehow life comes back to the entire people.

The Catholic religion is a poetic religion. It's powerful, life-supporting.

It's beautiful.

Every month of the year has its poetic and spiritual value, and, boy, that got into me.

And I'm sure that my interest in mythology comes out of that.

Born in New York, in 1904,

the young Campbell was soon looking beyond Catholicism to satisfy his appetite for ritual,

visiting Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Madison Square Gardens.

I was, from a very early date,

as a kid around four or five years old, fascinated by American Indians.

I went to school and had no problem with my studies.

But my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm

of the American Indian mythology.

And when I was about eleven or twelve,

I had read all the books about Indians in the children's library and was admitted to the stacks.

I think that's where my life as a scholar began. I know it did.

My parents were very co-operative. They found a lovely place in the Poconos of Pennsylvania.

And right nearby, was a man

whose books about Indians I'd been reading.

And so he became my first guru.

His name was Elmer Gregor.

He wrote boys' books about American Indians.

Already as a boy,

reading voraciously, he was noticing parallels between the Indian myths he had come to love

and the myths/religious motifs of the Irish Catholicism that he was raised with.

That, I think, is what really planted the seed,

that no one people, no one tribe, could take a claim to all the great truths.

Instead there were parallel stories from one side of the world to the other.

At Columbia University, Campbell studied medieval literature,

specialising in Arthurian legend.

He was a dedicated student.

But his greatest passion was not academic, but athletic.

I think that meant more to me than anything else in my college years - the track.

I think I learned more about living and what it takes to win and what it takes to lose - all of that.

I got up there in the high brackets, you know.

I could run as fast a half as anybody in the world at that time.

I never have had the ability

to let someone be ahead of me.

Campbell's course seemed set

for conventional academic success,

when his Arthurian studies took him to Europe.

But there he encountered modern ideas in the form of Freud, Jung and James Joyce,

which opened his mind to wider horizons.

I went back to Columbia to go on with my work on the PhD,

and told them, "This thing has opened out."

They said, "Don't follow that. Stay where you were when you went to Europe." I said, "To hell with it."

And on that, you might say I just retired to the woods.

I went actually to Woodstock and just read

and read and read for five years. No job, no money.

In Woodstock, Campbell immersed himself in ideas he'd encountered in Europe.

His ambition was to draw on mythic themes

to write the great American novel.

But the man who so influenced other storytellers, failed in his own attempts at fiction.

Instead, in 1934, he took a job

teaching comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence, a new women's college near New York.

We all looked forward to going to a Campbell lecture.

It was the highlight of the week.

All of these tales, all of these myths, how he tied them together was nothing short of brilliant.

He was a real presence.

He was a man that you felt you were being stretched by

every time you went into his lecture hall.

And every time these diagrams appeared on the blackboard,

you felt you had gained knowledge.

And that's a very heady thing.

As Campbell worked on his lecture notes, he arrived at the conclusion which inspired his most famous book.

I realised then, and no-one could say otherwise, there's one mythology in the world.

It had inflected in the various cultures in terms of their historical and social circumstances,

but it's one mythology.

Campbell's comparative approach to mythology wasn't only controversial,

it was disdained by many scholars when The Hero Of A Thousand Faces first came out in 1949.

It was believed that you washed away the differences, the nuances,

from culture to culture to culture by simply pointing out the correspondences.

The silver lining,

the uncanniness about the public acceptance of the book

is that creative souls everywhere seem to have known from the start what Campbell was trying to do.

I think Watership Down

owes everything to Joseph Campbell and The Hero Of A Thousand Faces

because if I hadn't discovered Campbell and the hero,

I wouldn't have been mentally free to write about the rabbits.

"They climbed not over, but through, the sun-red grass, among the awakened insect movement

"and the lighter blades.

"The grass undulated about them.

"They couldn't tell how far away the ridge might be.

"They topped each short slope, only to find another above it."

I think Watership Down

conforms pretty well to Joseph's ideas of what an adventure epic consists of.

Most of the things he pinpoints are mentioned.

The fascinating thing is you never get bored with this.

You never think, "This is Campbell, item 6A."

I don't think I could have done it looking up Campbell as a reference book. It had to come out naturally.

One of the big delights, and surprising delights,

has been to find how my books have helped other people in the arts.

And it's not that I tell people what to do,

but it points out where the inspiration is and you, as an artist, move in and pull it out.

The hero's journey is a metaphor for life,

in the simplest possible terms.

It's a metaphor for life from childhood to maturity to old age.

It's a metaphor for the daily struggle to find sustenance and security in life

against the forces of antagonism.

It's recognition that we move forward in time,

against our desires, our forces of antagonism, that we must overcome or we will not survive.

"The first stage of the mythological journey,

"which we have designated 'the call to adventure',

"signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual centre of gravity

"from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown."

DISCORDANT CLANKING

-What's the idea?

-Bob needs help. The men are hiding in the rocks.

-I tried to stop him, but couldn't.

-I said he'd get in a mess. Let him get out of it. Back to work.

'You remember those old westerns?'

They would go like this. The bad guys roll into town, shoot the place up, kill the old sheriff.

The townspeople gather and go to the livery stable now being run by the retired gun-slinger.

They'd go, "The bad guys rolled into town, shot the place up, killed the sheriff. You gotta come to our aid."

He'd resist that. He'd say, "No. I hung up my guns long ago. Get someone else."

No wonder they call you Rawhide. You're hard. You have no feelings. You haven't any love.

He would do everything possible to resist the call to adventure.

But eventually he takes on the task.

Come on, boys. We're riding.

'The call to adventure is simply the recognition that you can't live out of balance.

'You can resist or ignore it, but sooner or later, you'll be moved to have to do something.'

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone

"for heroes of all time have gone before us.

"The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path."

Let's describe the descent

into the labyrinth - it's a key stage in the journey.

It describes the pain of the ordeal that's inevitable in human life

if you are going through a transformation.

Campbell found that particular motif for example, in the Old Testament,

Jonah's descent into the belly of the whale is an ordeal that he goes through.

But when he emerges from the whale, he's a transformed man.

Think of Odysseus' descent

into 19 years of wandering, as it were, through the labyrinth of the Greek islands

before he can finally get back to Penelope in Greece.

Luke Skywalker has to confront death.

He has to go through the belly of the beast.

He has to confront Darth Vader, which means the "death father".

If you go back through history,

all the arts have focused on mythology.

It's one of the prime sources for all art.

Whether it's graphic art, theatre or literature.

I think it's because the emotional issues that are being dealt with are universal

and important.

When you're reading and reading and reading,

you don't have time to do all the things that you want to do.

Movies dropped out of my life a long, long time ago.

When I was in Europe, a terrible change had taken place.

When I left this country, we had only black and white silent movies.

There was a wonderful art developing, of mime and all of that.

I come back and you have talkies.

I never really caught on to the talkies as...an interesting art.

It's too naturalistic. Naturalism is the death of the arts.

That's a problem in American arts. They don't understand the metaphor.

For 40 years he hadn't seen a movie, a major Hollywood movie.

When George Lucas introduced himself backstage at one of Campbell's lectures in San Francisco in 1985,

as a local film maker "trying to make modern fairy tales and myths",

Campbell was very interested.

Lucas flew him from San Francisco to Skywalker Ranch.

Over the course of a weekend,

Joe was reintroduced into the world of the modern arts.

My God! We had...

We had Star Wars in the morning

and The Empire Strikes Back in the afternoon and The Return of the Jedi in the evening.

I tell you, I was really thrilled.

Campbell was moved by the fact that another artist

was trying to create a modern myth for the day.

And his books had helped bring that about.

I made the first Mad Max film without much insight

into the process of story-telling.

By some sort of luck

it succeeded in most of the territories around the world.

It was astonishing how it had resonances in places I didn't expect.

In Japan they called it a Samurai movie.

In Scandinavia he was a Viking.

The French picked up that it was a western on wheels.

I thought I was making this cheap action movie based in Australia, based on my culture.

I really, for the first time,

understood there was something afoot that was larger than my conceits.

In trying to find out about it,

I got on to Campbell who suddenly explained so much to me.

'A man haunted by the demons of his past.

'A man who wandered out into the wasteland.'

By the time I made the second Mad Max,

we'd really got into Campbell.

He was like a guide, really.

The biggest thing was the defining moment of the hero - the relinquishing of self-interest.

'When they have to go through the darkest threshold.

'They say, "It's not about me. It's about some greater good."'

If it's all the same to you... I'll drive that tanker.

CHRIS VOGLER: I've read about 10,000 screenplays.

I keep seeing the same patterns over and over again.

What The Hero's Journey can do for the writer is

give them a map of this well-travelled territory.

In a way, a map of the audience's experience of story.

You can vary from that map,

but it pays to understand what the audiences are programmed to expect

from having seen thousands of stories built on this mould.

I look at it as a road map for the writers.

Something you consult at the beginning, to design the story,

and then throw it away.

At Warners I'm meeting with the people in the animation department.

I'm working on the traditional animation.

They've got it figured out

that sometimes Bugs is the mentor to Daffy.

They're speaking my language.

ROBERT McKEE: This is what a producer faces in Hollywood.

You're fortunate if one out of 100 projects submitted to you

has even the promise of quality.

Under that kind of pressure,

people start looking for some type of tool that they can use

to rework these mediocre screenplays into something that will work.

Not a big hit, but it'll WORK.

Joseph Campbell is simply another effort to make sense out of chaos.

# Just whistle while you work

WHISTLING

# And cheerfully together we can tidy up the place... #

CHRIS VOGLER: At one point, when I was working for the Disney company,

I wrote a memo, about seven pages long, trying to explain to myself

what were the working parts of a story and how Campbell's idea from mythology related to movies.

So I translated Campbell's language of myth into movie language

and gave movie examples.

That memo was passed around. It had a certain power beyond my expectation -

it became mandatory reading for executives and was faxed and Xeroxed all over town.

When I showed it to some studio executives,

it was too long at seven pages and they wanted me to condense it again.

So I did a synopsis of my synopsis of his synopsis of world mythology.

The heroic story which Hollywood tends to do always tends to follow the same pattern.

The mistake if you are a storyteller is to follow that pattern as some sort of formula.

CHRIS VOGLER: I always caution the writers

not to drive with the map pasted to the windshield.

This idea of The Hero's Journey is just a guideline.

They're interested in The Hero's Journey. I don't have to sell them.

They're already very hip to that.

ROBERT MCKEE: Knowing how Hollywood works,

if it hadn't been Campbell, it would have been somebody else.

The problem is so fundamental.

Hollywood makes 400-500 films a year. US independents make 1,000 films a year.

Western Europe is going to make 700-800 films a year, and that's just the West, OK?

And so you've got this huge outpouring of film,

not to mention TV and all the rest of it,

and God simply did not give out nearly enough talent

to fill that volume with quality.

MUSIC: "Whistle While You Work"

So, Brad, what are your threshold guardians in this? What's holding this up?

-Why isn't it moving ahead?

-We've got threshold guardians in the script.

'Campbell has stepped up a degree

'from where he was when I started 15 years ago talking about this.

'Now it's part of the common language.

'And almost everybody has at least heard of it -

'they know the basics of the idea.'

-..Maybe a part-time mentor.

-Sure.

'And there are a lot of film makers who are quite conscious of it

'and are using it to plot their stories out

'and finding it a great source of inspiration.'

MUSIC ON SOUNDTRACK DROWNS SPEECH

ROBERT MCKEE: What's curious about all this, as Campbell would be the first to admit,

is that, long before Star Wars,

any number - hundreds, thousands - of films and novels

and even certain plays and whatnot

were all Campbellesque.

If Campbell hadn't written his book

and George Lucas had never brought him to the public fore, it wouldn't matter.

Because those forms are universal.

People use them all the time instinctively, creatively, naturally.

He made us aware of it, George Lucas made us aware of Joseph Campbell,

but it was and always will be there.

It's human. I mean, we just DO these things.

A communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion.

At last we can reveal ourselves to the Jedi.

GEORGE MILLER: As the old religions fail,

and as scary as it is,

movies and television basically replace it.

They are far more potent than church.

They create who we are,

or they help reflect who we are,

and amplify who we are.

I think Campbell, if he had lived a long time, would have got onto that.

And as crummy as most of our movies and television are, that's it -

that's what's happening to us.

Subtitles by BBC Subtitling - 1999

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