Alexandre O. Philippe’s “The People vs. George Lucas,” which recently debuted at SXSW, attempts to discover what went wrong. The Swiss-born Philippe conducted copious interviews and combed through fan-submitted videos — rants, puppet shows, 3D-animated shorts — and found no lack of fervor on the subject, both defending the man and vilifying him. But there was one party who refused to participate: George Lucas himself.

Salon talked with Philippe over the phone about who owns “Star Wars,” why Midi-chlorians ruined the Force — and whether disappointed fans should just walk away.

I hear you’ve already received death threats for making this documentary.

Part of the challenge for us was that people thought we were out to demonize George Lucas, that we wanted to give “Star Wars” a bad name, and that we should die. I wanted to provide a debate. Some of the letters got pretty nasty and were actually a bit scary.

Could the same documentary be made for “Lord of the Rings” or “Star Trek”?

There is a unique conflict between George and his fans. There’s nothing quite like it in pop culture. What sets “Star Wars” fans apart, at least the original generation, is their love-hate relationship with the creator. The film is an examination of that dysfunctional relationship.

What did the original “Star Wars” movies get right that the new ones got wrong?

What the original trilogy did was provide our generation with something we had never experienced before. It’s hard for people to understand today. Even people who see “Avatar,” for instance, think it’s clearly magical and visually stunning, but there’s still a precedence of special-effects movies leading up to it. “Star Wars” was unlike anything that we had ever seen, and it just blew us away in such a profound way that it became the story of our childhood.

Isn’t part of the appeal of “Star Wars” the story itself?

The beautiful thing about “Star Wars” as a story is that it’s not anything new. It’s pretty straightforward in terms of archetypes. George found a way to put a unique spin on it and create well-defined characters that you instantly identify with. Looking at Hollywood movies today, obviously they’ve got their actors and special effects down, but where some of these movies fail is the scriptwriting. How can you put $200 million into a movie and have a mediocre screenplay? It’s unfortunate. I can’t think of a film that has a weak story and really succeeds.

Did fans expect too much from the new films? Would “The Phantom Menace” be a success if it weren’t a part of the franchise?

I think if there were no precedent, “The Phantom Menace” would have flopped. I don’t think we’d be talking about it right now. It’s the fans’ hatred that keeps it alive.

Did Lucas simply get complacent?

You have to try to put yourself in his shoes. What’s it like when you’re this young rebel filmmaker who is fighting against the system and creates this one thing that becomes so powerful that it takes over your life, and suddenly you find yourself at the head of this billion-dollar empire? Would any of us have done any differently? Would any of us have not taken advantage? What saddens me is that one of the most promising filmmakers of all time hasn’t, as a director, made a movie since “Star Wars.” He has not been able to break free, and that’s the tragedy of George Lucas.

Are fans justified in claiming that Lucas has actually ruined the original movies with the later ones?

A lot of fans are saying things like the Midi-chlorians, for instance, ruined the idea of the Force. The fact that Jar Jar Binks essentially nominates Emperor Palpatine is a huge deal, because now Jar Jar Binks is not just this character you can forget about. He is an essential character in the “Star Wars” saga. That bothers people. But then again, fans also have a choice. They don’t have to torture themselves.

Sometimes “Star Wars” fans act like they own the franchise. Does the public have any right telling Lucas what to do with his movies?

This is the central question of our film, and there’s no real answer for it. You can look at it from both a legal perspective and a moral perspective. Legally, there’s no question: “Star Wars” belongs to George Lucas. Morally, we’re talking about a piece of art that has been embraced by culture for over three decades and has become a part of our national heritage. So you can certainly make the argument that “Star Wars” also belongs to the fans.

Unlike “Star Wars,” your film has lots of fan participation. You hail it as one of the first digital democratic documentaries.

Participatory documentaries are becoming more and more common. I think the whole issue of intellectual property and copyright law in the digital age is a very tricky one. On the one hand, I understand the importance of copyright and owning your work. People who pirate it and make it available to everybody else — that’s not cool. People work hard to do what they do and should be entitled to make money. But at the same time, we also live in a culture where we’re sharing and remixing a lot of things, and as a result people are using copyrighted material.

Are you worried that people who don’t care about “Star Wars” won’t watch your film?

Not at all. From the response at SXSW it became obvious that this was wider than just a fan film. We’re touching on issues that would be of interest to anyone interested in pop culture. I think it transcends “Star Wars” fandom.

The project began back in 2001, when Bourland started with the reasonable goal of rating 200-300 films. At the time, Bourland, who works at a grocery store down the street from his home, wanted to keep his favorite movies from slipping into oblivion. But the list ballooned as Bourland tried to “do justice to all the best films.” Nine years later, after spending more than 1,600 hours in seven libraries in three states, logging more than 4,000 hours on dozens of computers, and rummaging through 110 books, his project was ready for the masses. (Though it is, unfortunately, a Microsoft Word document.) The list primarily includes films made in the English language from 1927 to 1999, and excludes documentaries, made-for-TV movies, shorts and silent films. Even a list of the 10,000 greatest movies ever made needs some limits.

Bourland spoke to us from his sister’s house in Austin about the brilliance of “Starman,” why Roger Ebert rules, and what drives a man to such lengths.

Was this a hobby or an obsession?

It started as a hobby, and at some point I just realized: If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it well. I feel pretty good about how it turned out. If somebody can do better, then go ahead and spend about nine or 10 years doing it.

What was your method for ordering such a massive list?

I strived to find a consensus between what fans, critics and the movie industry thought — I attempted to synthesize all those opinions. There are people who will look at my list and see their favorite movie is No. 784. I want people to understand that I haven’t judged these films. It’s not a personal Brad Bourland list. This is what Brad Bourland believes the number has proven to be, and that includes hundreds and hundreds of hours reading critiques from professional film critics, trying to understand how they saw things the way they did, what they’re looking for, what they’re hoping not to see, and so on.

Who is the best movie critic you’ve come across?

Roger Ebert is the greatest. I cannot tell you how fair Roger Ebert is. He excels at fairness. There are other critics just as schooled in filmmaking, but their critiques are not taken quite as seriously because they’re not even trying to be fair. They’ve got it in for this director, or they don’t like anything this actor does, and so on.

Which film is the most underrated?

“Being John Malkovich” [No. 502]. It’s different and brilliant. It’s probably the best acting John Cusack ever did.

Did you agonize over placing, for example, No. 7501, “Lord of the Flies,” above No. 7502, “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit”?

Somewhere between 2,500 to 3,500 it becomes somewhat subjective, but I kept applying the same exact rule that helped me put the first 3,000 together, and I think it worked. As long as I stuck to my method, I stayed on track. If it’s an important movie, you can bet I listened to what 200 people had to say about it. In the end, I had to make the decision, but it was with lots of input from people who know movies. If a film’s in the top 500, I’ve probably seen it 10 times because I wanted to be sure.

What’s your favorite film on the list?

John Carpenter’s “Starman” [No. 1,057] from 1984 is probably the film closest to my heart. There’s an internal logic to “Starman” that is undeniable. I have watched that movie about 20 times over the years, and every single thing that Jeff Bridges’ character, an alien trying to be human, does in that movie — whatever he says, whatever facial expressions he makes, whatever gestures he makes — he has been shown that action before. There’s nothing he does out of left field. It’s a brilliant piece of scriptwriting. They also have music passages for him, the lady he’s in love with, and a third set of notes that go together for them. It’s an old device, but it worked well. Carpenter put it together perfectly. I wish I could put it higher on the list, but I can’t justify it.

How many of these films have you seen?

Fortunately in the last five years I’ve had the opportunity to see probably 6,000 to 7,000 of them. I would like to see them all. Unfortunately, some of the foreign ones, like the Australian and old British movies, are hard to see in America.

When you started this project, the Internet wasn’t as prevalent as it is today. Has the Internet made your list redundant?

That is possible. But I still think my list is useful, especially to those who are looking for obscure movies — it’s got a lot of those. I’d be the first person to tell you that the order is really not that important. What is most important is that the right movies are on this list. IMDb’s been around before I got started, and they’ve got a great catalog of just about everything in the world. Generally, though, my ratings are more accurate than IMDb, for one reason: IMDb is really, really heavy on teenagers and testosterone.

Are you a list maker? Did you ever make lists as a child?

I’ve never made one in my life. This is it. I have an analytical mind, I guess, and it served this project.

Was there ever a point you felt like giving up?

About a thousand times. There were at least four or five times I thought to myself, “This is insane, why would anybody do this?” But I just kept going. I was going to ride it until it was done. I lost the entire project in 2003 and had to start over again. There were times it was like a ball and chain, but 90 percent of the time I couldn’t wait to work on it the next day.

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In other bad news for Kathryn Bigelow’s film about a bomb disposal expert — which remains the presumptive favorite at this writing — a real-life bomb disposal expert is suing the film. Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver, an Iraq war veteran, claims he deserves some “financial participation in the film,” after writer Mark Boal immersed himself with Sarver and his unit during their time in combat. Boal’s time in Iraq produced a feature article for Playboy, which in turn became the basis for his “Hurt Locker” script, although he has consistently said the film’s characters are fictional. (Disclosure: Boal has also written for Salon, although not in recent years.)

Sarver argues that since the film is about him, he has rights to a portion of the profits, but in the Los Angeles Times, Boal defends his position: “There are similarities, because you’d find similarities to events that happened to lots of these guys. But the screenplay is not about him. I talked to easily over 100 soldiers during my research and reshuffled everything I learned in a way that would be authentic, but would also make for a dramatic story.” Boal goes on to say he “didn’t know there was a problem until recently, when the lawyers got involved.”

An insider source claims that an Oscar skit involving Ben Stiller, a botched translation and a blue-skinned Sacha Baron Cohen dressed as a female Na’vi, pregnant with James Cameron’s love child, followed by a Jerry-Springer type confrontation with the father, has been cut. Why? Because “producers think that Cameron is so thin-skinned he could literally walk out of the ceremony.”

To interrupt the Oscar-heavy news with festival news for a moment, the upcoming South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, has just announced it will host the premiere of producer Robert Rodriguez and director Nimród Antal’s “Predators.” This reboot of the action-monster franchise stars Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, along with Topher Grace, Alice Braga and Laurence Fishburne. In April, New York’s Tribeca Film Festival will introduce its long-awaited move into theatrical and cable-TV distribution. TFF will be launching both Tribeca Film, a new venture that will distribute seven to 10 films a year in theatrical venues and via video-on-demand, and Tribeca Film Festival Virtual, which will screen a number of TFF features online simultaneous with their festival premieres (or “day-and-date,” to use industry lingo).

With all the attention the Oscars garner, studios are trying to match eyeballs with movie posters — even if it requires breaking the law. In Los Angeles, a building owner went to jail on $1 million bail for illegally mounting an eight-story billboard for DreamWorks’ “How to Train Your Dragon.” Apparently, the film distributor, Paramount, “won’t be held accountable.” This doesn’t make the activists happy: “I would say 70-80 percent of the ads on illegal billboards in Los Angeles are for movies and TV shows. In fact, it might even be higher than that,” said Dennis Hathaway, president of the Coalition to Ban the Billboard Blight.

“If ‘The Hurt Locker’ wins the Oscar for best picture Sunday night — and at this stage, the race is really down to either ‘Avatar’ or the Kathryn Bigelow-directed film about bomb disposal experts in Iraq,” writes Patrick Goldstein in an excellent article about the tenuous relationship between the Oscars and movies about war, “it will be the first war film to earn the academy’s top honor in nearly 25 years. In the past 40 years, only three bona fide war films have won the top Oscar — 1970′s ‘Patton,’ 1978′s ‘The Deer Hunter’ and 1986′s ‘Platoon.’”

If you’re a Lewis Carroll buff, or a film history aficionado, check out Stephen Salto’s fascinating IFC.com blog entry on the various incarnations of “Alice in Wonderland” leading up to the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp 3-D version. It features six video clips, including an excerpt  from a British silent version made in 1903 (!) and another from Bill Osco’s 1976 soft-porn rendition, which stars a Playboy cover girl and emphasizes the tag line, “the world’s favorite bedtime story … that’s finally a bedtime story.”

James Cameron is planning to rerelease “Titanic” in 2011, except this time in 3-D. On Moving Image Source, film archivist and curator Leah Churner offers another historical treatise, this one exploring the allure of watching this great ship sink over and over again throughout the 20th century. Only one video clip — but plenty of footnotes! “The first movie dramatization of the event, ‘Saved From the Titanic,’ premiered a month after the collision with the iceberg, on May 14, 1912,” Churner writes. Not only that, the film starred an actual Titanic survivor, Dorothy Gibson, “an actress with the Eclair Moving Picture Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey.” Gibson played herself, wearing the same dress she wore on the night of the disaster. Can you imagine a 9/11 movie released on 9/25?

Have you ever longed to see your favorite movies again, but for the first time? Cinematical ponders this hypothetical question. If your instant reaction is “No,” take a look at these rare photos from the original “Star Wars” series, and see if you can’t contain a bit of nostalgia.

In movie-development gossip, reports abound about “Zoolander 2,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Indiana Jones 5,” “Space Invaders” — based on the vintage video game, of course — and a film based on the just-published novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

Charts can be nerdy, but fun at the same time. Click here to see a list of movie graphs and infographics, including “The Best Movies of All Time Map,” which resembles a map for the London tube.

Since data always presents itself as having all the answers, we’ll end with some questions:

What will it mean to be a film critic in 2010?

Has Hollywood started giving more and more of the plot away in trailers?

If Wes Anderson directed the “Spider-man” reboot, would it look like this?

Kevin Smith’s latest, “Cop Out,” staring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, also has a popular red-band trailer online, featuring a car-thieving, ball-kicking, potty-mouthed, underage youngster.

In related Willis-playing-the-role-of-a-cop news, rumors of another “Die Hard” film have surfaced. This would be the fifth installment, if you’ve lost track of how many times John McClane has graced the big screen with his foul mouth and tendency to solve problems through violence – but he’s an adult, so it’s OK.

Fans eagerly awaiting “Tron: Legacy” will have to keep waiting until December 2010. In the meantime, the Tron promotion campaign is under way with a “Massive Worldwide Scavenger Hunt” to help find Kevin Flynn.

Some critics argue that film sequels ruin great characters, as they veer further and further away from the qualities that made them great to begin with. (Are you listening, George Lucas?) JoBlo.com listed the top 10 examples.

Although technically not a sequel, Stephen Chow, Jack Black and Anne Hathaway are making a new film based on Bruce Lee’s “Way of the Dragon.” Their version of the 1972 classic will be titled “Tai Chi.” Another martial-arts masterpiece to be reinterpreted for a new generation is “The Karate Kid,” except this time it’s set in Beijing, Jackie Chan is Mr. Miyagi, Will Smith’s son, Jaden Smith, is Daniel Larusso, it’s “jacket on, jacket off,” and, oddly, it’s Kung Fu instead of Karate. Watch the new trailer here.

Critics also like to argue that remakes are usually worse than the original, especially when Hollywood makes eviscerated versions of European films. Neil Smith explains: “Why does Hollywood persist in remaking European films? Maybe they think no one will notice. (Few appeared to with ‘Brothers,’ a dreary Yankification of a Danish original from 2004.) Then again, it could be down to simple snobbery: the idea that anything imported from across the water must automatically have class and authority. (That would certainly explain Simon Cowell.) Rightly or wrongly, the qualities people associate with ‘foreign’ movies tend to be the same ones to which many US film-makers aspire – sophistication, worldliness, restraint and finesse.”

But Vadim Rizov is right to remind us that remakes aren’t all bad, and that “sometimes it just took time to get it right: 1941′s beloved ‘The Maltese Falcon’ was the third version in a decade.”

In other film-critic conundrums, Jeffrey Wells argues that director Douglas Sirk doesn’t deserve the praise he receives. Wells states: “Sirk is generally regarded as a pantheon-level guy because the film dweebs have been telling us for years that the dreadfully banal soap-opera acting, grandiose emotionalism and conservative suburban milieus in his films are all of an operatic pitch-perfect piece and are meant as ironic social criticism. (Or something like that.) … The dweebs are playing an old snob game. They’re basically saying that you have to be a serious cineaste to recognize Sirk’s genius, and that if you don’t recognize it then you need to think things through because you’re just not as perceptive as you need to be.”

Glenn Kenny responds with a post defending Sirk. “[Wells is] clearly not interested in having an intelligent discussion of Sirk,” writes Kenny. “Tired of trouncing the Eloi, he arbitrarily decides to have a go at the ‘dweebs,’ or as he sometimes calls them, the ‘monks,’ the ‘cloistered’ ‘urban’ types he’s got some sort of complex about because he thinks they’re lording it over him or something.”

 Although technically not a sequel, or a remake, a Speedy Gonzales film is in the works. Sound terrible? What if you found out George Lopez will voice the computer-generated mouse from Mexico? Worse? What if you found out it will be written by the duo who penned “Garfield”? Even worse? One commenter wrote, “A little too early for April fool’s don’t ya think?” Another wrote, “I weep for humanity.” A third put it the most succinctly: “NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”

What if the Danish government contracted Lars von Trier to make tourism commercials to boost national revenue? They would probably look something like this. Or, here’s “10 Films We’d Like to See Lars Von Trier Force Their Directors To Remake Under Strict Guidelines That Are Meant to Challenge Them Creatively.”

These days, movie news isn’t complete without “Avatar.” As if he doesn’t have enough going for him already, James Cameron is apparently frustrated with the Academy for overlooking his actors when it comes to Oscar nominations. Although Zoe Saldana’s performance as Neytiri could be seen as acting-aided-by-software, advances in technology are eroding the distinction between computer-driven and actor-driven characters. Perhaps the Academy simply has a hidden prejudice against lanky blue people. Continuing with the movie-magic theme, here is an extensive interview with Rick Carter, production designer of “Avatar.” And if Cameron has pre-written an acceptance speech for best picture, I hope it reads like this.

Despite reports that “Bright Star” director Jane Campion “made complaints to authorities in New Delhi after the husband of an organizer at the India International Women’s Film Festival allegedly made ‘lewd advances’ toward both Campion and other women in attendance at the December, 2009 event,” Campion is denying it. She is, however, disappointed in the festival: “Never in my entire experience has a film festival been so fraudulently presented and organised. It’s a shame for the film-makers, the audience, the funding bodies of the countries involved as well as the Indian government who, it appears from the advertising, sponsored them to some degree.” Bhaskar Deb, the accused husband of the festival organizer, responded by calling Campion a “racist from Australia.”

Tom Ford says making “A Single Man” was the “the most rewarding thing that I have ever done.” Read more of his words on his transition from fashion to film and the Independent Spirit awards, where his film is nominated for best first feature, best first screenplay and best male lead.

Have you ever been watching a movie with friends when a minor actor who you’ve seen in a dozen other movies suddenly appears in one particular scene, and even though you’ve never known his name, you’re suddenly overcome with a desire to know? There’s a Web site for that.