George Lucas

Raised on a walnut ranch in Modesto, California, Lucas was more interested in cars and racing as a teenager than in film, until a near-fatal car crash days before his high school graduation reportedly redirected his ambitions entirely. He enrolled at the University of Southern California's film school, where he fell in with a generation of future New Hollywood directors and impressed instructors enough to be invited onto a Warner Bros. soundstage as an observer — an experience that led directly to his mentorship under Francis Ford Coppola.

Lucas is the man who turned Saturday-matinee serials into the modern blockbuster. He built Industrial Light & Magic essentially from nothing to make Star Wars possible, assembling a team of young effects artists to invent techniques — most notably the computer-controlled Dykstraflex camera — that the existing effects industry simply couldn't provide. In doing so he changed how effects-driven cinema was made forever, and his decision to retain merchandising and sequel rights, which 20th Century Fox considered worthless at the time, quietly made him one of Hollywood's wealthiest independent filmmakers almost overnight.

He stepped back from directing for two decades after the original trilogy, focusing on producing and on ILM's continued technical innovation, before returning to write and direct the prequel trilogy beginning in 1999. That return pioneered digital cinematography at a scale no studio production had previously attempted, and though the prequels divided critics and fans, their technical legacy — an entirely digitally shot, effects-driven blockbuster — is now the industry standard.