The Starz original documentary "Fog City Mavericks: The Filmmakers of San Francisco" (9 p.m. Monday) interviews and draws connections among movie directors who hail from a California city that is decidedly not Hollywood.

Producer-director Gary Leva interviews acclaimed filmmakers with ties to the city by the Bay, including Clint Eastwood ("Letters from Iwo Jima"), Francis Ford Coppola ("The Godfather"), Chris Columbus ("Rent"), John Lasseter ("Finding Nemo") and George Lucas ("Star Wars"), who spoke with the Post-Gazette about "Fog City Mavericks" last week.

Q: Had you ever pondered the plethora of filmmakers that hail from the Bay Area before "Fog City Mavericks" and to what do you attribute it?

A: The movie was really done to say, "Hey, there is a thriving movie community outside of Hollywood." It's not just San Francisco. There's also one in Austin, Texas, and New York and more people also in Chicago and other places around the country. And as it turned out, San Francisco is a small community, but it's had quite an impact on film in the United States, and because the films are so successful, they tend to be lumped into films made in Hollywood. But there's an actual difference in attitude about why the movies are made and the commitment to the movies, which makes them different.

I've always been a big promoter of regional cinema here in San Francisco, and I always felt that it's an unknown reality that films are made outside of the [Hollywood] system. ... People make little art films and people make films that are relatively mainstream or appear to be mainstream only they're not the kind of movies being made by the studios. ["Fog City"] is just a way of saying there's a part of cinema out there most people haven't paid attention to.

Q: In the film it's said that you wanted to be an abstract, underground filmmaker. At what point did that change?

A: It was a matter of opportunity. Growing up near San Francisco, my only real contact with movies was underground movies. ... I kind of liked those abstract movies, and at that point I wanted to be an anthropologist. I wasn't aiming to make those movies. It's what I was attracted to until I went to film school, and that's when I figured I would make a living doing documentary films.

I started winning scholarships, including one where I met Francis [Ford Coppola]. I didn't know anything about Hollywood movies. In film school I was interested in foreign films, and [Hollywood movies] really weren't what I thought I was going to do. It wasn't until I started working with Francis as his assistant on "The Rain People." We started shooting the picture in New York and worked our way across the country, and when we finished the movie, we came back to San Francisco and decided we were going to set up shop here and not go back to Los Angeles. Then opportunities started to present themselves.

Q: What were some of those opportunities?

A: [I was given the chance] to make my student film "THX 1138" into a feature, and I thought I shouldn't pass this opportunity up. Then after that, Francis challenged me to do something more accessible ... and then I started working on "American Graffiti." And after that, before it came out, I thought maybe I'll try one big Hollywood movie that has sets and where you work on a soundstage. And I decided it would be a film for young people and then I'd go back to being a documentary filmmaker and make underground movies. ... I got roped into a different direction. It wasn't really intentional. I got very successful at something I was experimenting with to see what it would be like to do it. I was always saying to my friends, "Well, as soon as I finish this, I'll go back and do my underground movies," and I've never really gotten back to it.

Q: And yet you've maintained your independence. You built a moviemaking facility outside of San Francisco and you finance your own films, including the most recent "Star Wars" trilogy.

A: We strived to get to a point where we could make our own movies and finance our own movies and not have an influence of the studios in our movies. There are a lot of different definitions of, What are independent movies? For me, it doesn't make any difference where they are made as long as you're independent of the corporation and the institution and the people involved are able to make the movie on your own with your own ideas. You want to make it without interference.

The studio would never have allowed me to make the last three ["Star Wars" films]. I'm making ["Phantom Menace"] about a 10-year-old boy and even people in my own company were saying it was a mistake, that people wanted to see Darth Vader, and you can't make it with an all-new cast, and you'll destroy the franchise. If I'd been at a studio, they would have just said no. But I had a story to tell and I wasn't really concerned that maybe it won't succeed. I didn't expect any of them to succeed.

It was the same thing with "The Empire Strikes Back": It's a down story, it has an inconclusive ending where the bad guys win. People said, that's not what the franchise is, but I said, that's the story I'm fighting to tell. The story was not a sequel but more of a continuation of this idea I had and I wanted to get finished.

Q: "Fog City Mavericks" describes your childhood interest in anthropology. With Indiana Jones in the related field of archaeology, is there some aspect of your interest that you'll bring to "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," due in theaters on May 22, 2008?

A: The Indy movies are sort of the least involved with anthropology, which has to do with mythology and the way we form our culture. I think of anthropology as a form of psychological archaeology as opposed to the regular archaeology of digging up physical things and culture. It's trying to figure out what people think and what they believe. ...

Both "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" were based on serials from the '30s, but the new Indiana Jones we've switched because it takes place in the '50s instead of the '30s, so it's more based on B-movies of the '50s, so it is a little bit different. But it's still Indiana Jones, it's still a quest for something and all that.