We are nearing the end of our allotted time with His Eminence, Lord of the Empire, Creator of the Galaxy, Purveyor of The Force, Master of All Jedis George Lucas when, feeling the hot breath of his publicist, we announce the proverbial last question:

"I'm sure that over the last two decades, you've heard many times from historians and film critics how you and Steven Spielberg, with Jaws and Star Wars, changed the course of film history. How you created the blockbuster mentality that ended the golden age of the 1960s and '70s. What do you think about that?"

Glad you asked . . .

"That little myth got started by a critic who didn't know much about the movie business," Lucas said, referring, we would later learn, to David Thomson's "Who Killed the Movies?" essay in a 1996 issue of Esquire. "It's amazing how the media has sort of picked it up as a fact."

For the next 20 minutes, Lucas would have plenty to say about his and Spielberg's legacy, maintaining that far from cramping the styles of serious film-makers, their successes have helped pave the way for the current popularity of independent and art-house pictures.

"There's an ecosystem in the film business," he says. "What happens is when Steven and I make our movies and they make billions of dollars, well, half of that money goes to theatre owners. For every billion we make, a half-billion goes to them. What do they do with that money? They make more multiplexes."

More multiplexes means more screens, which means more room for more movies. Thus, room for more non-mainstream films. "Maybe not in the summer, when there are all these giant films out there, but in the autumn and in the spring, you can go to just about any multiplex and two or three theatres are playing art films."

So will Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace be big enough to finance more multiplexes? "Obviously, I'm paying for it, so I don't look at it as quite the sure thing everybody else does," Lucas says. "In order to be a big hit, you have to have repeat business. That's the key to anything getting into the stratosphere of grosses. I know we have a good audience for it, but will they keep coming back? That's the question."

So, what's Phantom really going to do? How sure a sure thing is it? How much will it rake in on opening weekend?

"I'm not sure we're going to make it over $100 million on opening weekend," he says. "We're not going to be on as many screens as Jurassic Park, or whatever the record holder is." (It's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, at $90.1 million.)

The Phantom Menace is giving itself a "long weekend", of course, by virtue of a (relatively recent) decision to open today, on a Wednesday, instead of the usual Friday opening. This will pose a problem for some fans - thousands of whom are expected to phone in sick to work. It's the Star Wars flu.

Without that crucial repeat business, Lucas says a movie can't generate $300 million in first-run box office, but few insiders expect The Phantom Menace to slow down until it has the $600 million record of Titanic at least in sight. When it comes to repetitive behaviour, love-struck teen-age girls may be no match for Star Wars-struck kids, and their arcade-generation dads - the first generation of turnstile-spinning Star Wars fans - who are likely to tag along.

There are actually indications that diversity in the US film market is healthier today than in the mid-1970s, a period considered by many critics a watershed of mature film-making. There has been a huge increase in the number of successful art films, and anyone flipping through movie ads must agree there certainly is a lot of choices among non-mainstream pictures. To a large extent, that is due to the doubling of the number of cinema screens in the US, from 16,554 in 1977 to 31,865 at the end of 1997.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace will open today on 3,000 of those screens. (That compares to 7,000 for Godzilla, which died of overkill.)

At any rate, Lucas won't take the rap for the decline in the quality of films, in spite of the argument that Star Wars and Jaws shifted the balance of power from film-makers to studios - which could insist on movies that followed a proven formula.

He says what really galls critics is the amount of money a few people - he and Spielberg, notably - have made. And another thing: Movies in the 1970s weren't that great.

"I grew up in that era and it's a complete myth! There were four or five movies that were really interesting and were about something . . . the others weren't about anything."