George Lucas flies to Nice as Cannes retrospective honours his work

George Lucas departed Los Angeles International Airport on May 28 aboard the Gulfstream V N138GL and touched down at Nice-Côte d'Azur Airport ten and a half hours later, on May 29. The 4,700-nautical-mile hop put the filmmaker in the south of France just as the Cannes Film Festival was entering its final weekend, a pattern he has repeated during prior festivals.

The same week Lucas arrived in Nice, the Cannes Film Festival was screening a restored 4K version of THX 1138 and hosting a public conversation with the director as part of its Cannes Classics sidebar, per the festival’s official programme published in April. The tribute, which also included a screening of American Graffiti, gave the festival a chance to honor Lucas’s broader body of work beyond Star Wars, a rare public appearance for the famously private filmmaker.

Recent flight records show George Lucas spent much of May shuttling between his Bay Area base at KSFO and the New York area, with stops in Chicago and Seattle — a mix of business meetings and personal travel typical of a filmmaker who keeps a low profile but maintains active interests in education and film preservation. The Cannes trip, by contrast, is a deliberate return to the art-house roots he rarely discusses in interviews.