Growing up in Modesto, California, a small city he later immortalised in American Graffiti (1973), Lucas wanted to be a racing driver. A near-fatal accident ended that ambition but gave him more time to explore his other passions, photography and the study of other cultures. Modesto was an agricultural town with two movie theatres, one for A films, one for B films.

“B films were all the Roger Corman films cheap films,” Lucas recalls. “Once I could drive, I could sneak into San Francisco and see films that were very different, like Fellini’s. Sometimes these films were seriously experimental, and I liked that. I said, ‘This is great. I can do this.’” Before he considered filmmaking, Lucas thought he might become an anthropologist, a student of how societies organise meaning. The museum, in this sense, returns him to that earlier fascination, albeit with different tools.

“What I found I was really interested in,” he says, “is making movies about primitive societies.” To do this, Lucas moved to Los Angeles to study at the University of Southern California, not far from where his museum will stand. Los Angeles is also where Lucas began buying the first pieces that he will soon share with the public. “When I was in college, I started collecting what I could afford, which was comic art,” Lucas says. “I could get a great piece for $35; it was kind of an underground thing.”

As his fortunes changed, so did the scale of his acquisitions. After American Graffiti, then Star Wars, the collection expanded outward, absorbing paintings, illustrations, photographs, and artefacts from cinema history. Lucas also kept sketches, models, costumes, and other by products of his own productions. “After a while, I had something like 30,000 pieces,” he says.