At 64 years old, George Lucas, creator of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, is ready for change. He may stand as one of the most influential film-makers of modern times, but he has directed very few movies. After taking the helm for arguably the most influential film of all time with the first Star Wars movie in 1977, he did not direct again for another 20 years, when he launched the three Star Wars prequels, released between 1999 and 2005. All that, however, is about to change.

"From now on, I'm going to be able to do my own thing," he begins, holding court in his HQ at Skywalker Ranch. "And I know that because I want to make more personal films, and more esoteric, that they are not going to find a giant audience. So I've built up a fund, a financial fund, that I can blow on this." And what might these esoteric, personal films be? "I don't want to say right now. All I'll say is that I love making movies. I'd sooner just make them and not even release them; just put them on the shelf, like ships in a bottle, where I can say, Oh look, let me show you my collection'. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. They are a very, very expensive hobby. And you have to get people to want to go and see them."

While it seems unlikely that a George Lucas film, no matter how personal or esoteric, would struggle to find an audience, the film-maker cites the example of his friend, Francis Ford Coppola, whose own personal movie, the recent Youth without Youth, collected all of $250,000 at the box office. Lucas, however, remains unperturbed. As he says, he has a "financial fund" that will allow him to fail, and those funds show no sign of drying up. The most recent instalment of his and Steven Spielberg's Indy saga, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, took almost $750m at the international box office.

He currently has two separate Star Wars projects on the go. The first is Star Wars: The Clone Wars, a animated movie that opens next week, and will then launch a TV show on the Cartoon Network later in the year. After that comes a live action TV series, akin to the recent Battlestar Galactica series - which is ironic given that the original Battlestar TV series from the 1970s was regarded as something of a Star Wars rip-off.

"The live action programme is completely separate from the Star Wars film," he says. "The animated Clone Wars film and show, however, has all of the characters that everybody knows - everybody from Yoda to Anakin to Mace Windu to Obi-Wan - everybody's there. But the live-action series has nobody there, because it's after Episode III, so everybody's dead, basically, or hiding somewhere.

"With the animated movie and TV show, I came up with the idea of doing these little five-minute promos for the Cartoon Network a while back and we hired a really great animation director. He came up with these little shows to provide a transition between Episodes II and III, because I knew that we weren't going to deal with the Clone Wars elsewhere. It's like making a movie about the Second World War and then going back to fill in the some of the holes. I'd wanted to do some animation - I've been a big fan of anime and Asian culture - so we decided to do a full TV show and, to launch that, we did the Clone Wars movie."

That Lucas is turning his hand to animation is somewhat apt. Before he set out on the road to Star Wars-fuelled super-fame, a young Lucas had fostered dreams of becoming an artist and illustrator. Indeed, his first course at film school was an animation class.

"Right at the beginning I wanted to be an illustrator," he says, "and then I wanted to go to art school, to an arts centre in Los Angeles. My father said, No way, you are not going to be an artist. Artists don't make any money and I won't pay for that'. Knowing I was a lazy under-achiever then, he knew I wasn't going to pursue that seriously. It was hard. But I do believe that in the end if I had gone to the arts centre and started to be an illustrator, I would probably have drifted into animation and I'd probably have been an animator, and would then probably moved into Star Wars, just like I did.

"It would probably be the same thing with anthropology, which was my first major at college. I'd have made documentaries and eventually features and done exactly just what I did. If you take all the things that I love - art, anthropology and making movies - what I do pulls them all together."

This is certainly true of his two biggest cinematic contributions. Star Wars, as fans know, draws heavily on the work of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, particularly his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, while the Indiana Jones franchise is riddled with stories of treasured artefacts and anthropological marvels. Lucas says that he and Spielberg may yet add to the Indy saga.

"We were pleased with the financial performance of the last Indy film, of course," he says. "It's about what we expected and if you take into account inflation, it's roughly what all the Indy films have done. I had a lot of fun getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Because I had one idea about what I wanted, and Steven and Harrison didn't like it, and we were constantly going back. So if I can come up with another idea that they like, then we'll do it." He laughs. "Although Steven wasn't that really enthusiastic about doing the last one!

"I still have a direction I'd like to take the series in; I'm in the future, he's in the past. He's trying to drag it back to the way they were. I'm trying to push it to a whole different place so still we have a sort of tension. This one came out of that tension. It was a kind of a hybrid of our two ideas, so we'll see where we are able to take the next one."

In the meantime, Lucas is about to start production on Red Tails, which tells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen - who might sound like distant relatives of Star Wars' Tusken Raiders - but who were in fact a real-life USAF squadron, and the first black pilots to fight in the Second World War. "I've had a hard time putting Red Tails together, 18 years it's taken me," he says, "because the story is so great, so fantastic but so big. There is also an element of personal responsibility to those who were involved. I'm only going to produce Red Tails, we have a black director. But then, like I said, I think I am going to direct some more, make some films that have a personal significance. I just hope people want to see them."

Star Wars: The Clone Wars is released on Friday, August 15.