by Edward Gross
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With Star Wars moving forward, it fell to Gary Kurtz to work out the logistical plan for the challenge of shooting the film on a trio of continents. For the desert planet of Tatooine, the search for a real desert took place in America, North Africa, and the Middle East, but it was southern Tunisia, located on the Sahara Desert’s edge, that seemed perfect.
ERIC TOWNSEND
Principal photography began on March 22, 1976, at Nefta in the Tunisian Desert, and continued for two and a half weeks. On that first day, they shot scenes that included the Jawas selling the droids beneath the giant Sandcrawler tread, which was built on the salt lake of Chott el Djerid, near Nefta. The scene included twelve local children as extra Jawas. A second scene was also shot at the end of the day featuring Luke and C-3PO rushing out of the Lars homestead to search for the missing Artoo. The shot of Luke watching the twin suns set on the Tatooine horizon was supposed to be filmed that day, but had to be scrapped due to unsuitable weather conditions. It started to rain quite heavily.
GEORGE LUCAS
I wanted it to be shot on location. I tried to find an environment that I could make look spacey and unreal and decided desert would be a good thing that I could actually go on location of. It looked realistic, because I was very keen to have immaculate realism. Which is something I learned from Kurosawa, which was to say even though this is a ridiculous story and it obviously has no reality in it whatsoever, I wanted to make a world that looked like it had been lived in; that had logic on every level so that every cultural artifact, every set piece, had a reason for being there. It wasn’t just sort of willy-nilly. And obviously, everything had to be designed, and designed around things we could get a hold of.
GARY KURTZ
The long shots of the Sandcrawler are miniatures of the whole thing rumbling along across the desert. We did build a full-size piece of it, and that was about 40 feet high and 125 feet long. We did investigate the possibility of using a real, very large earthmover or some such vehicle. The main problem is they weren’t where we needed it to be. They were also very valuable where they are and very expensive to rent. So we felt it was better to build our own. We fabricated the pieces at our studio in London and shipped it all to Tunisia on trucks. We sent four “land trains” (which is what they’re called in Europe)—truck/trailer combinations—across the English Channel, across France and Italy to Genoa and across on the ferry to Tunisia. The last group of material—the Landspeeder and costumes and the robots and all the rest of that—went over on a chartered Lockheed Hercules C-130 and unloaded. We shot for three weeks and got back on the charter and flew back to England.
GEORGE LUCAS
The look it had was pretty shocking when I did it, because everybody thought that science fiction is all clean and perfect. We made sure things looked dirty and that there was running water marks down the walls and all kinds of details on the robots. For whatever reason, I’ve had this relationship with technology. I started out building cars, so it all comes from the point of view of working on a car in a garage where you work on broken cars. In those days when I lived in Modesto and drove to San Francisco, there was pretty much like a 25 percent chance you wouldn’t make it, that the car would break somewhere along the line and you’d have to get it fixed somehow. Now, of course, cars are almost invincible, but in those days they were sort of like computers are today where they don’t always do what you’re telling them to do.
PETER BEALE
The last day before going to Tunisia, late at night, we were still trying to get the gold onto C-3PO (he was black below it), so we had to get gold on there that would stay on there. We were still applying the gold the night before. I say “we” generously; I looked as Bill Welch was doing it, but I was still there.
ROBERT WATTS
The R2-D2 we had on the first film could not turn its head while in the three-legged mode. And although it was radio-controlled, we often had to pull it along on a piece of piano wire. The head could turn in the two-legged mode because Kenny Baker was inside. We made it, but only just. The C-3PO costume was finally put on Anthony Daniels complete on the first day of shooting in Tunisia. That is the scene where Uncle Owen and Luke Skywalker buy the droids from the Jawas outside the homestead set.
MARK HAMILL
The very first shot in the movie is me coming out of that igloo-type dwelling to buy the robots, and I hear Aunt Beru say, “Luke!” What’s so funny was, when I went over to that crater and looked down, it was only about two feet deep. When they did the reverse over my shoulder, it was fifty to one hundred miles away at a real hotel. That was the lobby of the hotel. That’s the magic of movies. You can pretend. When I was walking out of the igloo house, they said, “Walk about ten feet and then react like someone’s calling you,” because Shelagh Fraser, who played Aunt Beru, wasn’t even on set that day.
GILBERT TAYLOR
(director of photography, Star Wars)
It was all a gray mess, and the robots were just a blur. I thought the look of the film should be absolutely clean; also, I was mindful that there was an enormous amount of process work to be done in America after we finished shooting in England, and I knew a crisp result would help. But George saw it differently, so we tried using nets and other diffusions. He asked to set up one shot on the robots with a 300mm lens, and the sand and the sky just mushed together. I told him it wouldn’t work, but he said that was the way he wanted to do the entire film, all diffused.
GEORGE LUCAS
Out of nowhere one night, a storm swept in, a very vicious storm, the worst in fifty years (that’s what they always say), and knocked down all of our sets. The little homestead on the lake was actually blown five miles away. Especially the big, round plastic top to the garage almost went to Algeria. And the Sandcrawler, which was about three and a half stories high, was completely flattened. And of course, I had to shoot the next day. I was already behind schedule. I couldn’t stop shooting just because everything blew away. We managed to get through it. But that day was one I’ll always remember.
ROBERT WATTS
That day we were due to shoot the last day on the homestead set in Tunisia. I was out very early that morning and it was raining very hard with a strong wind. I knew that we were in trouble to go on the salt flats as when they were wet the salt would crack. Underneath the salt, there was greasy mud that would stop the vehicles moving, even those with four-wheel drive. I called the assistant directors and told them to tell the crew I was calling a rest day. I then went out to the set with Les Dilley, the unit art director. The roof of the homestead was nowhere to be seen, it had blown across the salt flat heading for the Algerian border. Other bits of the set were damaged. Les got his crew together whilst I figured out what to do. We continued the next day shooting the other sets scheduled for this part of Tunisia. On the last day at this location, we returned to the salt flat to complete the homestead sequence. The last shot was done as the sun was going down. It is the shot of Luke gazing out as the twin suns are setting. One is the real sun, the other was laid in by ILM [Industrial Light & Magic]. Just as we cut it started to rain and we were in a mad scramble to get all our vehicles off the salt flat. We got them all safely off with the exception of the six-wheel-drive crane, which helped the other vehicles. The crane was on hire from the Tunisian army. We left it stuck in the greasy mud. Luckily we did not need it anymore. So all was well.
MARK HAMILL
I remember when Alec Guinness’s wife was sketching a mosque when we were in Tunisia, and this was taboo to the religion there. A local official realized what she was doing. He grabbed her paper and tore it up. And Lady Guinness was startled and so was Alec. He looked at me and said, “What was that?” I said, “I have no idea. Unless it was the local art critic.”
KENNY BAKER
In the desert, it was freezing in the morning and we all wore anoraks, hats, and goggles. It was like Scott of the Antarctic. Then it changed to violent heat and then wind. All types of weather in
one day! The robot conducted a lot of the heat.
PETER BEALE
Over the years, I’ve read with amusement all sorts of experts discussing it, who had little or nothing to do with it, saying how difficult it was. However, there hasn’t been a film made that is not difficult to make. The smallest film, the biggest film—because all of us want to do better. All of us want to try harder to make it better. When you try and do that with robots and all these things in the desert, just being in the desert in itself is a feat. Of course, it’s difficult, but that’s normal, that’s why we’re the A-team, that’s why we do it properly. I discard all those people that sort of said, “Oh, it was so difficult.” It was difficult on location, but we got it done. We got it done on schedule and got it done quite well. When this crew came back to the studio, they had bonded as the actors had bonded.
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Star Wars began shooting on March 22, 1976, with the commencement of principal photography in the Tunisian Desert, and would continue there for two and a half weeks. On April 2, scenes of the Mos Eisley Cantina were filmed at multiple shooting locations, the exterior shots obtained in Ajim, Djerba. These included the “These are not the droids you’re looking for” Jedi mind trick Obi-Wan pulls on dim-witted stormtroopers, the droids in front of the cantina and the stormtroopers watching the Millennium Falcon take off and blast off. Most of the interior scenes were filmed during April at the Elstree Studios, although there would be additional shooting in Hollywood later on.
Filming moved to Elstree Studios on April 7, where the production shot for fourteen and a half weeks. Finally, on the nineteenth, Lucas did some more work on the script, and it was at this point that Luke Starkiller became Luke Skywalker.
RAY MORTON
As happens in filmmaking, the story continued to evolve during shooting. Luke Starkiller became Luke Skywalker on the day they shot the scene in which Luke first meets Princess Leia. It was then that Lucas decided that Starkiller was too grim a name for his ebullient hero. Most significantly, Lucas decided to kill off Ben Kenobi two-thirds of the way through the story on the way back from Tunisia, where the first scenes of the film were shot. In the shooting script, Ben traveled to Yavin with Luke, Leia, and Han, but then didn’t have much to do from that point on. After seeing how strong Alec Guinness’s dignified performance as the character was, Lucas decided it would be more powerful to have Ben sacrifice himself to help the others escape (something Kane Starkiller also did in the early drafts) and then return as a supernatural entity to guide Luke during the attack on the Death Star. This was an excellent choice that gave the story a solid emotional punch right at the end of the second act, raised the stakes for all the characters (if one of the heroes can die, then all of them can), and—by showing that Kenobi’s mastery of the Force allowed him to conquer death—made an already strong character even more powerful.
MARK HAMILL
I had never been to England. I had been to Glebe Place in a basement apartment and I was near Marylebone station, which was this big train station. And the first time I took the train, I had this overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Why does this look so familiar to me? I couldn’t quite place it. Somehow I mentioned it on set, and Gil Taylor, who was the cinematographer on the original Star Wars, said, “Marylebone station? That’s where we shot A Hard Day’s Night.” “You shot A Hard Day’s Night?,” and he said, “Yes,” and of course I turned into Fab Boy. “Oooh, with the Beatles?” Gil had a little bit of the cantankerous C-3PO in him, that tended to see the dark cloud in the silver lining. He said, “Oh, it was terrible. All those screaming girls.”
GARY KURTZ
George wasn’t happy in England. He doesn’t like being that far from home, and there are a lot of little things that are different—light switches going up instead of down, that sort of thing. Everything is just a little bit different, just enough to throw you off balance. And George is not particularly social to begin with. He never goes out of his way to socialize. It takes him a while to know someone to get intimate with, to share his problems. It’s hard for him to work with strangers.
GEORGE LUCAS
The studios mostly are filled with television. I needed like eleven soundstages and they didn’t have them here. London also had great talent, great actors, they had good carpenters. To do a film like Star Wars is really hard and other than Hollywood the craftsmen in England are the best. And their industry was basically falling apart, so the studios were crumbling and they were selling them. They sold Elstree, which is where I was, and turned it over from having a staff to having independent guys come in and work. And as a result, I was able to get a great deal and save a lot of money. Basically, it’s always been my philosophy to simply go anywhere in the world I can go where I get the lowest price. On this film, we did the budget and it came out to thirteen million. Laddie said the board will never approve this, we can’t do it. It has to be under ten. I said, “I can’t do it for under ten.” This was not a negotiation thing, which I’m sure everybody’s gone through, this is actually a real cost. This is the price. We worked it out, but they are so used to producers and people sort of ripping them off that they don’t believe that there’s actually a real thing behind it. You know, there’s actually that guy who gets paid that much an hour and he’s got to work that many days and that’s what it’s going to cost you. We gave him a budget of $9,999,000 and 99 cents and I said, “I don’t think it will come in at that,” but we did it anyway. It came up to $14 million because that was what it actually costs to do it.
BRIAN JAY JONES
As the writer of Jim Henson’s biography as well, I at least had the perspective I’d gained from it. What I love about this is Jim’s across the street the whole time in the television production. When they came over, they were like, “Really? You guys are going to break for tea right in the middle of the day,” and we get to the very end of the day and it’s like, “We’re not done yet. We need to continue.” And they were like, “Nope. Lights out.” That’s a very un-American way of working, so I’m sure they were just getting used to that style. Because of the British unions, you have mandatory tea breaks and you get to 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever you’ve agreed to, and it is lights out and everyone’s gone for the day.
GEORGE LUCAS
You can imagine what I went through. I had long hair, a beard, I was twenty-nine years old, and their industry was sort of crumbling a little bit. And I walked in there and had this really crazy script and the crew was 100 percent against me except for the art department. They were the only guys that stuck by me through the whole movie.
BRIAN JAY JONES
For Americans, that had to be really tough, especially given somebody like Lucas who’s like, “We’re going to be filming American Graffiti and we’re filming all night, and we may or may not have a permit for it.” It’s like, they’re going to do it as long as it takes to get it done. And when he’s editing the movie, he’s going to stay up all night. He’s not going to leave the editing studio at 9:00 p.m. because the day is over. So the American mentality of filmmaking is kind of the American mentality of the way we do a lot of things, which is just, “Well, we’re on our schedule and everybody just needs to adapt.” I’m sure it had to be very tough getting over there and just really having those strenuous union rules clamped down on lights out at the end of the day no matter what’s going on. So I’m sure that was very frustrating.
GEORGE LUCAS
It was horrible. At the end of the day, you’d have to go to the crew to get a vote on whether or not to continue. Well, the AD [assistant director] was way against me and the cameraman was way against me. Every time they would say no except for the art department, but of course, they were outnumbered, so I had to get it done at five thirty every night. That was the least of it, but they just had no idea and they thought the film was stupid, which, you know, if you read it, it sort of does read kind of stupid.
MARK HAMILL
I have to tell you, the crew that was making it, they wer
e all very professional, but they all thought it was, to put it kindly, rubbish. They thought it was silly. I mean, there wasn’t a lot they could compare it to except, maybe Doctor Who or the comic strip Dan Dare. The idiom was not really something that was familiar to the British crew. So they were really nice and they liked all of us, but they just thought it was ridiculous.
BRIAN JAY JONES
The crew doesn’t understand Star Wars. The feeling was, “We make great art over here and what is this?” And Huyck or whoever had the great story about, “Get more light on the rug or get more light on the dog.” Like, they had these disparaging names for every character in the movie. So, yes, the British clearly just didn’t get it. One of the cool stories about Star Wars was the process of putting together that film and the story is, again, very American with a lowercase A in this case.