Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  MARK HAMILL

  They thought it would be a movie that would be released only on matinees for children in the daytime.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  It’s hard to be the only person in the room that gets it, because even people like Mark Hamill, who’s nerdy enough, I think understands what Lucas is trying to do, but I can’t imagine how hard it is to be doing something and somebody telling you, “Okay, later on in production you’ll actually see what the planet will be there.” There’s so much shit that you can’t tell what’s going on. I think even Peter Cushing talks about it like he didn’t know what a goddamn line of dialogue meant; he had no clue what he was talking about most of the time. It’s really hard to be the only one there and they’re like, “Okay, you’re going to be looking out here at the end and you’re going to see a planet blow up.” And it’s like, “So why are we blowing it up?” “Never mind. Don’t worry about your motivation.” Lucas is one of these guys with actors where he’s like, “You’re not Brando. You don’t get a motivation. Just do the lines that are on the page,” and then zero feedback for the actors. I always love those stories where the actors are busting his balls about his direction consisting of, “Faster and more intense.” That was the only direction he could ever give anybody.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  I’ve been described as a Machiavellian director. I get what I want, but a lot of time I get it indirectly by putting people in situations where it just happens.

  MARK HAMILL

  There would be moments during the making of the movie where I’d say, “Hey, George, instead of saying this, can I say that?” And he’d go, “Hmmm, no, I like the way it is. Just do it the way it’s in the script.” And then Harrison would do an ad-lib and he’d get away with it! And I said, “How come you get to?,” and he said, “Look, don’t ask. Just do it. He’s got so many things on his mind that, A, he might not notice and, B, he might like it better if he sees it in performance.” So that’s another little tip, not to be forthcoming. I’ve used it ever since.

  CARRIE FISHER

  “Faster and more intense” were his actual directions. At one stage he lost his voice and we joked about getting two boards fixed up each with their own horn on top and “Faster!” chalked on one and “More Intense!” chalked on the other. He also told me to stand up straight a lot and act more like a Princess. George didn’t really have the character well defined. He gave me a lot of freedom and responsibility. The first day I met him, he said that I could change any dialogue that I felt uncomfortable saying. In fact, I changed very little. When I see how I said a lot of it, I wish I had changed more. But that’s me just being strict with myself. The only thing you couldn’t tell from the script was the style and that was one thing that George communicated really well to all of us. For example, he wanted the dialogue read straight. Like, “I thought I recognized your foul stench, Tarkin.” Not thrown away like I was originally going to do: “When I came on board, you know, I thought, the smell. Who is that?” George didn’t want us to cheat like that. Go for broke—and I went for broke.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  There’s a great bit you’ve probably seen where they show the three of them come running through a room and then they get down and they turn to Lucas and he tells them it’s going well. Well, Lucas said it was pretty good and they’re just so excited by this. And he actually looks happy, because Mark Hamill’s got this great quote where he says that George always looked like he was ready to burst into tears, which I think we can probably all relate to.

  MARK HAMILL

  One time when we were shooting some of the action sequences, trying to get the Princess out of the detention cell on the Death Star, one of the British crew members came up to me and he said, “Don’t you think that it’s just a little phony that you have these forty thousand stormtroopers after you, and you have not been hit once? I mean, can’t you just get a little flak on your arm?” By that time I knew, and George had really told me, and Gary had really told me, it’s just not that kind of movie. It’s a fairy tale, it’s sweet, and it’s a swashbuckler.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  The thing Lucas has to do, and it’s huge, is cede control and he has to let the union guys do their stuff, he has to let Gary Kurtz do his thing. And being in charge of all that would have killed him, but I think it also killed him not being in charge of everything, having to put his life in another man’s hands, so to speak, at any given moment. That had to make that super hard. But, again, he got physically ill. When you see the pictures of him directing, he actually has gray in his beard. You see photos of Obama, his hair goes white in two and a half years. It’s the agony and ecstasy of Star Wars is what people always call it. I remember seeing an interview with Harrison Ford talking about pointing guns that don’t make any sound and you’re just hoping that you’ve got the gun pointed somewhere in the direction so that when they put in the laser in post, it actually hits what you’re supposed to be shooting at. And it’s a real leap of faith on everybody’s part and it’s all hanging around Lucas’s shoulders. So, of course, I think he was scared shitless.

  * * *

  Some of that fear must have been assuaged as he watched set designs being brought to life, his imagination finding itself becoming rooted in the real world.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  John Barry was a really fantastic art director. Really, really great guy. He put together an art department, prop guys … the whole little group, and they were completely 100 percent on my side. Very supportive of me in every possible way. And no matter how wacky I got, they would go along with it and came up with other things. They actually contributed a lot by bringing things in. The design work in Star Wars, and especially as it goes on to all the other ones, is huge. It’s beyond anything that anybody can imagine.

  GILBERT TAYLOR

  John Barry’s sets, particularly the Death Star, was like a coal mine. They were all black and gray, with really no opportunities for lighting at all. My work was a matter of chopping holes in the walls and working the lighting into the sets, and this resulted in a “cut-out” system of panel lighting using quartz lamps that we could put in the walls, ceiling, and floors. I thought I was going to get sacked, but Fox agreed that we couldn’t have this “black hole of Calcutta.” So, George concentrated on the actors while I took care of my end. This lighting approach allowed George to shoot in almost any direction without extensive relighting, which gave him more freedom. George avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one, so I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture. I took it upon myself to experiment with photographing the lightsabers and other things onstage before we moved on to our two weeks of location work in Tunisia.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Take the stormtroopers. That was, again, John Barry. We were molding plastic, which was like a new thing. Getting a vacuum form machine is a big deal, and we’ve got the only one in England. It came from some factory; we just grabbed it and we also did another kind of vacuum forming with John designing the sets. I mean, Ralph McQuarrie kind of designed what they look like, but then John took those designs and made them into panels. So we made four-by-eight panels, which is kind of like sheets of plywood, made out of some kind of fiberglass mold that he did. Vacuum formed was a whole different approach to building sets. And that was one of the ways we got it done. It was figuring out new ways to accomplish things without spending.

  MARK HAMILL

  When we were wearing the stormtrooper uniforms, you couldn’t sit down. They put us in piece by piece, and they built us some saw horses to sit on and that’s the most we could rest all day. It was terrible. Plus, you get panicky inside those helmets, because it’s not like any mask at all which is fitted up against your face. You can see the inside of the helmet and it’s all sickly green, plus you’ve got wax in your ears because of the explosions. You just feel eerie, because with the helmet on you feel that you’re in your own little thing because n
obody’s talking to you. I only once freaked out and said, “Get me outta here!” It was really uncomfortable.

  * * *

  Part of the discomfort came from wearing the stormtrooper outfit in a sequence on the Death Star where Luke, Leia, and Han are in a trash compactor that’s being set to … compact.

  MARK HAMILL

  The monster that pulls me under the water in the trash compactor, in the script it said it was a Dianoga. It’s never said in the movie. Under our stormtrooper gear, we had scuba gear on. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that cold. It’s just the way it was. What happens is that every time I went underwater, I’d have to go upstairs to my dressing room, take off the stormtrooper gear, take off the scuba gear, change my underwear, put on a new scuba outfit, put on new stormtrooper gear, and have someone do my hair. So it was a real pain. Make sure everything is fine before I go back down underwater!

  One time we were sort of just hanging around the trash compactor, and there are all these floating bits of polystyrene—we call it Styrofoam. And George of course was up here; we were down in the compactor. He was twisting his beard and frowning; he was his usual unhappy self. You can imagine that after all these years of imagining this, that he has to realize it on film and that’s where your imagination is. He’s got to be worried about a bazillion other things. What happened was he and I just linked eyes. We just noticed each other and just to cheer him up I took a little piece of polystyrene off my stormtrooper outfit and said, singing, “Pardon me, George, could this be Dia-noga poo-poo?” For younger people there’s a song called “Pardon Me Boys, Is This the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?” I thought that would make him laugh. All he did was, he walked up to me like this [head down], put his foot on my chest, and pushed me under the water, [as Lucas calls out] “All right, get him out, up to the dressing room.” [Hamill, facetiously waving fist] “Curse you, George, I’ll never try humor on you again.”

  * * *

  The sequence obviously had an impact on Hamill, who adds that he actually burst a blood vessel during it. Beyond that, there was the Errol Flynn–like sequence on the Death Star, where Leia and Luke make a death-defying leap across a massive chasm.

  MARK HAMILL

  We were on a platform, and there was a cut-out area where it dropped down lower, where the scuba guy and the scuba gear was, with his hand around my ankle. “I think there’s something in here!” And when it came time for me to cue him, I’d just tap my foot and he’d yank me down. For some reason, I thought it’d be a great idea when I was underwater … you know how you can make your face go red by forcing blood to your face? I thought it’d be so cool, because once I went underwater, they wrapped the Dianoga tentacle around my neck. When I came up, I was just scarlet red, like I was being choked. And I did it so hard I did burst a blood vessel. And George later said, “Why did you do that? It was really stupid.” And I said, “Well, I wanted it to look like I was really being choked.” He said, “Well, there’s a red filter on the camera to make it look like the red lights, so you’re not going to see it anyway.” And the problem was, for the next few days they had to shoot me from the other side, because I had a burst blood vessel.

  CARRIE FISHER

  I was scared to death of swinging across the Death Star chasm … but I was sort of sorry we got it right on the first take. I wanted to do it again.

  MARK HAMILL

  I do remember the “swing across.” I was looking forward to that all week long. We were both in harnesses, the way you would be for Peter Pan. So we were all on wires. They had our two harnesses linked together, Carrie and I. And so we’re ready to go. What I didn’t realize was that they had at least four cameras going, in my memory. Maybe three. Normally in a movie, you do a scene over and over. We might spend all day doing that. We swung across once. What a gyp!

  * * *

  One of the most ambitious set pieces of the film in terms of physical production was the final sequence where the heroes (sans Chewbacca) are given their awards for the destruction of the Death Star by Princess Leia.

  PETER BEALE

  We had this enormous sequence to do. First of all, building it, we were talking about going down to Shepperton Studios and the big “H” stage down there, but to build this was going to cost a fortune. To employ a thousand crowd in England is an enormous undertaking. To have a thousand costumes. To have a place for a thousand people to change. Little lockers to put their possessions. To feed them. To have toilets. We’re talking about an enormous scene and we didn’t have much of the contingency [money in the budget reserved to cover expenses] left. I went to George and said, “You know, George, when the queen does investitures, she does it a bit more modestly at Buckingham Palace. Could we consider a different form of investiture program?” He said, “No, Peter, I really want this big thing.” So I went to John Barry and Gil Taylor and said, “Can we do an old-fashioned theme? Can we try it? Would you be prepared to do it? Would you design a set where the foreground hides the walls; a couple of fronts of columns and instead of having a thousand crowd, having one hundred and expose them multiple times in different positions.” Now, it’s done all the time in digital stuff, but in the past, it had been done many years before, but hadn’t been done for a long time.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Part of the reason for filming in England is because he needs a gigantic soundstage, because he’s got this goddamn medal ceremony in every draft of Star Wars. And it’s great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s one of those things that, like the cutting the arm off in the cantina, were in draft one and made it all the way through. I think had he found a soundstage at Universal, he would have one there, but they weren’t big enough, so he’s doing it for the vision of that award ceremony at the very end. Of course, he still doesn’t have enough bodies to put into that ceremony; he’s got cardboard cutouts. But I think that partly defined why he was there. It wasn’t necessarily cheaper in England, which is the thing people always forget. Taxes were very high and the cost of everything was a lot.

  PETER BEALE

  John Barry designed this set where you can see two foreground pieces, not very much of them and inexpensive to build. The background, the lights were matted in, so that one didn’t have to be built. We got a very good motion camera and put it and Gil at the very back of the studio at Elstree, on the lighting rail at the farthest back corner. It was locked off so it couldn’t possibly move. Put one thousand feet of film in and brought a one hundred crowd in. Gil lit the one hundred crowd and everything was absolutely black. We then moved the one hundred crowd to the next position, rewound the film through the camera with a cap on the lens, and moved the one hundred crowd, relit them to the next position, everything black, and we did that ten times. I said to George, “Let’s try it. If it fails, we’ve spent a day and we’ll come up with Plan B. But if it works, it’s going to be great.” This is what we did and then finally everything was black except the central pathway and the actors walked down the central pathway. I was very nervous and got in early next day to see the rushes. I’m pleased to say that it worked.

  MARK HAMILL

  When we went to get our medals, Harrison and I came down the steps, walked all along the alleyway, and then up the stairs to where the Princess was. And, of course, all the guys lined up. They didn’t give them a script. They didn’t know what the movie was about. So during rehearsal, under their breaths, they’re saying things like, “Fucking wankers.” It was bothering me. Harrison was all, “Who cares?” I said, “I care!” I went over to the guys and I said, “Do you know what this scene is?” and they said, “No, no one tells us anything.” And I said, “Well, this is the end of the movie where we’ve defeated the evil Galactic Empire, destroyed their superweapon, and you guys are all the heroes that helped us succeed.” Well, the minute they heard that all of that teasing and razzing went away. It taught me something: you include the background artists, as they call them in England, or extras.

  In any case, we rehearsed the scene and I’m i
n that yellow jacket and Luke is so proud. And, “Action!” Step, step, step, and they said, “Okay, good, but we’ve got to do it again. Some camera problems.” This is rehearsal. So on the second rehearsal, I went step, step, step-step, step, step. Harrison said, “Come here a minute. Is that the way you’re going to do it with that little extra step?” Because he was doing the same. We were syncopated. I said, “It’s justified, because Luke’s anxious. He really wants to get there. Solo’s, you know, blasé. He doesn’t care.” But it was probably stealing the “center of interest.” Harrison’s a very generous guy, but he will not abide stealing center of interest. And I thought it was justified, I should really do it. But pick your battles, you know? Don’t sweat the small stuff, so I didn’t do it and Harrison and I have remained friends ever since.

  * * *

  By the beginning of May 1976, the pressure of making Star Wars wasn’t abating at all. It was around this time that Alan Ladd and additional executives from Fox flew to England to view some dailies and get some reassurance about the film’s mounting cost. In his memoirs, Ladd wrote of this moment: “I was warned upfront that it was a very rough assembly, and that they were quite unhappy with the editor. The picture started and all I could say was, ‘That’s interesting; it looks good’ and so forth. But, and I never said this to George, my real reaction was utter and complete panic. I didn’t sleep that night. But the next day I spoke to George and when I heard specifically what his concerns were, and how things should be changed, I must say I lost the anxiety about it. Had George said, ‘Didn’t you love it?,’ I would have been very scared and very nervous. But he said, ‘This is not what I want and this is not what it’s going to look like.’ He explained that he hadn’t even seen a lot of the footage himself yet.”