The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “Everything has mushroomed,” Lucas said in January 1978. “Before, I had these modest dreams; now I’m sitting on top of a corporation that is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve had to hire people and start new hierarchies, new bureacracies, new everything to make the whole thing work.”

  LOST SISTER DEVELOPMENT

  “I also want to develop Luke’s sister. The idea is that Luke’s father had two children who were twins. He took one of them to an uncle on one side of the universe and one to the other side of the universe, so that they would be safe. If one got killed, the other wouldn’t even know that the other one was there. She also becomes a Jedi—she’s doing the same thing simultaneously that Luke is doing. Eventually in some episode, not this one, we could cope with Luke and his sister, and how she is the female Jedi and he is the male Jedi.

  “Luke gets his awareness of his lost sister through the Jedi training. We can come up with some interesting pieces of background.”

  Screenwriter Leigh Brackett.

  LOVE STORY DEVELOPMENT

  “A nice romantic story could be built up around the ice, think of Doctor Zhivago [1965], romantic images; snow will be threatening and romantic at the same time. It should be a more fiery relationship than it was before, because now it really means something. Han would state his position, sulks off. It should be very mature in the way it works. It’s not until later that we realize that Leia doesn’t love Luke. It has got to be a real triangle with real emotions; at the same time, it has to end up with good will. Luke has gone off to learn the Force and the ongoing story continues with Leia and Han. The Empire continues to chase them. We keep them in a constant danger situation.

  “This is where Leia and Han meet up with the third guy, the gambler. Could have Han and Leia go to a Wookiee planet. We could have this new character, the gambler, run a general store on the Wookiee planet, a guy who trades with the Indians sort of thing.

  “We have to work with Han to make him roguish. A way to visualize it is to see Han as Rhett Butler, Leia is Scarlett, and Luke is Ashley. This would change the beginning when Luke is sick and Han comes on to her; she rejects Han, though she is excited by him. We can do the old-fashioned traditional things that work so well. Trouble is, in order for that to work, you really have to believe in the people. We have set up such a fairy tale, we have to figure out if we have an environment where you can pull off something like that. A lot of people who see the film don’t really believe it anyway, they sort of go along with the fun of it.

  “Somewhere along the line, we’ll place the Errol Flynn kiss that knocks her off her feet. In scene 31, space, we have the continuation of the love affair; a scene between Chewbacca and Threepio with Han and Leia in the background being lovey-dovey. Chewbacca and Threepio carrying on a conversation, since Threepio can more or less understand Chewbacca. Maybe they are playing a game and are commenting on the mushy thing that is going on between Han and Leia; they’re like kids who don’t like what the adults are doing. Chewbacca is out of sorts about the whole thing, jealous; Threepio thinks the whole emotional thing is silly. He doesn’t know what Master Luke is going to think about this whole thing.”

  OBI-WAN (“BEN”) KENOBI DEVELOPMENT

  “I may bring back Ben eventually; I’ll have to bring back his voice. May also bring back the ghost of Ben, not the person of Ben. Luke is learning the Force through a combination of things, rituals. Some of the Force came from Carlos Castaneda’s book Tales of Power [1974]. The idea that you can see things in another dimension would work great, that Ben is now part of the Force and he can be there with Luke. As Luke goes through this experience, he begins to see Ben in this other dimension. He can begin to see his ancestors in this other dimension with the Force, which would mean we could then bring them back in a different kind of way.

  “Ben will explain to Luke that he will gather all these powers, but he can’t use them for evil or he will succumb to the dark side of the Force. If you use it for evil, it will start using you. It is a force for good, but the more you become addicted to it, the more it controls you and the side that controls you is the bad side. The side that you can control is the good side. The good side is a passive side and the bad side is an aggressive side. Two sides to the Force: One is aggressive, one is passive in relationship to things.” (In one of his notes, Lucas wrote, “The mood of a warrior calls at once for control and abandon; the Force commands you and obeys you—unity of opposites.”)

  “If you use it well, you can see the future and the past. You can read minds and you can levitate and use that whole netherworld of psychic energy.”

  Two early concept studies from the same sheet for “swamp monsters” by McQuarrie (no. 15), November 1977.

  TEACHER OF THE FORCE DEVELOPMENT

  “I also want to use another teacher. The original idea was to have that person be an alien, strange and bizarre, an old Indian in the desert type, a desert rat—which is what Ben started out as. (I decided to keep him very noble after casting Alec Guinness.) I’m intrigued with the idea of not taking something on surface value. Instead of a withered old man, we can use a withered old space creature. The way to think of it is as this crazy little nitwit that scurries around like a rat, which in the end teaches Luke a lot of stuff about the Force.

  “It’s not until the end of the third act that you realize that this guy is not a crazy little thing, but an agent of the Force—a teacher, like Ben was. Maybe he is the one who trained Ben. They don’t even know about this guy; or maybe they had heard of him, but he was a legend; nobody really knew who or where he was.

  “He’s constantly making fun of Luke. It’s the crotchety old-man syndrome combined with the crazy-funny person syndrome, where he says the simplest things and the simplest truths almost like a child. He could be very childlike even though he’s an old man.

  “We’ll try to make the lessons into proverbs or Commandments, so that at the end Luke has learned all these commandments as a way to the Force. The first one will relate to getting food. The second one will relate to bringing the ship up. In scene 28, Lesson Three, the Critter either uses Luke’s laser sword or somehow reveals that he is this super warrior. There may be some kind of attack, maybe the Critter kills a monster. The Creature will get serious about the whole thing. He will still be strange and slightly crazy. The Creature says, ‘It would have been easier if we had started when you were much younger, which is the way it was with Ben. It will be a lot harder for you to learn because you’ve waited so long.’

  “We need a name for the Critter. Let’s make him small, so he’s about 28 inches high. Maybe he’s slightly froglike. Slick skin, wide mouth, no nose, bulbous eyes that move around. He squats. We could possibly have Jim Henson of the Muppets work with us. He’s interested and could probably help with this. It should be like Kermit the Frog, but an alien, with very thin puppet arms and little thin hands. Maybe a bulbous body with short legs, but very large, floppy webbed feet, almost like swim fins. It would have the personality of a Muppet, only it would be realistic enough to be believable.”

  Early, undated alien concept study by McQuarrie.

  LUKE SKYWALKER DEVELOPMENT

  “I want to perfect Luke as a fighter. When you learn the Force, you learn all the paranormal-psychic powers, plus various other mystical things. It is a constant struggle so that every time we see Luke he is always proving himself, getting better in the Japanese tradition of really becoming perfect at what you do. In this film, we are going to throw him into this devotion of becoming the perfect Jedi Knight. The second act of the film will be Luke’s training, which will be intercut with Leia and Han.

  “We will begin to deal with the roots of the dark side of this Force in this film, which will also have to do with Luke’s training. It makes his training dangerous. The danger is that he will become Vader. We know now that Vader is out to get Luke.

  “We need to do something to humiliate Luke; we have to take Luke apart in the beginning. Part of it could be tied in
with the love story where he loses the girl and feels very inadequate. We need to take him to his lowest point ever, so that he really comes back super.

  “The appropriate way for Luke to go off to become a Jedi Knight would be for him to be called. He has a feeling he has to go someplace. It can’t be an accident. Luke might receive some message from Obi-Wan, some kind of code that he figures out is a signal beacon. He’s constantly trying to figure it out, so there is a little mystery going on.

  “It could be something that Ben left him. It could be something that he hasn’t even thought about and he just finds it in his pocket one day. It could be in his sword handle. Whatever it is should be connected with the sword because we saw Ben give Luke the sword. He’s practicing with the sword and he actually bumps something the wrong way and something crystal, clear with lots of shattered glass in it, would pop out of the handle. It would be like a hologram. It would be an infinite amount of information in a storage memory system, a holographic storage system. He doesn’t know how to decipher it, so he shows it to Artoo, who would say, ‘It is a crystalline holographic memory system containing three million two hundred fifty-four bits of information. Most of it is in a configuration that is incomprehensible to me although some of it appears to be coordinates for various star systems.’

  “When Luke first displays his talent as a Jedi warrior, we can really do a big number where he’s in a physically trapped situation, with stormtroopers. Luke polishes off 137 stormtroopers. Vader comes in and they have a giant duel as all the doors close and lock, and Luke is trapped with Vader. The fight is psychic because, at the same time, Vader is trying to convince Luke to come over to his side of the Force.”

  PLANETS

  “A Water Planet—Would give us a chance to do an underwater city.

  “Bog Planet—We used it in the [Foster] book and was one of the original ideas [in the earliest Star Wars scripts]. It could be the place where Luke learns. The Bog planet is very swampy, very eerie and misty, like Hound of the Baskervilles.

  “City Planet—A giant Death Star kind of place, a completely built-over planet, nothing left but this giant city. I’m thinking of using some place like this for the center of the Empire. Sooner or later, the Empire will have to be shown, but I probably won’t have to in this Trilogy or this film.”

  NEW ALIENS

  “The aliens in the city should be semi-stoic creatures. Think of them as tall, thin, white ethereal aliens. Stoic Indians, only milk white; a very noble creature, but threatening. They carry a spear or pneumatic dart gun, a long tube, or a long pole with a beam that comes out of it. Luke outwits them or he does something to win over the leader. And then you realize the chief is very wise and very fair and very honest, so that when he gets killed it’s an outrage.”

  Concept studies for “Noble Aliens” by McQuarrie (no. 48 and 46), December 1977.

  Concept studies for “Noble Aliens” by McQuarrie (no. 45, which contains the artist’s note, “More otherwordly—Close Encounters”), December 1977.

  DARTH VADER DEVELOPMENT

  “Where do we pick up the story with Vader? Obviously there are troops in the attack on the Rebel base. Is Vader in on that attack, leading the troops, or do we see him isolated, alone? Being alone might not be a good idea. We need to get a sense that he’s back with civilization, that they found him. You get a sense that everything is the way it was.

  “After the snow planet attack and everybody escapes, that’s when he might go into isolation. Maybe this is a good time to talk about the Emperor as this terrible force. Vader is really afraid of the Emperor. That’s the only thing Vader is afraid of. The best way to set up a super-villain is to take the biggest villain you’ve got and make him afraid of the super-villain. The Emperor is even more powerful than Vader. He’s the classic devil character, a hooded, dark figure—you can’t even see who he is.

  “Vader started getting fascinated with the dark side of the Force and was lured into it. He didn’t tell anybody, as he became an evil person. The evil Force was starting to take over the galaxy—it was in control of the Emperor. He began to get more power and the Senate was getting less powerful. No one knew that he had been seduced, but he went around killing all these Jedi in secret. He killed a bunch of them and trapped others in a situation where they were all destroyed; only a few escaped. One of them was Ben.

  “Vader is completely consumed by the evil side of the Force. He is an instrument of the Force rather than having his own free will in terms of what he does. He really is driven by the Force. When we kill him off in the next one, we’ll reveal what he really is. He wants to be human—he’s still fighting in his own way the dark side of the Force. He doesn’t want to be a bad man, but he is. He can’t resist it. He’s struggling somehow to get out of what he is, struggling with his humanity.

  “Darth Vader’s prime purpose is to get Luke. We’ve got a personal agenda between him and Luke. He doesn’t really care about anybody else. He’s trying to smash the Rebels, but that’s secondary. In the middle section, he can’t find Luke. He’s searching for Luke. In the process of looking for Luke, he might find Leia and Han or he might use Leia and Han to find Luke.

  “We have to give Vader another environment, either another Death Star–type Imperial City or some kind of cave. Might be nice to give Vader a little castle on a rock in the middle of the ocean. One way to see him would be in a tall, dark tower, very narrow in a lava flow, dark, red, and burning, almost like hell. He’d be up in the tower with his gremlin, goblin type gargoyles surrounding him. His pets. Vader walks down the hall—these long, narrow, steel corridors, very gray—and he goes into a gray room. It’s all steel and there at the end of the room on a throne is a gray, macabre, cold steel box and it’s the Emperor. The Emperor tells Vader to get Luke—he is the last of the Jedi and must be stopped. Vader is saying he’s not a Jedi yet. Vader could talk to the Emperor with a viewscreen à la Flash Gordon.”

  VADER-VERSUS-LUKE DEVELOPMENT

  “I’d like the end conflict to be a moral conflict, in addition to a physical one. It should have Vader using a moral law that we learned earlier, but Vader turns it around. It has to be a mystical thing. Something you can look at from two sides. In the end, Vader is trying to undo everything Luke just learned. The real drama is whether Luke will become Darth Vader or not. We have tested him and we know he is weak. He really had to struggle to stay good. He has the same potentiality that Darth Vader had.

  “Earlier, Luke talks to Ben; when he brings him up as a ghost, we portend what is going to happen. Ben says, ‘Vader has more power than you can imagine. When he and I met, we fought on such a level that there didn’t appear to be much of a battle; it appeared to be a swordfight, but it was a battle of our wills that was really going on in the beyond.’ I’d like to make it into a battle (which we did in the Alan Dean Foster book, which is what I wanted to do in the first one with Ben and Vader) with lightning or electrical bolts, and throwing things around the room; an Exorcist kind of battle where you can bring all kinds of supernatural powers to bear. We’ll have Ben say, ‘Vader couldn’t use his supernatural powers against me, because I was too strong; he had to rely on brute force, which wasn’t of any value, because I was too advanced for that, so everything he did to me was useless.’

  “Maybe we should set up some kind of levels of achievement. Ben can say that Luke is now a level 2 and Vader is a 4; ‘I was a 6 and the Emperor is a 6, and he’s on his way to becoming a 10, which will be a force so powerful in the universe that nothing can stop him. You must stop the Emperor before he achieves the level 10.’ Luke has to destroy the Emperor. It does give us a time frame for the future—not only do they have to restore the Republic, but they also have to worry about the Emperor. We’re really beginning to set up that situation.

  “In the fight, Vader is using the dark side of the Force and he’s really tricking Luke. It limits Luke’s ability to throw things around or use lightning bolts. If he wants to be aggressive, he has t
o use the dark side. So in the beginning of this fight, Luke will be shielding himself against Vader, but he’ll finally get mad enough to where he starts to pick things up and throw them at Vader, which gives him the upper hand. But even as Luke gets the upper hand, Vader knows that he’s winning because he’s getting Luke to use the dark side of the Force. The audience would also know—it’s a physical way of manifesting the idea that the more lightning bolts he shoots at Vader, the more he’s succumbing to the dark side of the Force. The more he’s winning, the more he’s losing. It will also make a more exciting fight. You’ll be rooting for Luke, because he’ll be so outmatched, and the only way he can survive is to use the dark side.

  “The set piece can be in some kind of power place, with very dangerous equipment. Maybe it’s at the core of the city where a shaft goes all the way down to the reactor at the bottom. It can be huge, like a cliff. Vader sends Luke down a giant shaft. Maybe we set up some kind of vacuum tube; we’ll have Luke swing himself into the vacuum tube, which has a sucking sound, and we’ll have a shot of him zipping away down the tube as fast as he can. He would pop out of the underside of the city, from a little drain tube; he comes flying out and gets semi caught on a grate, so Luke is dangling above the exit port of the city.”