“I felt that when I came onto Empire, I was really a very keen instrument for George,” says Kasdan, who left the meeting with an urgent deadline. “We agreed that we would meet about every two weeks and, in that time, I was expected to do about a fifth of the script each hiatus. I had never shown pages to anyone as I wrote—but in this case we were under so much pressure that I had to turn out the script quickly.”
“X-wing in Bog” (8-plus hours), by McQuarrie, June 20–22 (with retouches on July 20), 1978.
Preparatory thumbnails for his “X-Wing in Bog” painting, by McQuarrie.
* * *
MCQUARRIE’S METHOD
“I was hired to give George Lucas a chance to get as close as he could to the ideal look for things he had been dreaming about getting into his films,” says McQuarrie. “Actually, he could have done any or all of the conceptual sketches himself, because he draws quite well. But George concentrates more on the ideas and lets me get them into shape because I have a greater facility for drawing and painting.”
Color study (no. 238a).
Drawing of Darth Vader.
Materials: “In all of my illustrations, creating an atmosphere is my goal. After deciding on the idea I want to present, I complete the drawing on tissue paper, sometimes two or three tissues, slightly altering the composition, perspective, and organization of elements. Then I make small thumbnail sketches that establish general color value patterns. Next, I take a wash of waterproof cel vinyl over the whole board, trace the drawing over that wash, and begin to paint, starting with objects in the extreme background and working forward as fast as the paint dries. I use cel wash and designer’s colors because they can be painted over without smearing, and the wash has a generally transparent look to it.”
“Communication Center” by McQuarrie, May 18–19, 22, 1978.
Preparatory material for “Communication Center,” by McQuarrie.
A Johnston concept for the rebel communication center on Hoth.
“Ice cave exterior” (with early tauntaun) by McQuarrie, May 26, 29–30, 1978.
Preparatory drawings for “Ice Cave Exterior,” by McQuarrie.
Preparatory drawings for “Ice Cave Exterior,” by McQuarrie.
“Attack on Generator” (14 hours) by McQuarrie, June 23–24, 26, 1978.
Preparatory sketches for “Attack on Generator,” by McQuarrie.
Preparatory sketches for “Attack on Generator,” by McQuarrie.
Color: “I get some nice visual effects sometimes by letting the wash show through in certain areas, making the rest of the piece very opaque and solid. At times, I will use an airbrush for graduated tones, color changes, or modifying color values in specific areas. I try to use flat patterns and shapes with subtle color schemes. I combine colors to get rich effects without being splashy, but often get a little shy, and lean toward neutral, gray tones at times. To me, color goes beyond the spectrum and has to do with lighting sources and angles. I will never do a painting at high noon, but rather when the sun is low and casts raking shadows.”
“Falcon into crater” by McQuarrie, July 12, 1978.
Preparatory color study for “Falcon into Crater,” by McQuarrie.
“Big gun” by McQuarrie, July 13, 1978.
Preparatory thumbnails for “Big Gun,” by McQuarrie.
“Giant worm” by McQuarrie, July 20–21, 1978.
Giant worm concept by Johnston.
Giant worm concept by Johnston.
Giant worm concepts by Ken Ralston.
“Rebel big gun, control booth” by McQuarrie, July 26–27, 1978.
Time: “How much time I take to complete a painting varies greatly, depending on the complexity of its elements. Some of the paintings I’ve done for Empire have taken as long as seven days to complete. Others, I’ve finished in a day. The average is two or three days. Science fantasy allows me to create realities that have never been seen before, which is the primary challenge each new job presents. I’ve done a lot of dreaming in my life—and now I’m getting a chance to put it all to work.”
Color study by McQuarrie for his “Dusk battle on Cloud City,” July 24–25, 1978.
“Dusk battle on Cloud City” by McQuarrie, July 24–25, 1978.
Final painting and preparatory thumbnails of Vader’s bridge, by McQuarrie.
Final painting and preparatory thumbnails of Vader’s bridge, by McQuarrie.
Preparatory sketch by McQuarrie for his “Star Destroyer bridge (looking at right-hand inboard side)” (12-plus hours) July 18–20, 1978.
“Star Destroyer bridge (looking at right-hand inboard side)” by McQuarrie.
* * *
THE ART OF DOING
JULY 1978 TO FEBRUARY 1979
CHAPTER THREE
During the month of July, preproduction seesawed between recruiting for ILM, work on the third draft, and creation of the walker prototype. Dennis Muren visited the ILM offices three times before committing. Ken Ralston, who had been Muren’s camera assistant on Star Wars, joined him for what was probably the key trip.
“Dennis and Jon Berg started talking to me about moving up there,” says Ralston. “I said, ‘But Star Wars was so hard.’ I was hedging. They said, ‘Ah, come on up.’ So I flew up with them to San Francisco and it was a beautiful day: big clouds, cool, with the Golden Gate and the fog. We drove up to Park Way to see George and hear his dreams of the future. He rolled out big blueprints and said, ‘This is Lucas Valley Road—no relationship to me,’ which I thought was really odd. He showed us where the ranch was gonna go and the effects facility; it was really cool to hear him so excited. Then just for the hell of it, Dennis, Jon, and I got in a car and drove up Lucas Valley Road. We jumped the fence and walked up the dirt road to this empty, old dairy farm. I remember just being in shock the whole day. I finally said, ‘Sign me up!’ ”
“By that time, I was thinking that this was something I wanted to do,” says Lorne Peterson. “I had gone to San Francisco State and I liked San Francisco a lot more than I liked LA.”
“We basically moved every damn thing out of ILM on Valjean, right down to the air hose fittings, up to the new ILM,” says Edlund. “We quickly took over the whole building, though I think there was a muffler shop and a welding shop—we had to wait until we could get them out of there. By that time, Star Wars being the monolith that it was, we called ourselves The Kerner Company because we didn’t want to have kids going through the trash looking for model shop sweepings. We were deities to a lot of people, so we had to keep a low profile.”
Because ILM wasn’t ready yet as a facility, Jon Berg continued his skilled craft in LA. “I went to Jon’s house in Silverlake where he’s got his little machine shop,” says Ralston. “He wanted to just show us how the legs work. It was a very early moment on the movie and it was really neat. It was like, ‘God, Jon, you’—because these pistons were doing one thing and the head another; it was so complicated.”
“It was taking something that was a free-born imaginative concept,” says Berg, “and breaking it down not only so that it could be manipulated in the manner that we needed it to be, as a stop-motion puppet, but so that it would also look like it was operating realistically and believably.”
MYSTERY OF THE RASCAL SAGE
On July 18, more building improvements were approved for the Kerner facility. The next day, a deal memo from Norman Kurland to Tom Pollock solidified, retroactively, the deal between scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan and The Chapter II Company. Kasdan would be paid $40,000 for the “rewrite” and $20,000 for the subsequent polish.
Kasdan had completed at least one-fifth of the script when he sat down for another grueling story conference with Lucas and Kershner. “The first session after we met was the hairiest,” says Kasdan. “I had written about 25 pages. They sat in the room and read those pages, and then they came back to the table and we all tore into them. They told me what they were happy about and what they were unhappy about. Actually, the way George works is that he n
ever tells you what he likes, just what he doesn’t. If you’re sensitive about your ego, this can be tough. He’ll come to a new scene or a new stretch of dialogue I’ve written and just flip through it. I’ll be dying with each movement of his eyeballs, eager for praise. No way. His silence was my only reward.”
“It was a great experience working with Larry and Kersh,” Lucas says, “because they are very serious about what they do and they really went through and analyzed everything. I had to explain or rationalize what was going on. They wouldn’t just say, ‘Okay.’ It was more like, ‘That doesn’t make sense. I don’t believe you—why is it like that?’ I had to go down, down, down and rethink things sometimes. And if I couldn’t come up with an answer, then we would try and figure out another way of explaining it. They challenged everything in the script. I was defending things, but, at the same time, if they had a great idea or they had a point, then it immediately went into the script.”
“A great deal of the emotional basis for the film takes place in the first fifth,” says Kasdan. “There are three or four important scenes where the characters are all together. You have to establish the dynamics of the romance that follows and the drama that follows. In fact, you’re not going to have many opportunities later in the film to bring the people together again and have them talk. So you have to figure out how these people feel about each other now. We don’t know what the relationships are between Leia, Han, and Luke. Threepio and Artoo, where did they come down as far as who is their master? What are Chewie’s feelings about where they are? Luke broke off his training to be a Jedi when Ben was lost—how important is that to Luke? It was a very rough task.”
“Larry was focused a lot on dialogue,” Lucas says. “I had a rudimentary version of Yoda. If you looked at it, you might say, ‘Well, it’s kind of the same’—but it’s not. You can speak and act using Larry’s dialogue for Yoda. He mainly made the dialogue better and the characters more consistent. Between Kersh and him, they added depth.”
“This was my first time writing the Star Wars language and creating long talking scenes, emotional scenes,” Kasdan continues. “Kershner, George, and I all had different ideas about the way each of these scenes would go. That first session was ragged and rugged, with many, many hours of figuring out what was the best way to set up the story and communicate what’s happened just prior to the story.”
In addition to the established characters, Kasdan continued to develop the new ones. “Boba Fett is a real villain,” he says. “Lando starts out a villain and develops. There is also a very strong, positive alien [Yoda], who I really think is going to be one of the stars of the movie. He figures very heavily in the dramatic and spiritual development of the whole story and particularly in Luke’s education.”
“At first I thought Yoda should be eight or nine feet tall with a big beard, like an oversized Moses,” says Kershner. “After all, he is a Zen master, almost god-like. But that was too much of a cliché.”
Early sculpts of “man-in-suit” tauntaun, created by the art department in England, summer 1978.
Tauntaun and rider concept by Johnston (no. 292), June 8, 1978.
“Snow planet scale” by Johnston (no. 301), July 1978.
Rebel outfit concepts by assistant art director Nilo Rodis-Jamero, August 1978.
By this time, responsibility for Yoda’s visual characterization had moved from Johnston to McQuarrie, who completed two paintings featuring the rascal-sage. “We worked for about four months before coming up with a design we liked,” Lucas says. “You can see the progression from Joe’s drawings to Ralph’s paintings, see the character’s look improving, acquiring more personality.”
“Joe Johnston had done some sketches on him, and they seemed to me to be kind of puffy, lacking in bone structure,” says McQuarrie. “I’d hoped to see him have more of an ascetic look, so my sketches gave him that.”
“Yoda started out as little drawings,” Kershner says. “We had artists making all sorts of sketches when I was working with George on the screenplay, but we had no idea how or if it could be done. We were sitting for days saying, ‘Geez, if we try to make him two feet tall, how are we going to do it?’ I thought we could do it as a Muppet. But then I’d go look at Muppets and puppeteers and decide that wouldn’t work. They don’t look real. How are you going to shoot a close-up of a Muppet? It’s just a piece of cloth and Ping-Pong balls.”
“We experimented with the idea of a monkey dressed up in a costume,” says Kurtz, “which didn’t work because most animals don’t like things blocking their vision, over their heads. Stuart Freeborn used to recount stories of the baby monkeys used in 2001. To make them not look like monkeys, he did special makeup on their faces and their ears, but the baby monkeys spent all of their time trying to tear away all this stuff because they just didn’t like it.”
“We thought we could dress up a monkey,” laughs Kershner. “But I said, ‘How are you going to get the words out of it? Can you train a monkey? No, you can’t train a monkey.’ ”
“We thought about doing it with stop-motion,” Lucas says. “But to do a stop-motion character like that and have it act, and not look like a cartoon—I just didn’t think it was going to work. We explored doing stop-motion, but it just became very apparent that yes, you can get the movement, but can you get the face and all that stuff? It’s impossible. We wanted a combination of Kermit and the skeletons from an old Ray Harryhausen movie. But it’s like, How is that going to work?”
“Meanwhile, the artist was making him a little bigger and a little bigger,” Kershner says. “We realized that maybe he was trying to tell us something. If he was three feet tall, we could get a midget. But how good an actor would that midget be? We needed a terrific actor. But there’s no great actor that’s three feet tall. Then we thought of a child. But he would have to be four or five years old. Come on—the discipline under those lights, saying lines, and making motions a certain way—where could we find a child capable of that? We were ready to give up!”
“Yoda is the lead samurai from Seven Samurai,” says Kasdan of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film. “Seven Samurai is for me the greatest film ever made and enormously influential for George. If you see Seven Samurai, you see Yoda is Shimada, the lead samurai. He’s the mentor figure who gets the whole picture.”
The solution to a practical Yoda had to be shelved temporarily, even as it was obvious how key a character he was going to be, because finishing the script was the priority. “I went away and I’d show them a new section each time, plus the old section I’d changed,” Kasdan says. “We did that draft very, very rapidly.”
Early Minch-Yoda concept by Johnston, spring 1978.
Early Minch-Yoda concept by Johnston, spring 1978.
Early Minch-Yoda concept by Johnston, spring 1978.
“Minch Muppet” measurement (18 inches) by Johnston (no. 303), July 1978.
Minch Yoda concept, by Johnston.
Minch Yoda color variations, by Johnston.
A monkey is outfitted with cane and mask, and measured.
The simian was also briefly considered for walking shots of Minch-Yoda that would have been impossible to perform with a puppet.
“Minch house [exterior]” by McQuarrie, July 15 & 17, 1978.
Color sketches of Yoda and R2 on Dagobah, by McQuarrie.
Preparatory drawings of Luke in Yoda’s home, by McQuarrie.
Final painting of Luke in Yoda’s home, by McQuarrie.
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH
Lucasfilm and Fox officially released to the trade papers and the public the name of the sequel on August 4. “I love the title of The Empire Strikes Back,” Hamill says. “It’s got that gaudy Saturday-afternoon quality that’s important for us.”
“When George first told me about the title, I wasn’t so sure he was serious,” Burtt says. “It seemed like such an extreme-sounding pulp title. But that’s what we were making: a big version of those old serials, with names like ‘Fate Takes the Wheel’ or �
��The Crimson Ghost Strikes Out.’ ”
Also in August, Watts continued the groundwork for the location shoot—“I returned to Finse with both Bruce Sharman and Philip Kohler, who was to be the location manager, and started preliminary stuff in terms of bank accounts and meeting with shipping agents”—while production began paying for a security system at ILM and discussing a bank loan for the facility: $180,000 for construction, $50,000 for optical lens design and construction, and $27,000 for a high-speed VistaVision camera. All told, nearly $1 million. Despite the fact that the building was mostly non-operational, a first group of department heads was added to the payroll. Johnston and McQuarrie were now joined by assistant art director Nilo Rodis-Jamero on August 7 (he and Johnston worked at Ancho Vista until ILM was readied); Phil Tippett on August 8; Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren on August 16; and Lorne Peterson on August 17. Star Wars veteran Bruce Nicholson, optical photography supervisor, started on August 16. Model makers Paul Huston and Steve Gawley would be salaried as of September 5.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 15