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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  NO. 12, MONDAY, MARCH 19; STAGE 1—INT. MEDICAL CENTER, SCS. 42 [ROBOT SURGEONS WORK], 43 [LUKE IN BACTA TANK]

  In the morning, Kurtz and Lucas were supposed to continue their costume inspection, but they were delayed when they became involved with shooting on the medical center set, where Kasdan joined them. Built on Stage 1, the centerpiece was a tank containing 400 gallons of chlorinated water, which British Aerospace, a company experienced in the manufacturing of Perspex cockpits for pressurized aircraft, had helped design (at 7′ 6″ high and 3′ 8″ in diameter, the tank was the largest of its kind ever made).

  “We had a large transparent tube in one of our sets, with a liquid inside it, within which Luke Skywalker was to be suspended,” says DP Peter Suschitzky. “My idea was that the tube should be the major source of illumination and the rest of the set should be lit very low-key. Problem: How to get a lot of light into a small tube with liquid in it? I solved this by using an army searchlight on the studio floor with a mirror suspended above the set. This all worked very well, photographically, for a few days until, for some inexplicable reason, the heat from the searchlight shattered the mirror above the set—not once, but twice!”

  “Mark almost got killed,” Kershner says. “They had a mirror right over the tank, which was open on top. And just before he went into it, the thing cracked and these huge pieces of glass came tearing down into the water—and if he had been in the tank, I don’t know that he would’ve survived.”

  “It had to be Mark in the tank because he was recognizable,” Watts says. “But it worked very well and he was on a scuba-diving-type breathing apparatus and on a wire harness to pull him in and out.”

  “There are incidental things which may not appear to be stunt work that have to be taken into consideration like when Mark is put into this water tank,” says Peter Diamond. “Mark had to be rehearsed in breathing apparatus. Of course, he’s never done any before, so we had to teach him underwater diving in a very short length of time.”

  “I was on wires with the scuba gear,” Hamill says. “I found that sort of peaceful. It was interesting to be underwater and not be able to hear anything that’s going on. I would be lowered into this red bubbling water. My character was delirious and thrashing about in the water, having a nightmare.”

  “Mark’s surgeon is not a human being, but a tin man, a droid,” says Kershner. “You say to yourself, ‘Well, it’s not a bad idea to have a surgeon be a piece of machinery.’ He has no feelings; he can’t make a slip; he’s perfectly attuned, reactive, and diagnostically sound because he’s rigged up to the biggest computer they have.”

  “In the scene where I’ve been hurt, Harrison comes in and says, ‘Hey, you don’t look so bad. In fact you look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark,’ ” Hamill says. “I reply, ‘Thanks to you,’ and his line was supposed to be, ‘That’s two you owe me, Junior.’ But he didn’t say it … He gave me a little kiss—which had everyone falling on the floor. That’s the side of Harrison people don’t see—he’s a very funny guy.”

  Costume designer John Mollo.

  The entrance to the Wardrobe Dept.

  The interior of the Wardrobe Dept.

  Several sets seen from their exteriors on Stage 1, including the Hoth medical center (a crew member sits to the left of the bacta tank opening through which Hamill would be lowered).

  Hamill in scuba gear and a rig is lowered into the bacta tank.

  The bacta tank is described in the scripts as containing a red liquid, as seen behind C-3PO in a shot filmed before Hamill was actually in the tank, where the water turned out to be blue.

  “Alternative medic robot” (no. 37) by Reynolds, October 1978.

  Final frame.

  Concept drawing of the medical center by Reynolds.

  Concept drawing of the medical center by Reynolds.

  THE RELATIONSHIP

  NOS. 13–14, TUESDAY–WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20–21: STAGE 1—INT. MEDICAL CENTER, SC. 57 PT. [LUKE RECOVERS]; ICE CORRIDOR, 15 PT. [LEIA PURSUES HAN]

  “On March 20, for the first time, I think, we were actually shooting on two sets simultaneously, weren’t we?” Arnold asks Alsup. “We were shooting in the ice cavern as well as the medical thing.” Alsup replies in the affirmative and, the next day, Progress Report No. 14 lists production as one day behind. That Tuesday, Kershner filmed first unit in the ice tunnels while the second studio unit finished up inserts on the previous set. On Wednesday, Kurtz talked with insurers about the skyrocketing costs incurred as a result of the fire on Stage 3, and bluescreen consultant Stan Sayer arrived.

  “The ice cavern is very special,” Kershner says. “It has tons of material that appears to be ice and snow and we’re using everything in it: CO2, mist, steam, and compressed air; we use lighting in a certain way; we use glycerine on the walls to make them shine. You sit in an office and you say, ‘We’ll do it this way.’ But you come on the set and none of it really photographs that way. So you begin to make changes, which is part of that creative process of being so loose that you’re reacting to what is, not what you expected or anticipated.

  “Whenever I could, I would go to the set the night before,” the director adds. “I’d take a camera with me—and have the film quickly developed that night—and I’d make drawings.”

  “Ralph and I did a few things for the ice hangar, very early on,” says Johnston. “I think Ralph, because he worked in England for several months, was able to follow up on a lot of that stuff with his production paintings. So he had more involvement with the interior sets than I did.”

  “Ralph is incredible,” Kershner says. “He’s not just a great technician; he has a very lucid mind. There’s simply no waste there. He thinks on two levels at once: the dramatic and the specific. But Ralph never really designed the film; his paintings were suggestions. Some of the time, they were dead-on; some of the time, they simply led us in one direction or another. He continued to do paintings all the way through production.”

  “I did quite a few paintings of the ice caves to give us a feeling of how the tunnels might look in terms of actual depth,” McQuarrie says. “There was also a large painting down at one end of the set, which made it seem a lot longer with other tunnels branching off the main cave at various angles.”

  “The interior set for the ice caverns were pretty painful,” Kershner notes. “We were living for days in these man-made caverns that were covered with salt for a glistening effect. There was so much salt that it got into our lungs, our pores. We could taste the salt all day and all night. And for scenes with fog or mist, we had to keep shooting heated mineral oil into the air, because the effects folks claimed it was healthier than the vegetable oil used in America. After a while, we couldn’t breathe, let alone smell anything. We’d leave the sets exhausted, with no sense of smell and reeking of salt.”

  To see the action in the cramped tunnel sets, production hired a Hitachi video camera and monitor from Osborne Sound. “I got lost in them, literally, for the first few weeks,” Kershner continues. “We built all the corridors fully enclosed until we were ready to shoot in them; then we could move some walls. The set looked so good, looked so cold, that it didn’t seem right that you could be working up a sweat. But it sometimes reached 100 degrees in there.”

  Kasdan headed back to the States, but for the rest of the week, Lucas stayed on the set; Arnold asked Kershner if he felt “inhibited or compromised” by his presence. “Not at all,” he replied. “It was like having the toymaker present, but he didn’t play with the toys.”

  “Once in a while, when I’m on the set, I get a little restless as if I were directing, wishing I could go in there and get it done,” Lucas says. “But I like what Kersh is doing creatively. I don’t have a strong feeling of wishing it were being done another way—well, perhaps once in a while, but I much prefer that somebody else do the work.”

  “I found that there was really no problem except I worried whether he wouldn’t get an ulcer standing there,”
Kershner says. “George said, ‘No, no, I’m fine.’ I would find it very difficult to stand on someone else’s set for a whole day and watch, but he was always complimentary. He would constantly be supportive. He was really staying there because he was interested and he loves being around a film being shot, especially this one. Also, these characters are familiar; they’re old friends. They’re like parts of his dreams that are manifest. There was no problem having George here and that surprised me: I thought there would be.”

  “When Kersh was shooting, George would be over his shoulder whispering this and that,” Johnson says. “Kersh did not always agree, so two versions were shot.”

  “I told George I couldn’t work if he would be looking over my shoulder all the time. After all, I had done time with Jon Peters,” Kerhsner adds, referring to the producer of The Eyes of Laura Mars. “George does not stand over me and he’s really, as he says, here to help. He’s changed the storyboard for me, he’s taken care of parts of the script that needed compressing, he’s someone to talk to when I have a little problem—and I get an immediate answer, which is good.”

  “Kersh wanted to give the film a slightly more serious tone from what I’d done in the first film,” says Lucas. “But without taking it completely out of the Saturday matinee feeling. He wanted to get deeper into the characters and make the jokes a little less flippant.”

  “George didn’t particularly like telling people what to do,” says Kasdan. “He didn’t like arguing with them. He didn’t like the cajoling that is so much a part of directing. He didn’t want to do that and he had reinvented himself as the producer-mastermind of these movies, which had started for me with the creation of Raiders. I saw his dealings with Steven Spielberg and Irvin Kershner as very supportive, and yet, you know, trying to guide them into exactly what George wanted. What a great producer does is he guides everyone without making them feel controlled. George was very good and funny and charming in the George-ian manner.”

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  Printed daily from March 21, 1979, with the camera on Luke (Hamill), with extended dialogue from the medcenter scene (and a nice ESB intro slug) shot at Elstree Studios. Note that Anthony Daniels and Peter Mayhew speak their dialogue through their masks. Director Irvin Kershner makes a “beep, beep” sound for Han coming through the automatic door. (Colored slugs in the sequence indicate where film has been cut to be used in an actual edit; the slug allows sound to stay in sync with the remaining footage.)

  (2:02)

  Solo looks on as Leia kisses Luke.

  Hamill, Lawrence Kasdan, modeler Fred Evans, Lucas, and Kurtz observe a shot that would not make the final cut, in which a medical droid takes off Luke’s facial bandage, circa Monday, March 19, 1979.

  Fisher, Kershner, Ford, and Hamill discuss the scene.

  Kershner directs Hamill.

  Daniels is prepared for the scene by the wardrobe department’s John Birkinshaw, while director of photography Peter Suschitzky sits (on right).

  “Ice cave corridor” by McQuarrie, 1979, which served as a direction for production’s design of the ice corridor sets.

  The Empire art department (FRONT ROW): Allan Moss, Michael Ford, Alan Tomkins, Harry Lange, Leslie Dilley, Norman Reynolds, Ralph McQuarrie; (MIDDLE AND BACK ROW): Sharon Cartwright, Brian Archer, Bob Walker, Ian Giladjian, Fred Evans, Michael Lamont, Fred Hole, Michael Boone, Steve Cooper, and Richard Dawking.

  In the ice cave corridor, Lucas and Peter Suschitzky.

  Kershner and Lucas.

  Ford as Han Solo.

  Ford as himself.

  What has become an iconic photograph of Hamill, Lucas, Fisher, and Ford (in the background are chief hairdresser Barbara Ritchie; Michael J. Duthie, an editor who happened to be visiting the set that day; and assistant to director Debbie Shaw, daughter of actor Robert Shaw).

  ALTERNATING RHYTHMS

  NOS. 15–16, THURSDAY–SUNDAY, MARCH 22–25: INT. COMMAND CENTER, ICE CAVE, 14 PT. [HAN HAS TO LEAVE], 45 [WAMPAS DETECTED]; 46 [PROBE DROID SPOTTED BY REBEL, WHO IS KILLED]

  On Stage 1’s Rebel Command Center set, cast and crew numbered 101. Behind the scenes, Jeremy Bulloch had a fitting as Boba Fett, whose costume took 20 minutes to put on. Bulloch had started acting when he was 10 and had since appeared in Disney films, and British sitcoms and plays. The half brother of Robert Watts, he was 35 when cast as Fett.

  “There was talk of this new character—not a big character, but a new one,” says Bulloch. “My brother called me and said, ‘Go and see Tiny Nicholls, wardrobe supervisor.’ I arrived at the studio not knowing what was going to happen and they asked me to put this costume on. I thought, This is strange—there was an odd sort of Wookiee scalp hanging from my shoulder, which I originally put under my helmet because I thought it was some kind of hairpiece. It took a long time, but I finally got the costume on and it fit like a glove.”

  “I’d never managed to give Jeremy a job on a film,” Watts says. “So I rang him up and said, ‘If the suit fits, the part’s yours.’ ”

  “Then I walked onto the set,” says Bulloch. “My first meeting with George Lucas was actually in the costume and he said, ‘You look fantastic.’ I didn’t know how to react to everything or what he wanted me to say—even if he wanted me to speak—and everybody was on the set because they were actually in the middle of doing something with the snow creature. Everything seemed to stop and there was this marvelous feeling of a presence, of somebody else. Lucas chatted with me and said, ‘As far as I’m concerned, you’re fine.’ ”

  Carrie Fisher was far from fine and fainted on set, due to a possible allergic reaction to the steam and spray paint. “At one point I only weighed about 85 pounds, because we were working 12 hours a day,” Fisher says. “I’m not crazy about English food; bangers and mash don’t make me want to run out to the pub. So I was sort of the crew mascot. I could crawl all over their shoulders and heads, and sit on the camera. I would be carried to the set. ‘If they want me, then I get a piggyback ride.’ There is something very childlike about being an actor, because you go in and they dress you, they put your makeup on, they do your hair, they bring you something to drink when you want it. They drive you there and they drive you home, and they bring you your food.”

  Arnold writes that Fisher’s friends and acquaintances came to visit her—Penny Marshall, Rob Reiner, Treat Williams, and Harvey Keitel—“people with whom she could talk movies, play records, drink chilled white wine, or just loaf away the sterile hours between performances. Now and again, she and her friends would take off for a fashionable discotheque, but most of the time they stayed in, sending out for dinner to nearby Lester’s, the neighborhood bistro, or to a Chinese takeout. Only when Treat Williams visited did they do some indoor cooking. Carrie is a self-confessed night person.”

  Billy Dee Williams arrived on flight TW 760 from Los Angeles, and on that same Thursday script revisions omitted the elevator scenes on Cloud City.

  “When I first came here, George and I had dinner,” says Williams. “We sat and talked. I’d been reading about these guys before I even met them—George Lucas, Coppola, William Friedkin. I see all of the other people who’ve entered this feeling—I call it a feeling—and it’s new, it’s different. It’s different from the feelings I’ve experienced about Hollywood. They’re a much more quiet people. There’s a different kind of commitment, and I think the people who they surround themselves with seem to be people who lend themselves to the same kind of feeling. And it’s great for me, because I think the only way you can really know about yourself is by the people that you come in contact with. People, to me, are like mirrors. They tell you greatly about where you are at a particular point.”

  On Friday, Charlie Weber, Sid Ganis, and Carol Titelman flew in for business meetings; Williams was fitted at the Berman Costume Company and Hamill continued what must have seemed like end
less fencing rehearsals.

  “It was so arduous and long,” Hamill says. “Carrie and Harrison were doing the bulk of their story line, so I wasn’t even shooting. I’d wake up and think, Oh, no. Usually, I’d fence from something like 9:30 till lunchtime, take a long lunch, then come back about 2:30, fence until 5, and then go home. I got to a point where, just overnight, I would forget the moves. ‘It’s right flank, parry; left flank, parry; duck …’ I was so frustrated one day, I just threw down my sword and said, ‘I can’t do this!’ But Peter Diamond gave me this terrific pep talk, this fatherly pat on the back; he told me that he’d worked with Errol Flynn and all these people, and that it was perfectly natural for me to be going through this.”

  Hamill rehearses the choreographed duel with stuntman Bob Anderson, as stunt coordinator Peter Diamond supervises.

  Hamill rehearses the choreographed duel with David Prowse (Darth Vader).

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  At Elstree Studios, Hamill rehearses the carbon freeze duel with stuntman Bob Anderson, who will be Darth Vader in that sequence; both are supervised by stunt coordinator Peter Diamond.