“Last time, we had one person doing the mechanical effects and one person doing the special effects,” says Lucas. “Brian Johnson is really overseeing both of them. The directors of photography, who really did most of the work on the first film, I brought back: Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren are the ones that actually do it every day on the set. They are the ones who are actually making the creative decisions.”
“There were a lot of interesting management problems I had to face, and most of it just involved discipline,” says Muren. “You can take something as far as you can and then say, ‘I think we ought to shoot it.’ But then you stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Maybe with just a little more effort—and only another 10 minutes, but a lot of thought in that 10 minutes—we can make it better.’ So we’d stop and run into the projection room. We’d analyze it and have roundtable discussions as to what we could do to make it better. And often we’d come up with a nice degree of reality that didn’t come from a hurried, cluttered atmosphere.”
“George was usually there with Irvin Kershner,” says Johnston. “The people at ILM had all worked with George first; George was the big boss and Kershner was second in command. But you can’t be a backseat director; if you want the film to be exactly the way you want it, then you better direct it yourself. I think George knew that. I think he probably grumbled about some stuff. I know he did, ’cause I heard him.”
“I feel that George Lucas is a conceptual artist in a very profound way,” says Kershner. “That doesn’t necessarily mean that his work is profound. I wouldn’t attempt to judge it. But he is an artist; he is unique in what he does.”
Kershner’s directorial contribution was “enormous,” according to Johnson, “He developed the characters as he went along, and even George Lucas says that he did a better job with the actors. But, ultimately, it’s Lucas’s vision. He designed and wrote the film, and directed the special effects in California. Lucas created the storyboards, so we would have a guide of what each shot should look like. Kersh made some changes, but it was George’s picture: No one can doubt that the movie is stamped with his personality.”
“In the visual effects, when the film moved into postproduction, the director was much less involved in the process,” says Patricia Blau. “And of course, George loves to play in the editing room. That is definitely his medium, to go in and start letting his imagination fly.”
“George will want an 11-frame cut of something,” says Ralston. “How much work do I put in that? Not much. You get the basic bold move and a big lighting gag going on, and you’re done with it. You can noodle something to the point of it becoming just a vapid experience with no energy. I don’t care if there are some flaws in a shot—it’s the energy I want.”
“The movement in the animatics gave me a precise frame count for the special effects,” says Lucas. “Because I was doing probably 10 times more shots than anybody had ever done before, I had to figure out a way of making them cost 10 times less. The way I could do that was to say, ‘Cut it precisely; this will be on the screen 12 frames, half a second, or 18 frames and that’s it.’ By doing that, I could tell the guys, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to go so fast, you can barely see it.’ And they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ and they wouldn’t fuss over it.”
“The whole production concept is just doing what George wants,” says Johnson. “George is the man with the vision and he tells everybody what he is expecting. Sometimes it’s a matter of just doing it and waiting for George to say, ‘I’ll take it,’ or ‘I think we should add a little bit of this and that.’ At the same time, though, he’s open to a lot of input from us. Things do get changed around and we can surprise him with little tricks. It’s a very good working relationship. He is basically a storyteller and has an innate sense of timing.”
“The best directors, like George or Steven Spielberg, are very collaborative,” says Tippett. “They say, ‘You know what you’re doin’, right? So here’s what I need editorially and dramatically. Now, you go do it.’ If you went back to them with details, they’d go, ‘Isn’t that your job?’ ”
“We shot little crummy models on sticks, flying cardboard X-wings all over the place and doing video shots,” says Ralston. “Then we cut it together with sound effects just for laughs; we ran this thing for George and he just cracked up. He loved it. Unfortunately for me, George really stuck to how long the cuts were on it. It was like, ‘Okay, I’ll try to cram everything into this brief moment.’ And that became the sensibility—being right in the middle of the action.”
“Most of our spaceship motions are made by hand with a joystick, instinctively, by the cameraman himself,” says Muren. “It’s fast and allows the cameraman freedom to add his style to the shot. Ken Ralston, for example, is also an artist and an admirer of the old Warner Bros. cartoons by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones. His maneuvering of the TIE ships and the Falcon show his great understanding of the need for timing, motion, and life within the shot.”
“I wanted to bring my animation background into it,” says Ralston. “I wanted to speed up and slow down the action to get a certain kind of emotion out of it. So I had ’em build a small Falcon instead of that big monster that you had to move with a forklift. So then, in the scenes like the escape from the Star Destroyers, this Falcon’s doing big acrobatic jumps and falls, and the TIE ships are like bees or flies. They’re just like, Bzzzzz … I wanted to start getting character into these inanimate objects. I was trying to put the audience more in the driver’s seat—the space battle had a choreography to it that you hadn’t seen before.”
“The system that we have now is not a computer system,” Edlund says. “It’s a solid core memory system, and the electronics very precisely remember what you’ve done in programming a shot. It’s all done by humans and not by computers. When a mathematician programs a move, it comes out in a perfectly mathematical parabola and the shot is so perfect that it’s not interesting. On the other hand, if you enter the human element into it—to give something the look of a guy out there with a handheld Arriflex shooting it—then you have a certain suspense.”
“The thing that I’ve always been weak on and that George is good at, is coming up with the ideas,” says Muren. “Between him and Joe Johnston, they come up with the art direction and some really neat shots.”
“I have a lot of faith in my films,” says Lucas. “I’m convinced they’re going to be great, or at least I will like them, or I wouldn’t be doing them. And once I decide I’m going to do something and this is going to happen, I just don’t let anything stop me. You know, I plow forward no matter what happens. When I’m making a movie, I’m just like any other crazy artist. My father said, ‘Never make your hobby your profession.’ But I’m willing to do stupid things to make it great, which most people won’t do.”
“George never micromanaged anything, which gave me freedom to do what I wanted,” says Ralston. “Now, I don’t know if I earned it or if he did it with everyone, but I think George was able to feel out who was doing what he wanted. Then he’d just let you go off and if you did some cool stuff, he would get real excited about it.”
Tippett and a desk on a forklift, as the ILM facility was constantly reconfigured (note the giant calendar on the wall).
Johnston, Edlund, and Lucas (with the prototype for the twin-pod cloud car model).
Muren, Johnston, and Pangrazio with the Empire Flex camera.
Visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston adjusts the model of Boba Fett’s ship for one shot and a miniature Luke for another.
Illustration by Ralston for the “Night Crew” Tshirts.
A little rhyme written by Ken Ralston and Selwyn Eddy III—two of the night crew—for the day crew.
Huston and Muren.
Posing with a placard saying “Night Crew” are Ken Ralston and assistant cameraman Selwyn Eddy.
LIBERATING THE MIND
“We’re going to show the picture to Johnny Williams to get him started because the music composition must begin on
the first of November,” Kurtz says. “We’re scheduled to record the music just after Christmas, but the sound effects people have already started. They’ve gathered together a lot of sound recordings and they’re cutting the robot dialogue right now. And then in January, the re-recording starts, the mixture of the soundtracks, which carries on into February, when the lab and negative cutting goes on.”
On Friday, November 2, Arnold witnessed Kershner rummaging around his Marin County house, “picking out one LP after another from the shelves that framed the stereo. He played only bits of them, and, as the pace of his selection grew more frenzied, my musical sensibilities were treated to a most unfeeling assault. In the space of minutes, he had played and rejected snatches from Stravinsky and Shostakovich, Hindemith and Copland, Prokofiev [his scores for Sergei Eisenstein’s films] and Bliss. Recalling the strain he had been under, I began to wonder if Kersh had become a shade unbalanced.”
“I’ll use them to make a temp track,” Kershner explains. “You see, John Williams is coming in from Los Angeles to view the film, so I want it to have a temporary music track when he sees it. It may help him to know where we feel music will be most effective.”
Not long afterward, Lucas, Kershner, and John Williams sat down to view the fine cut and spot the music. “Howie Hammerman was the projectionist at Park House,” Jane Bay says. “George had built this great movie theater in the back of the house in a separate building that was called the Carriage House. It had long couches that you sat on, with huge ottomans.”
“I’m beginning a little further ahead of myself than is usual, because the score will reprise some music from Star Wars,” Williams says. “With that as a basis, I want to try to develop material that will wed with the original and sound like part of an organic whole; something different, something new, but an extension of what already exists.”
On Saturday, November 17, Arnold flew to Los Angeles, where he rang the doorbell “of John Williams’s pleasant, unostentatious home. Williams himself opened the door and took me to his study, a comfortable room with many plaques on the walls testifying to best-selling records, and trophies and awards on every shelf and surface … He showed me other rooms, including a music room with a white grand piano.”
“Empire will require 107 minutes of underscore,” Williams says. “You could say it’s the equivalent of several Lisztian tone poems. There is a new theme for Yoda, which begins in a kind of piquant way and develops into a more profound, nobler piece. There will be a Love Theme developing from the love interest between Princess Leia and Han. There will be a new piece of music for Darth Vader, who plays a more important role in this film. In Star Wars, he had what you could call a musical fragment, but in the new picture there will be a Grand Imperial March.”
“I’ve detected influences from the English school in your music,” Arnold says.
“I have always been enormously attracted to the English school, especially to the moderns such as William Walton, Arthur Bliss, Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten,” Williams agrees. “My influences, like those of all composers, come from a wide range of sources and I acknowledge them freely.
“I suppose the unconscious mind works all the time on one’s problems,” he adds. “Sometimes themes come very painfully after hours of holding my head in my hands at the piano. Days can go by and I’ll think it is never going to come. Then I’ll sit down at the piano and it sort of pops into my mind; after two weeks of frustration, it just appears out of nowhere. Other times, I might think about a theme for a character and get it straight off. It is a strange and mysterious and frustrating process, almost impossible to describe. It was like exhuming another part of myself in a way, to have to go back and continue a score that was done that long ago. But if you can just get out of the way and let it happen, not let whatever neurotic hang-ups about writing get in the way, one is free to do it.”
* * *
Lucas and Ralston brought their love of animation—the twists and twirls characteristic of director Tex Avery, for example—into the photography of the Falcon, and TIE fighters, which plays out against the strong graphic formalism of the three Star Destroyers.
Muren and his team found it difficult at first to create the feel of the Star Destroyers’ enormity. Utimately, Muren made use of a star as a light source, using its light and shadows to give size and definition to the craft.
“The Warner Bros. cartoons really taught me a lot about timing and energy,” Ralston says. “I always tried to remember what Chuck Jones said about how one frame can make a scene funny—or not. Each frame is important.”
* * *
Music editor Ken Wannberg, music supervisor (uncredited) Lionel Newman, composer John Williams, and Kershner during the spotting of the music for Empire, in Marin County, early November 1979.
Notes concerning Lucas’s editorial changes to music cues, from Duwayne Dunham to Wannberg, November 5.
Revised music notes per the film’s opening, December 4.
A page from the orchestration of Williams’s music by Herbert W. Spencer for “Yoda’s Entrance,” reel 5, oboes, clarinets, and bass clarinet.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Lucas, Kurtz, Kershner, editor Paul Hirsch, and composer John Williams spot the music in Marin County, early November 1979—here taking a look at the carbon freeze scene.
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SHOOTING THE TAUNTAUN
By mid-November, Tippett and Muren were ready to start the stop-motion photography for the tauntaun shots. Although they numbered only a few, these sequences, along with the walker shots, represented some of ILM’s most ambitious work and would take weeks, then months, to perfect. To facilitate the job, the completed tauntaun model was fitted with a motorized brace.
“We have a way to clamp the model to the table, which will give the illusion of maintaining balance in any position you put it,” Tippett says. “If the leg is to move forward or the head is to move to the side, we move that maybe a tenth of an inch to a quarter of an inch; photograph that frame, go back, move it again, and just repeat that process until we’ve accumulated a sufficient number of frames to simulate the action. A shot that’s two or three seconds long could take us an entire day or half a day.”
“You’re dealing with a tabletop that maybe is five feet square and it gets very crowded around us because you still have to use a lot of lights to light that up,” says Edlund.
The miniature snowscapes also had to match the exteriors photographed in Finse, so Muren sometimes needed up to five hours to adjust the lights. “We’d open the trap doors, animate the puppet, go back down, and close the door,” Tippett would tell Cinefex. “That was probably the most grueling animation on the whole show, having to be under the tables.”
By December, after rotoscoping work by Peter Kuran and Sam Comstock, Lucas had approved the first stop-motion shots with the tauntaun. One sequence, however, didn’t make the cut. Tippett had animated two shots in which the Han puppet, while on his taun, tosses a sentry marker into the snow, turns his steed, and canters out of frame.
“The shot itself didn’t look right,” Muren says. “Phil spent two full days animating the first one. It took a long time to set up and we had a beautiful background for it, but there was something about it that didn’t look real. We never managed to solve it and it didn’t cut well, either, because the camera was too close on the taun. What George really wanted was a long shot, so we quickly did a replacement shot of the animal running way off in the distance.”
To add a blurring effect that would make the tauntaun’s movement read as realistic to the human eye, Tippett’s motorized brace could move the model slightly forward while each frame was exposed. “What makes a running horse look real is the fact that the motion-picture film is inadequately capturing the information of how he moves and is causing these blurs,” Tippett explains. “What we’re trying to do
is simulate that effect by getting blurs into the stop-motion, adding realism. So we’re actually moving the taun during the frame: The shutter of the camera is opening up and the puppet is physically moving for every frame of film.”
“It’s a combination of blurring motion controls and stop-frame,” says Edlund.
The moment in which Han’s tauntaun rides up as Obi-Wan’s image fades away in the blizzard “was actually the first motion-control taun shot where we introduced blurs on the puppet,” says Muren. “I don’t think it was entirely satisfactory. There were a lot of problems in tying down the puppet that couldn’t be resolved during photography. There is a similar shot, though, of the tauntaun running up to the camera, which wasn’t done bluescreen. It’s the best taun shot in the film, I think. So does George. It’s a very bold shot, which starts off with the taun misted out way in the distance and it gets crisper as it approaches the camera. All that atmosphere was done on stage during animation; we did superimpose a tiny snowstorm, but it was virtually insignificant. Finally the taun rears up—and the shot was right there.”
“I had seen some incredibly complicated approaches to get blurs,” Tippett says. “People would put glass up in front of scenes and paint Vaseline on the glass as the characters were moving and wipe the glass off and literally animate a blur for every single frame. It was extremely time consuming and very difficult to do. So we hooked up a stop-motion puppet to the motion-control equipment. It was quite rudimentary and the character had to be on a pylon that always had to be matched to the background. So, working very closely with Dennis, who gaffed and designed the snow walker and the tauntaun scenes, we were able to figure out how to make the motion-control setup work in a stop-motion context and began to put blurs on puppets that were very similar to what you’d actually get in the real world with real live-action photography.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 46