THE RETURN OF APOCALYPSE NOW
“I had worked on Star Wars for about two years,” Lucas says, “and we were starting preproduction. Francis had finished The Godfather II (1974) and he was saying, ‘I’m going to finance movies myself—we don’t have to worry about anybody, so come and do this movie.’ I had a choice: I had put four years into Apocalypse Now, and two years into Star Wars—but something inside said, ‘Do Star Wars and then try to do Apocalypse Now.’ So I said that to Francis, and he said, ‘We really have to do it right now; I’ve got the money, and I think this is the time for this film to come out.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t you do it then?’ So he went off and did it.”
What must have been a difficult choice was made somewhat easier by the reaction Lucas was still experiencing to American Graffiti. “Part of my decision was based on the fan mail I had gotten from Graffiti,” he says. “I seemed to have struck a chord with kids; I had found something they were missing. After the 1960s, it was the end of the protest movement and the whole phenomenon. The drugs were really getting bad, kids were dying, and there was nothing left to protest. But Graffiti just said, Get into your car and go chase some girls. That’s all you have to do. A lot of kids didn’t even know that, so we kept getting all these letters from all over the country saying, ‘Wow, this is great, I really found myself.’ It seemed to straighten a lot of them out.
“I also realized that, whereas THX had a very pessimistic point of view, American Graffiti said essentially that we were all very good. Apocalypse Now was very much like THX, and Star Wars was very much like American Graffiti, so I thought it’d be more beneficial for kids,” he adds. “When I started the film, ten-and twelve-year-olds didn’t really have the fantasy life that we’d had. I’d been around kids and they talked about Kojak and The Six Million Dollar Man, but they didn’t have any real vision of all the incredible and crazy and wonderful things that we had when we were young—pirate movies and Westerns and all that. When I mentioned to kids, like Francis’s sons who are eleven and eight, that I was doing a space film, they went crazy. In a way I was using Francis’s kids as models, because I’m around them the most. They’re the ones who I talked to about the story. I know what they like.”
Optical department supervisor Robbie Blalack poses within an optical printer at ILM.
FRENZY
AUGUST 1975 TO SEPTEMBER 1975
CHAPTER FOUR
August 1975 saw action in England, with Lucas and Kurtz flying over from the States for the first of many brief preproduction stays. The latter arrived first and continued to review studios; at this point Pinewood was the front-runner. On August 1 production designer John Barry officially started, renting space at Lee Electrics in London. His first assignments were to build a landspeeder and to work on the robots with John Stears. They began by making a cardboard mock-up of R2-D2 based on the McQuarrie paintings. Kenny Baker was hired to be the man inside the droid.
“I got the job right away,” says Baker, who came to the interview with his longtime cabaret partner, Jack Purvis. “I said, ‘I can’t just walk into a movie and leave my partner stranded.’ They said, ‘Well, we have plenty of work for Jack,’ and they made him head Jawa.”
“We had to start with a tiny man to go in Artoo,” Barry says. “He’s only forty inches, Kenny, and very strong, fortunately, because it’s very hard to move. So we figured out where it was going to hurt him, and all the techniques around the boots. He’s got these specially made little boots that lace up tightly and hold his—the robot’s—boot firmly to his leg so that it moves as one. Then the harness that holds the body onto Kenny was quite important.”
“It just wasn’t very comfortable,” Baker says. “They had screws going through the robot’s head that stuck into my head.”
“When George came back to England around the middle of August, I said, ‘Look! What about that?’ ” Barry says. “And little Kenny—he’s a wonderful little man, I must say, marvelous—he came around the corner in the studio in this little wooden dust bin, a sort of mock-out trash can. He’s waddling across the floor, and George says at once, ‘That’ll work.’ ”
“We met Kenny and he was a good possibility for one of the robots,” John Stears says. “Working with Kenny in the early days, we made up mock-ups, and we could see exactly what he could do and what he couldn’t do, how fast he could move, and so on. Therefore we got into a mechanical situation, because this thing has to do things that Kenny was not physically capable of doing.”
Once a mechanical R2-D2 was deemed necessary for some shots, Stears spent a lot of time at a hospital where limbs were made for amputees; he visited atomic research facilities to study how the mechanical arms worked, even talking with a robotics professor “who thought I was crazy,” Stears admits. “With that knowledge, I once again worked out what was possible, spoke to George about it, and we tailored the actual mechanical answer.”
“Maybe it’s only over lunch, but all the time you’re talking about, ‘How about if we do this, how about if we do that?’ ” Barry says. “The outside of the robot we conceived of with lots of little panels, doors, all over it—so we know that if ever we need another arm or another antenna, we can say it is right behind that panel.”
As the workload increased, the production art department slowly staffed up and soon had about twenty-five to thirty people. Among them, John Barry supervised the efforts of Harry Lange, another of the class of 2001, who was designing control panels. “He’s got a tremendous eye for that sort of thing,” Barry says. “He really produces amazing things out of some amazing materials. The trick of it all was to come back with an eggbeater and half a vacuum cleaner, and suddenly whip up the most amazing control panels.” Another new hire, Liz Moore, concentrated on the landspeeder and C-3PO fabrication.
Back in 1973 Kurtz had spoken to a local production supervisor named Robert Watts, who was preparing The Wilby Conspiracy (1975) for location shooting in Kenya, and had asked him to send over his résumé. In April 1975 Watts had received a call from Peter Beale, the Fox representative in London, who asked Watts to meet Kurtz in Soho Square on May 1. Kurtz then contacted him in June to speak further about the project—and now Watts was undergoing the last part of his lengthy interview process by meeting with Lucas.
“I reckon I was about ten years old when I first went on a film set,” Watts says, “and it was about that age that I decided it was the life for me.” His grandfather had worked as a script writer at Ealing Studios, where Watts obtained his first job as assistant office boy in 1960, afterward working his way up to third assistant director and then production manager on films such as Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), Thunderball (1965), and You Only Live Twice (1967).
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Set dresser Roger Christian remembers the beginnings of R2-D2. (Interview by J. W. Rinzler, 2012)
(2:37)
In addition to interviewing more potential department heads, Lucas had important conversations with John Barry, who says, “I talked with George very much. He showed tremendous interest in the sets, so we knew very much what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be. George really wants to be involved in everything on the movie, whereas sometimes with a director you have the opposite problem. My personal taste leans more toward Barbarella [campy sci-fi film, 1968], which George didn’t want to do. He wants to make The Star Wars look like it’s shot on location on your average, everyday Death Star or Mos Eisley spaceport—which I think is a very valid point.
Kenny Baker was hired to be R2-D2, here shown in unpainted prototype form.
Lucas was satisfied enough at this point to pose with the robot and then give the photo to Ralph McQuarrie (courtesy of Ralph McQuarrie).
Ralph McQuarrie’s sketch of R2-D2’s inner workings had served as a conceptual guide.
A McQuarrie drawing indicates how a little person might fit inside the R2-D2 shell in order to operate the droid’s “legs.”
“Lash La Rue scene—L
uke vaults over space left by retractable bridge” was McQuarrie’s title for his November 21, 1975, painting that visualized John Barry’s idea of late August
Preparatory sketches for “Lash La Rue scene—Luke vaults over space left by retractable bridge”.
Around the same time McQuarrie finished the Alderaan interior.
His sketch of a robot was for a detail in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting.
“The eighth illustration is the elevator scene, which was just the result of a little pencil sketch I did,” McQuarrie says. “We didn’t talk very much about how the elevator should be; George just said there would be a row of elevators and Luke, Han, and Chewbacca would have to come to them and stand there. So I decided to make them individual tubes rather than just open doors, just so they would be different. This big canyon wall was part of that Lash La Rue scene, where Luke has to jump across.”
An envelope was sent to McQuarrie from Kurtz’s Universal Studios office in September 1975 and was used by the artist to store reference material given to him by Lucas.
“The thing is to design the sets simultaneously,” he adds, “knowing how you’re going to turn one into the next, because another area of responsibility is the budget—which, in this case, is a large percentage of the overall budget, in that there’s not a large number of very expensive actors.”
After talks in England, Barry flew to the States at roughly the same time as Lucas, who was preparing for the casting sessions. According to Ralph McQuarrie’s handwritten notes, John Barry arrived on August 20, 1975. The two met with Lucas to go over the artist’s paintings and discuss the sets in even more detail. “I had worked with Ralph McQuarrie while I was writing the script,” Lucas says, “and we designed certain things, but John was very willing to step in and say, ‘Yeah, these are good designs, let’s use those.’ He wasn’t hung up on the idea that everything would have to be his; he was very open to suggestions and he was very easy to work with. He also had a lot of good ideas of his own, adding creatively onto things without making it cost an enormous amount of money.”
One idea that Barry came up with at the time involved Luke and Leia escaping on Alderaan. “This was John Barry’s idea,” McQuarrie says, “to have this cliffhanger scene where the bridge retracts and Luke throws the little hook and swings her across. They call it the ‘Lash La Rue’ scene. This was after we had about three days of talks with John Barry, to introduce him to the project. I sat in because George thought I could do some sketches maybe while we were talking, but it was definitely established at that point that I was a sketch artist and not the art director, because John was going to be the art director.”
A CAST OF THOUSANDS
While Barry returned to England to supervise the burgeoning full-scale sets, and while ILM was still being set up as they built cameras and equipment, and while a contract with Fox was still outstanding, and while he was working on the fourth draft, Lucas began interviewing actors for The Star Wars in late August.
Having earned the director’s high opinion by casting American Graffiti, Fred Roos helped Lucas organize what was going to be a long process. “I was brought in to do some tests and give my opinion from time to time,” says Roos, who had built up his expertise by casting around forty low-budget movies.
“Fred didn’t get paid or anything,” Lucas says. “Fred is just a friend who is also a very good casting director who helped out as best he could. I asked his advice because I trust Fred’s opinion quite a bit; he’s very sharp about talent and casting. He’s a producer now and he really doesn’t cast anymore, but he got interested because I was working out of the American Zoetrope office in Los Angeles. Our offices were next door to each other, so he helped us. When I was in England, I could trust him to do tests and things, so he took some time out to do it. He really just did it as a friend.”
Like the two before it, Lucas’s third feature film was not a star vehicle, so he was going to have to devote enormous attention to the choice of his relatively unknown leads. “Deciding to cast unknowns was not a controversial decision,” Roos says, “because nobody cared at the time.”
Roos called casting director Dianne Crittenden in August 1975, and she eventually hired two assistants as the interviews multiplied. Crittenden may also have been recommended by the Huycks, who had worked with her on Lucky Lady, and she knew Coppola because they had attended Hofstra University at the same time. “I hadn’t read the script and I didn’t talk to George until right before we were ready to start,” Crittenden says. “It was just: ‘We need two young guys and a girl for this thing, and George will be here for three weeks.’ And I felt, Well, that will be fine. Then I read the script and found it fascinating, but I really didn’t know what it was about. I think I read it eight times before I finally got into it. But George knew what he wanted. He wanted Han to be a cowboy, the ‘James Dean’ character, but instead of a horse, he’s got a spaceship. Luke was a farmer. I said, ‘What do you mean, a farmer?’ And he said, ‘It’s a moon-farm or an interplanetary farm.’ George’s concept of the princess was an independent, strong one. Someone who was capable of leading her people, as opposed to some fragile fairy-tale kind of princess.”
With everyone ready, three weeks of casting began within the Zoetrope offices at the Goldwyn Studios in late August—and it was relentless, from 8 or 9 AM to 6 or 8:30 PM, as quickly as two people every five minutes, around 250 actors per day.
“I saw thousands of kids,” Lucas says. “I would see them for one minute, three minutes, five minutes. It gave me a physical idea of who they are, because you know about a person in one minute when you first meet them and they sit down. Your first impression of them is the same impression more or less as the audience’s when they meet them. The illusions can be much greater in theater because, with lighting and the distance, you are farther from the actor. You can fake things much easier. But with film, in a close-up, you are looking into somebody’s eyes—you are not only looking at the person as an actor, you are also looking at them as a human being. So I have to rely half on the human being and half on the actor. That’s been a prime requisite of anybody I use—I’ve hired very good actors who I’ve also felt could be that character in real life.”
Francis Ford Coppola and Fred Roos (with initialed bag, “F. R.”) in the Dominican Republic shooting the Cuban sequence during the making of Godfather Part II, circa 1973.
Though the speed of the interviews made perfect sense to the low-key director, many of the young actors rolling through the doors were somewhat perplexed. “Generally, George would ask, ‘What have you been doing?’ ” Crittenden says. “And they would respond, ‘You mean, today, or with my life?’ George would say ‘Either.’ And you could see people start to squirm. They’d ask, ‘What’s this about anyway?’ And he’d say, ‘Well, we’re doing a science-fiction movie.’ I received hundreds of phone calls later with people asking, ‘What was I doing there? What happened?’
“George was looking for something very visual.”
DOUBLE JEOPARDY
“Brian De Palma called me to do Carrie [1976],” Crittenden says. “So I said, ‘I can’t because I’m working with George.’ And he said, ‘You’re working with George? He’s my friend and we’re looking for the same thing, so I’ll just sit in on this.’ So that’s what happened. But it added confusion to the process, since Brian is the one whose name more people knew. They’d sit there and they would say, ‘Oh, I just loved Hi, Mom! [1970].’ Which didn’t bother George; in fact it seemed to make him feel more comfortable, because it became easier for him to watch the performances. Afterward, the actor would leave and George would say, ‘A definite three,’ and Brian would say, ‘I’d give them a four,’ and it would go on like that.”
A mutual friend of De Palma and Lucas, editor Paul Hirsch heard about the casting sessions, which began as somewhat notorious—and have become legendary. “Brian was terrifying these new actors and actresses,” Hirsch says. “Brian told me George had the op
ening speech and he had the closing speech, and vice versa. They were seeing so many people that they got it down to less than a minute. If they knew they weren’t interested in the person they were seeing, no sooner had George finished the opening speech than Brian would launch into the closing speech.
McQuarrie’s early sketches of Han Solo may reflect Lucas’s changing idea of his appearance and costume, from a more savage pirate to a more debonair James Bond or gunslinger type.
Another McQuarrie sketch perhaps reflects Lucas’s fixed pursuit of Alec Guinness for the role of Ben Kenobi—the drawing, which is markedly different from earlier depictions, has the hairdo and look of Guinness. Written by Lucas in the corner are the words “Ben Kenobi.”
A McQuarrie costume concept sketch for Princess Leia, with blaster in holster.
“During that time, I called Brian and he said, ‘Listen just a second. George wants to speak to you.’ And George said he liked my work and maybe we’d work someday together,” Hirsch adds. “I remember saying, ‘Gee that’s really terrific.’ I had heard things about Star Wars and if there was really one film I wanted to work on, it was that one. Brian would go over and see the miniatures at ILM, and he would tell me that he was envious of George. Brian was doing this movie with girls slamming doors and George was having all this fun making models and building things.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 14