The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “Brian and I are very good friends,” Lucas says, “and when I started casting, which is a laborious job that goes on for ten hours a day, with a person coming into your office every two minutes, you try to be pleasant and sharp and to have your analytical eye attuned—but it gets to be very, very difficult day in and day out, week after week. So Brian asked if he could sit in on my sessions and I said, ‘Sure,’ because it’s great to have company, somebody to compare notes with and somebody to keep you alive, so you don’t become completely blotto toward the end of the day.”

  THE GAUNTLET

  “In the beginning we were very open,” Lucas says. “We had two male characters, so I wanted the farm boy to be shorter than Han Solo, so they didn’t conflict visually; I didn’t want two guys looking exactly alike. I also made a decision in the casting to lower the age considerably from what I’d had in mind, because I wanted to make a movie about kids for kids, though, in a way, it’s an adult kid’s movie.”

  “We talked about Jodie Foster,” Crittenden says of the actress, who was about fifteen at the time. “We were down to that age. The princess was supposed to be about sixteen, Luke was about eighteen, and Han was in his early twenties. He was the old guy. But for purposes of shooting and having a full eight-hour day, people had to be over eighteen. It was incredible, the varied types of people that were brought in. We went so far as to send every school letters and we met people who had never acted before. We really wanted to cover everything.

  “During the first week, by the third day, we’d seen nearly everybody—John Travolta, Nick Nolte, Tommy Lee Jones,” Crittenden adds. “Mark came in the second day.”

  Twenty-four-year-old Mark Hamill was actually a little dubious about the test, according to Crittenden, because he already had a recurring role in The Texas Wheelers. “I think the TV series almost kept Mark from doing it,” she says. “When we saw him the first time, he wasn’t even sure whether he would be available. I really did have to persuade his agent [Nancy Hudson] that it would be beneficial at his age to do a feature film rather than to just keep his career stagnating in television.”

  “My agent said that there was going to be a general meeting at Goldwyn,” Hamill says, “and that there was no script. The only thing she knew about the kid was that he’s from a farm. At that time, to show you how much I knew about the film, I started practicing a midwestern accent. So we were scheduled one every fifteen minutes—it was one of those. Thousands of people sitting on the floor; you wait two and a half hours, and then you go in and talk. And I talked to Brian De Palma. I think he introduced me, but George didn’t say anything all the way through it. I told them about my brothers and sisters, and how we moved around, living in Japan.”

  His brief interview over, Hamill left knowing little more than before, and was immediately replaced by the next in line. While Lucas wasn’t making any decisions just yet about those he was seeing, De Palma hired John Travolta and Bill Katt, as well as Sissy Spacek and Amy Irving.

  RETURN OF THE LADYKILLER

  “By the second week, we were into the dregs already,” Crittenden says. “By the third week, we were just pulling people from colleges. But George wanted to see everybody. After a while Brian got tired and he dropped out.”

  Consistent with his rethinking of each draft after finishing it, as the sessions drew to a close, Lucas flirted with the idea of casting only African-Americans in key parts. He talked with Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, who was playing Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington in the hit TV comedy Welcome Back, Kotter. Lucas also considered doing the whole film in Japanese with subtitles. While this last idea might seem to have grown from the drudgery of the casting sessions, it was actually related to his love of Kurosawa and a desire to re-create the feeling of disorientation he’d felt as a student watching films from different cultures. Lucas imagined what it would be like to watch a foreign film as if it had just washed up on the shore—all of its customs, history, language, and mannerisms strangely exotic, somewhat familiar, but not explained—an idea that would inform much of the style of the completed Star Wars as it had THX 1138.

  “There was talk at one point about having the princess and Ben Kenobi be Japanese,” Crittenden recalls, “which led George into thinking Han Solo might be black.”

  “This was actually when I was looking for Ben Kenobi,” Lucas says. “I was going to use Toshiro Mifune; we even made a preliminary inquiry. If I’d gotten Mifune, I would’ve also used a Japanese princess, and then I would probably have cast a black Han Solo. At the same time, I was investigating Alec Guinness.”

  He entrusted Crittenden with the first step of that process, and she was able to put a copy of the script into the hands of the famed English actor in September. “I had a friend working on the film Murder by Death [1976] and I just said, ‘I would like to come over and see Alec Guinness,’ ” Crittenden says. “I went over and talked to him, and he said, ‘Let me see your script.’ George had cleverly attached to the script a whole set of sketches for the film, so I hand-delivered the script to Alec Guinness—who called me about two hours later and said, ‘I love this; I’m very interested in it.’ So I set up a lunch for George to meet him. It all happened without a middleman or an agent or a lawyer.”

  In fact, Guinness almost turned down the picture when he realized what genre it was tapping. “I was in Hollywood making a movie, and on my second to last day a script arrived on my dressing room table,” he says. “I saw it was going to be directed by George Lucas, and George Lucas I knew about because of American Graffiti, which I admired very much. So I was immediately excited, but when I opened the script and saw it was science fiction, I said, ‘Oh lord.’ I’ve never done a science fiction [film]; I’ve seen one or two of them and enjoyed them, but I always thought they were sort of cardboard, from an actor’s point of view. But because of Lucas, I started reading it—and I found myself involved. There was an excitement in the script. I wanted to turn each page to know what happened next. I wanted to know how each little incident was concluded. It had a touch of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It was a rather simple outline of a good man who had some magical powers. It was an adventure story about the passing of knowledge and the sword from one generation to the next.”

  Lucas’s lunch with Guinness went well, with the actor being “impressed” by the “new breed of filmmaker.” But they were far from a contract.

  A BAG OF TRICKS

  Simultaneous with the three-week casting session in August and September, the ILM model shop had increased its output. Cantwell had by this time built a Star Destroyer, X-wing, Y-wing, Skyhopper (originally a good-guy fighter), a landspeeder, a small Death Star sphere, a TIE ship, and a sandcrawler. The last was a truncated pyramid with tiny “gravity grippers” that would search for things, according to McCune. “It had two little tanks that pulled it around and it looked more like a barge for picking kelp.” McCune and his team—at this point Bill and Jamie Shourt—realized that these concept models, while fanciful and ornate, were by the same token impossible to photograph. The models were consequently “heavied up” so they would work with mattes, and made large enough so they’d have room for essential motors, lights, and other equipment.

  “The X-wing just kept getting fatter and fatter,” McCune says. “But the basic ideas for the pirate ship, Star Destroyer, X-wings, and Y-wings were all nailed down tight within the first thirty days. The TIE ship came right after that.”

  “I asked George whether the Death Star was always going to be near a planet,” Cantwell says. “He said it was, so I explored a very risky thing with a prototype model: I tried making it silver [far left, on top shelf], so you can set scenes where it would show in space.”

  In John Dykstra’s office at ILM, Joe Johnston stands next to shelves exhibiting Cantwell’s concept models, from the top: Skyhopper, Death Star sphere, landspeeder, pirate ship, sandcrawler with tanks. Star Destroyer.

  Lucas took a Polaroid of the last ship, penciled in its name, and gave it
to McQuarrie for reference (“star d”).

  Cantwell’s model of the Star Destroyer.

  Cantwell’s model of the Death Star.

  Models were a priority for two reasons. First, cockpits and ship interiors were going to be built in England based on the miniatures, but production couldn’t start until the models had been approved. Second—and crucially—they were planning on using front projection on the set for the escape from Alderaan battle with the TIE fighters, which meant that ILM had to have plates ready by early 1976. John Dykstra had used front projection on Silent Running, and one of the pieces of equipment he’d had Don Trumbull build was a front projection rig, with four-by-five plates and motors in it for rotating the image.

  To help complete all the models in the allotted time, McCune hired David Beasley, whom Bob Shepherd had found in the “Unemployment Department.” To help with the redesign of the concept models and to create storyboards for the front projection sequences based on the third draft, Joe Johnston was hired to start the art department in August 1975. Earlier that summer Johnston had been working at Magic Camera on an aborted Paramount project, The War of the Worlds.

  Richard Edlund, Rose Duignan, John Dykstra, Lucas, and Joe Johnston consult together.

  “Bob Shepherd knew about me and called me up,” Johnston says. “I was going to the beach every day and really enjoying the summer, and he ruined it! [laughs] He said, ‘We’re doing another space movie and we want you to come up and see what you think.’ My first thought was, Oh no. I don’t want to work. I changed my mind, though, after I got there. It looked like a fun job. It looked like a good project.”

  Johnston needed somebody to translate his concept drawings into orthographic schematics for the model shop as a basis for building, so Steve Gawley was hired (he soon segued into the model shop).

  “John Dykstra and I sat down with Joe Johnston,” Lucas says. “John took the models and said that we had to change them, for his technical needs more than anything else. The wings had to be fatter or they wouldn’t show up in bluescreen, and we had to fatten the bodies up so we could fit the suspension bars in. Joe was the one who added all the aesthetics in terms of detailing.”

  “George wanted all the rebel ships to look secondhand, old and beat up,” Johnston says. “He wanted them to look like they weren’t as well built or well designed as the Imperial ships. If he didn’t like a ship, he’d say, ‘Do more sketches.’ ”

  “Joe was the only one who could draw from inside him,” Shepherd says. “He could really make images that you understood. So Joe would do a drawing, and it would get kicked around at that conceptual level. At some point it would be okayed, the drawing would be handed to Grant, and they’d say, ‘Build it.’ And he’d ask, ‘Well, how big is it?’ And they’d answer, ‘Well, it’s got to be this big for photographic reasons,’ or ‘We’re going to put a light in it.’ After the scale was established, the guys in the model shop looked at the thing and embellished it from their own head—they are artists in their own right—and that’s why they have to be able to think.”

  THE DEMISE OF THE LOCKED-OFF SHOT

  From the beginning there was no question that new and valuable creative thinking was taking place on Van Nuys Boulevard. Complicated negotiations took place with the special effects hires. “We were involved in some new patent processes,” Andy Rigrod says. “We had to get licenses for them. There was [going to be] a huge staff, and every one of them had to be employed under agreement so they would promise to not give away the secrets that were involved in the processes.”

  One of the most important processes was the creation of the motion-control camera John Dykstra had proposed. To understand why this camera was needed, one has to appreciate where special effects were at the time. If a director wanted a shot of several starships flying through space, his team would have to combine various pieces of film, all shot separately: a starfield, each spaceship, lasers, perhaps a planet, and so on. The different pieces of film would then be combined with an optical printer, which would enable the compositor to arrange the several pieces into one. This was a very expensive and tricky process, for a number of reasons. The miniature set would have to be left standing until the film came back—it was a “hot” set—because they’d have to use it again if any mistake had been made. Moreover, the process was so complicated that nearly all shots had to be static—the camera couldn’t move because it could never successfully and repeatedly film all the needed elements if it did.

  The ILM model shop as it got up to speed: In the foreground are David Grell, Steve Gawley, and Joe Johnston. The door led to the optical department, while the wood shop was to the left of the model shop, and the motion-control stage to the right.

  Model shop supervisor Grant McCune and model maker Dave Beasley in the model shop.

  The Star Wars had an estimated 350 shots, each with as many as seven or eight elements—which represented a staggering amount of time and money doing it the contemporary way. “So we had to create systems that would allow us to shoot a shot, tear down the rig, then set up and shoot another shot—with the certainty that it would be okay one way or another,” Dykstra continues. “We needed to be able to record the information using the latest techniques to ensure that we were going to get something good to start out with—but also, if we didn’t get the shot the first day, a camera that would enable us to go back and do it again.”

  Lucas’s short film of aerial action had also made it clear to everyone at ILM that the status quo of science fiction—static spaceships flying on rails—wasn’t going to be satisfactory. The X-wings and TIE fighters were going to have to dive, weave, and bank. “Before we developed the equipment for Star Wars, those moves could be made,” Dykstra says. “But it was a very complex problem to get them combined into one shot. You could make a zoom or a pan or a tilt during a shot, but to zoom, pan, and tilt in the same shot and maintain matte integrity was really difficult. So the moves were primarily linear in the films [of that time].” Complex moves had been created for commercials that had maybe one shot, but they’d never been attempted on such an ambitious scale, because it was too risky and expensive. “They weren’t viable in terms of achieving that effect over and over in a variety of situations.”

  Not only would elements within the shot have to maneuver more freely but, to fit the director’s vision, the camera would also have to be able to move as if it were a handheld device in a cinema verité film—that way, people would feel like the space battle was real. Nearly every other film up until then had used what was referred to as a “locked-off shot,” in which the camera wouldn’t move during the special effects shot. To audiences, this was a telltale sign that they were about to see something fake. Nice, perhaps—but fake, because up until that moment in the film, the actors and objects, as well as the camera, would move about in a familiar way, and then suddenly everything would become still. Consciously or unconsciously, this would be a signal to the audience that something not occupying the same space as the actors was about to appear. But Lucas was adamant that he wanted his effects to occupy the same reality as his protagonists.

  “It really means making the viewer feel as though it’s a real situation,” Dykstra says. “You can move the camera—you can watch a ship come from a distance and pan and follow him and watch him go away, covering a 180-degree field of view. In the old shots you saw a very narrow cone of vision. Everybody knows that you can line up one shot and have it look right, if you don’t move the camera. But if you start moving the camera, that is the subliminal cue to the person watching it, even if he knows nothing about film, that he’s watching real live-action photography. Because the moving camera puts him in a space. Instead of viewing a postcard, he’s seeing a three-dimensional reality.”

  Pirate Ship

  “I went by Colin’s place quite a bit,” McQuarrie says, “and would take photographs of the models as they produced them from casts. I was putting them in the paintings and some of the paintings I updated
as Colin would get further into developing them.”

  After about two weeks of talks with Lucas, Cantwell finished his concept models several months later, in May. “It took a long time,” Lucas says. “By the time he was done, ILM had been set up.”

  Johnston’s early sketch was based on Cantwell’s model for the rebel ship; an alternate Cantwell prototype had more rocket boosters, and those were incorporated into a later sketch by Johnston of the pirate ship, and into a painting by McQuarrie.

  Johnston’s early sketch of the rebel ship based on Cantwell’s model.

  An alternate Cantwell rebel ship prototype with more rocket boosters.

  Johnston sketch of the rebel ship incorporating Cantwell’s changes.

  The rebel ship in a painting by McQuarrie.

  With Lucas’s approval at each stage, John Dykstra drew additional sketches of the pirate ship, which Joe Johnston turned into more concept designs that Steve Gawley translated into orthographic drawings; then the Shourts and Grant McCune started construction. “It’s really an amazing acrylic sculpture,” McCune says. “It was like a six-inch tube with four-inch tubes stuck out at the ends, and wings of eight-inch Plexiglas. Jamie Shourt is an incredible mathematician and he figured out every piece of it on paper with his little mini computer—all the three-plane geometry problems. It weighed about 125 pounds”.