Joe Johnston did several sketches of the second pirate ship. Because a hamburger or saucer doesn’t really have a front, mandibles were added to give the new vessel orientation. “We justified the mandibles by saying that they could be a freight-loading area where your cargo goes in,” Johnston says. “Something comes out and grabs the freight and takes it back into the ship.”
The cockpit was lifted off the first pirate ship.
November 25, 1975: “Fighters low over Death Star” and “One of the fighters dashing down trench” (fifth image). In this early McQuarrie concept of the Death Star surface, its walls are smooth and the cannons low to the canyon floor. “George just wanted an atmosphere sketch of the action and the hail of laserfire,” McQuarrie says.
The painting that so impressed Paul Huston and others at ILM.
December 5, 1975: “Throne room scene-princess receives heroes.” McQuarrie’s painting was based on his consultations with Lucas after the latter returned from England. “George went back and described it to Ralph,” John Barry says, “who then did the painting from the concept we knew we could handle. It’s such an enormous set that we were going to have to build in such a short time, so it had to be something that had those wing effects that keep disappearing. That way, we wouldn’t have to keep building the part ‘round the corner.”
A McQuarrie sketch of a Tusken Raider head, with Lucas’s handwritten title on the upper left.
McQuarrie’s costume concept sketches.
McQuarrie’s costume concept sketches.
December 7, 1975: “Tusken Raiders painting.” The Sand People came out of McQuarrie’s costume concept sketches done back in July and August. “I thought they should have goggles on because they have some sort of vision problem, the result of their species’ mutation,” he says. “The mouthpiece is a filter because of the constant sandstorms; the little tank underneath is filled with gas or a chemical, as part of their life-support system to counteract their mutation problems.”
A Tusken Raider costume sketch by costume designer John Mollo, early 1976.
* * *
GREEN LIGHT, GO!
On December 13, 1975, Fox had its long-awaited board of directors meeting. The fate of The Star Wars hung in the balance—at least for the studio. Lucas was fully prepared to take his project elsewhere if necessary. A participant at the crucial meeting, Warren Hellman says, “To the best of my recollection, Laddie came in and said, ‘I’m a believer in this—we’ve gotta go ahead with this project. Now’s the time we really have to get behind this.’ Dennis Stanfill was being neutral, and finally went along with it. But the board never had enthusiasm for the project.”
It was decided to give the film the green light. Though each board member had been given a portfolio made by Lippincott containing artwork by Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston, according to Hellman, Ladd’s backing was the key. At least one letter written by Pollock makes it clear that the Star Wars Corporation was aware of this: “George Lucas is extremely pleased with his relationship with Alan Ladd Jr.”
“I would have loved to have been at that meeting with Laddie’s board of directors,” says Michael Gruskoff, one of the producers of Lucky Lady, “when he presented Star Wars as a $7 million movie with a small furry animal and two robots, with the budget constantly going up and just a few sketches to show—and he needed an answer right then.”
“If at any time, Laddie would have left, the project would have died. There is no doubt,” Pollock adds.
“Kubrick’s 2001 didn’t break even until late 1975—and that was the most successful science-fiction film of all time,” Lippincott says of the 1968 release. “You had to be crazy to make a science-fiction film when we wanted to.”
Another letter, written shortly after the board meeting, expressed concern over a possible management change—Fox was still on treacherous financial ground—asking for assurances that if Ladd were to leave the company, Lucas would have final cut. “Unfortunately, after some negative experiences in the past at other studios, George does not feel that he can entrust the product of four years of his life to an unknown person,” Pollock wrote to Immerman on January 5, 1976. “George feels very strongly about this point—as strongly as about anything else we have ever discussed.” The reply was that, as a publicly held company, Fox could not grant final cut.
But Lucas’s space fantasy was a go-project and the purse strings began to loosen. From then on, everything from casting to set building to special effects jolted back to life and quickly took up a truly frenetic pace. On December 17 Lucas was interviewed by Lippincott, perhaps to mark the occasion of the critical point that had been reached after two and a half years of work:
George Lucas (Lucas): I’ll talk about anything.
Charles Lippincott (Chas): Why did you write this story, The Star Wars?
Lucas: Well, I read a lot of books, including Flash Gordon. I loved it when it was a movie serial on television; the original Universal serial was on television at 6:15 PM every day, and I was just crazy about it. I’ve always had a fascination for space adventure, romantic adventures. And after I finished Graffiti, I came to realize that there were very few films being made for young people between the ages of twelve and twenty. When I was that age, practically all the movies were made for that age. I realized that since the Western had died, there hadn’t been any mythological fantasy movies available to young people like the ones I grew up on: Westerns and pirate movies, Errol Flynn, all that. They just sort of petered out to the point where they don’t do them anymore, and then it petered out on television. Now all you get is cops and hard drama. So instead of making important, gripping, isn’t-it-terrible-what’s-happening-to-mankind movies, which is what I started out doing, I decided it would be much more useful for me to make movies that made kids have a fantasy life and feel good, so they could go ahead and have a more productive life.
John Barry and Lucas study topography photos of Tunisia, in England.
Lorne Peterson in the ILM model shop.
Concept art of a TIE fighter and “boarding craft,” by Joe Johnston.
Lorne Peterson.
Chas: The Star Wars has been through quite a few conceptual changes, there’s been several scripts—what was the evolution?
Lucas: Well, the problem is what happens in a lot of movies. It started as a concept. So I want to make a movie in outer space, let’s say an action-adventure movie just like Flash Gordon used to be. People running around in spaceships, shooting each other, and exotic people and exotic locations, and an Empire. I knew I wanted to have a big battle in outer space, a dogfight, so that’s what I started with. Then I asked myself, What story can I tell? So I was looking for a story for a long time. I went through several stories, trying to find the one that was right, that would have enough personality, tell the story I wanted to tell, be entertaining, and, at the same time, include all the action-adventure aspects that I wanted. That’s really where the evolution came from: Each story was a totally different story about totally different characters before I finally landed on the story. A lot of the scripts have the same scenes in them. On the second script I pilfered some of the scenes from the first script, and I kept doing it until I finally got the final script—which is the one I’m working on now—which has everything from all the other scripts that I wanted. Now what I’m doing in this rewrite is I’m slowly shaving down the plot so it seems to work within the context of everything I wanted to include. After that, I’ll go through and do another rewrite, which will develop the dialogue and the characters.
Chas: Do you conceive of a scene you would like to do in a certain setting and then…
Lucas: This film has been murder. It’s very easy to write about something you know about and you’ve lived through—it’s very hard to write about something you make up from scratch. And the problem was that there was so much I could include—it was like being in a candy store, and it was hard to not get a stomachache from the whole experience. But there were things I k
new I didn’t want to have, like exposition. I wanted the story to be very natural. I wanted it to be more of a straight adventure movie rather than something that had such complex technology that most of the film was spent dealing with the technology. And I didn’t want to make it so obscure that you didn’t understand what was going on at any given point—which is very hard to do in a science-fiction/fantasy movie, because everything is unfamiliar and therefore, by definition, needs to be explained.
Chas: How did you conceive of the characters?
Lucas: My original idea was to make a movie about an old man and a kid, who have a teacher-student relationship [treatment, rough, and first drafts]. And I knew I wanted the old man to be a real old man, but also a warrior. In the original script the old man was the hero. I wanted to have a seventy-five-year-old Clint Eastwood. I liked that idea. Then I wrote another script without the old man. I decided I wanted to do it about kids. I found the kid character more interesting than the old man. I don’t know that much about old people and it was very hard for me to cope with it. So I ended up writing the kid better than the old man. Then I had a story about the kid and his brother, where the kid developed—and a pirate character developed out of the brother [second draft]. As I kept writing scripts, more characters evolved. Over the two-year period of rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, all the characters evolved. I pulled one character from one script and another character from another script, and pretty soon they got into the dirty half dozen that they are today. It was a long, painful struggle, and I’m still doing it, still struggling to get them to come alive.
Chas: What point have you been trying to reach with them now?
Lucas: Essentially, I’m trying to knock out all the plot loopholes and I’m trying to smooth it out and add more intensity to the film, make it work better. I’m trying to make the characters more interesting, more enjoyable.
Chas: Your films, even when you were working as a student, always have been strongly oriented toward design, a strong visual sense. How did you conceive of the visuals in this film?
Johnston’s storyboards with Edlund’s notes reflect the pirate ship design revision. An earlier shot of the ship approaching Yavin (above) is replaced with the second vessel (below).
Storyboard showing the first pirate ship moving along the Death Star trench. “Re-do ‘Hamburger Boogie’ ” is a notation referring to the second pirate ship, which had been inspired by the form of a hamburger.
Lucas: I’m trying to make a film that looks very real, with a nitty-gritty feel, which is hard to do in a film that is essentially a fantasy. Photographically, I’m working on a filtered look, nostalgic, a looking-back quality. I’m using a lighting style that is very dramatic, in the style of Greg Toland [the cinematographer on Citizen Kane, 1941; and My Darling Clementine, 1946], using strong shadows. Framing-wise, I’m going to try for a semi-documentary, loose frame that will give it a nervous “now” quality, a sense of being captured, which will look real but at the same time be slightly fantastic. Binding all those things together will create, hopefully, a fantasy-documentary look.
Chas: You’ve had a strong orientation toward documentary. Your first two features used documentary cameramen. Why?
Lucas: I have a strong feeling about it. I like cinema verité; it’s one of my real loves. Cinema verité films are challenging, and that whole genre is in my blood. Apocalypse Now was going to be a real Peter Watkins [famed BBC documentarian and Academy Award winner], you-are-there, newsreel-type movie. Ultimately, the genre of the movie you’re making determines the style that you have to use, and I’m a strong believer in style. Graffiti had a real Sam Katzman, AIP [American International Pictures], hot-rod movie style, and everything was sitting there center frame. THX was a totally two-dimensional drawn-on, surreal style, with very eccentric graphics and framing—but it also had that documentary quality, which I achieved mainly through the lighting. In this film I’m going to use a documentary frame but with theatrical lighting. I like to have that edge of reality because I want the movies to make you believe they are real. I try to do it with the acting, too.
Chas: What is happening with the acting?
Lucas: It’s more improvisational and linked to the style I use in directing, which is to have more than one camera and lead back away from the people, so that the actors essentially play the scenes themselves. The cameras are onlookers, and you aren’t right in there. People aren’t acting to cameras, people are acting to each other. I won’t really demand that they get the lines right. They can play as much as they want with what they’ve got, which makes for a much more casual, sometimes much more intense interaction between actors rather than just having every little piece be perfect and done to the camera.
Chas: What do you look for when casting?
Lucas: I look for magic. What else can I say? Besides being solid actors, I’m looking for somebody who has the personal and physical qualities that I want that character to have.
Chas: You were talking the other day about having two concepts of the characters…
Lucas: I’m essentially thinking of casting in two different directions. One is a little more serious, a little more realistic; the other is a little more fun, more goofy. Right now my first choice is to make it fairly serious, because I think it’ll be more fun that way. Because I think you have to have a very strong reality in a movie for people to really enjoy it, and the more serious characters will give it the stronger reality.
Chas: Have you had any luck with Alec Guinness?
Lucas: We’re negotiating.
Chas: Will you have the studio putting any weight on you?
Lucas: I hope not. It’s not likely. The big issue usually comes down to whether you have movie stars or not, and since I’m not having movie stars, I don’t think they would know one actor from another.
Chas: How did you get them to agree to that?
Lucas: It’s just something that was a given at the very beginning. I said, “I am not going to put movie stars in this movie.” It wouldn’t do me any good, because the film is a fantasy. If it’s a Robert Redford movie, it’s no longer a fantasy; it’s a Robert Redford movie and you lose the whole quality of the fantasy, which is the only commercial aspect of the film in the first place. In order to create a fantasy, you have to have unknowns. I’m a strong believer in that. Part of the charm of Graffiti was that you’d never seen any of those people before, except Ronnie Howard, and I sort of slipped by with that. But essentially it was all fresh talent who you’d never seen in the movies before. It has a quality of making it not be a movie where players are acting a part; it has a tendency to make you believe that these are the real characters.
Chas: How are you going about choosing the various personnel, like your cameraman?
Lucas: I keep track of whose work I like as I go to the movies. So I interviewed thirty or forty cameramen, whose work I admired, to see how I get along with them. It’s especially hard for me in picking a camera [director of photography], because I never had a camera before. I’ve more or less shot my own movies. On Graffiti, Haskell Wexler came in, and he’s a very close friend of mine. It was really just him helping me out; it wasn’t like having a DP on the picture. I’ve never really had that to contend with, so on this picture it’s been tricky. I’ve been trying to find somebody who will essentially work with me and do more or less what I want to do, the way I want to do it. I like to take a lot of chances, do a lot of very eccentric things—and finding somebody who is open-minded enough to take chances and not worry about whether it’s going to look good is very difficult. And this picture is going to be difficult, technically: It has a lot of front projection, a lot of huge sets lit with backdrops and paintings, and challenging stuff that a lot of younger men can’t handle because they’ve never done it. They shoot on location and they know a certain kind of lighting, but they don’t know the old-style giant-set-on-a-sound-stage lighting with backdrops and tricky cutouts.
Chas: What’s cameraman Gilbert Tayl
or like?
Lucas: He’s very free-thinking, very talented, will do anything. That’s originally what I was looking for. He’s very similar to Geoffrey Unsworth. I think he’s the best black-and-white cameraman in England. I’ve only had about two meetings with him; I don’t think he’s even read the script yet, quite frankly. Matter of fact, I’m sure he hasn’t. What it comes down to is: I have a tendency to want a lot of the control over it. A lot of the decisions will be made for him, and I will expect him to build on those decisions and make them come out the way I want them.
A series of images show how elastic a certain shot could be: what started as a McQuarrie sketch of an Imperial pilot tracking another ship …
…became a Tavoularis storyboard of the same pilot approaching the cloud city of Alderaan …
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 19