Turman had also been recommended by Fred Roos, who had been “impressed” by his performance in Cooley High (1975), but Ford won out. “I’ve always had the feeling that I was hired for the job because I did the right thing for that character,” Ford says. “Acting is a matter of mechanics, and it was presumed I had sufficient capacity as an actor to handle the material, or was as close as George could get for the part.”
Although giving it a different chronology, Ford agrees that Luke and Han were cast as a duo. “I think George cast the relationship between Han and Luke,” he says. “That’s where George is a real student of human nature, ’cause he picked the kid automatically as soon as he picked me. I found it very easy to assume that relationship with Mark.”
“I try to cast it as a very good ensemble,” Lucas explains. “You think of it not only in terms of very good personalities who are going to work well on the screen, as good actors who are going to really be at the top of their craft, but also in terms of how all the actors interrelate as a group.”
The choice of Hamill also jibed well with the script. “If you read the original description of Luke, it’s almost exactly the way Mark is,” Lucas says. “In the end, it was between Mark and an actor who was a little bit older and a little bit more collegiate. He wore glasses; he was a little bit more intellectual. He was more like Kurt in American Graffiti, and Mark was a little younger, more idealistic, naïve, and hopeful; a little more Disney-esque.”
“My agent took me to lunch, and she was going down a list of business matters, like a grocery list,” Hamill says, “when in the very middle she said, ‘You have the part in Star Wars,’ and then she went on with the next item. ‘Wait a minute—back up!’ I interrupted.
“George chooses you for your personality,” adds Hamill, who was understandably shocked when he heard the news. “I mean, as a person, the actor is already so close to being the character. I’m not saying that’s true all of the time, but one phase of them is that character. I think if George would have had five more meetings with me, I wouldn’t have gotten the part.”
Mollo’s costume sketches for Luke.
Mollo’s costume sketches for Han Solo (right), and Ben Kenobi (left). “Luke wore a Japanese-type shirt with baggy pants and puttees,” he says. “George didn’t want any fastenings to show, he didn’t want to see buttons, he didn’t want to see zips, so we used stuff like Velcro, and things were just wrapped over and tied with a belt, or actually attached to the suede soft-leather boots. Ben Kenobi’s shirt is very much Russian.”
More costume sketches by John Mollo.
The last lead to be cast was Leia. “I had another girl who was much younger, who looked like what you might envision as a princess [Terri Nunn],” Lucas says. “She was very pretty and petite, but she also had an edge to her. Whereas Carrie is a very warm person; she’s a fun-loving, goofy kid who can also play a very hard, sophisticated, tough leader. This other girl couldn’t play sweet and goofy. Whereas with Carrie, if she played a tough person, somehow underneath it you knew that she really had a warm heart. So I cast it that way. The princess is one of the main characters, so the actress was going to have to be able to generate a lot of strength very quickly with limited resources available—and I thought Carrie could do it.”
“I ran outside in excitement,” says Fisher, “because I’d seen American Graffiti three times and liked it a lot.”
The budget benefited from the casting of unknowns. While Guinness’s long career and reputation earned him a substantial sum, Hamill’s weekly salary was $1,000, Fisher’s $850, and Ford’s $750. Another veteran English actor to receive more than his American counterparts was Peter Cushing, who was cast as Governor Tarkin and paid £2,000 per day. Apart from starring in dozens of Hammer horror films of varying quality during the 1960s, Cushing had started by playing bit parts in Hollywood films, such as James Whale’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1939) as well as Laurel and Hardy’s A Chump at Oxford (1940), later returning to England to play Osiric in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948).
“The character of Tarkin, as I kept rewriting the script, kept evolving into a bigger and bigger part,” Lucas says. “And after we’d started designing the costumes, and I saw what Darth Vader looked like, I felt I really needed a human villain, too, because you can’t see Darth Vader’s face. I got a little nervous about it, so I wanted somebody really strong, a really good villain—and actually Peter Cushing was my first choice on that, once I’d decided we were really going to spend some money to go with a really good actor rather than just some stock day-player villain.”
“When you get to be my age and you’re still wanted, it gives you an awfully nice feeling,” Peter Cushing would tell Starlog magazine. “The older you get, the lonelier you feel. When you’re over sixty, you think you’re on the shelf.”
The last hurdle to the final cast was the United Kingdom itself, which had to be persuaded to let the American leads into the country. “The only problem that came up was the original equity problem about getting all three of the young actors into England,” Kurtz says. “We solved that through the Film Producers Association, saying, in effect, that we need a waiver on this because we have three hundred jobs at stake in England, and we have a lot of other actors that are locally hired. That was just a casual thing. They were willing to listen to reason.”
Uncanny Cans
In the UK art department are set dresser Roger Christian, assistant art director Les Dilley (later promoted to art director), production designer John Barry, construction supervisor Bill Welch, and art director Norman Reynolds.
In early 1976, under the watchful eyes of Lucas and Barry, blueprints began to be generated by the art department’s five draftsmen: Ted Ambrose, Rich Greene, Peter Childs, Allan R. Jones, and Peter Shields. The group had a scant twelve weeks to get finalized dozens of complex sets, two very demanding robots, weapons, and armor. “Designing pictures is so difficult,” Barry says. “And paradoxically, its contribution to the movie is less than its difficulty, because one wants to make only a subliminal contribution. In a novel, a character’s apartment might get three or four pages of description. But the way the audience sees a set, it can make a strong comment immediately on the characters, which is very dangerous in that sense.”
Pirate ship interior: A John Barry sketch from November 1975 shows a pirate ship interior consistent with Colin Cantwell’s design, which featured a single long corridor. When that design had to be scrapped, maquettes were made of the new exterior. Blueprints were drawn up on February 17, 1976, of the rear undercarriage assembly; the huge set was quickly constructed; and the interior redesigned.
A Barry sketch from November 1975 of the pirate ship interior (note that only the robots are playing chess).
Maquette of the new exterior.
Set construction.
Redesigned interior.
“It had to appear to fit the exterior, so it had to have a curved design, a circular corridor.” Barry says. “George wanted it to look like a spaceship from 2001 that had aged two hundred years. The hold had the sequence where Luke is training with the remote, so we had to have a wide area, which gave us the foreground part. Then we had to have removable panels, so that John Stears could fit in the controls to the remote robot. The curved corridor had to be built with panels, so we could take them off and get lighting in. The ramp had to match exactly the exterior ship, which we’d already built. So gradually, to a great extent, the design evolved out of all those problems.”
Death Star blueprints: The biggest challenge facing production was to build, as cheaply and as quickly as possible, several Death Star sets: a control room, conference room, prison sets, hangar, war room, hallways, elevators, and so on. The art department rapidly generated blueprints for the “garbage room” on February 23; the “cells corridor” on March 1; and the “conference room” on March 12. “The inside corridors we had to build on the stage concentrically, one inside the other, in order to get them all to fit,” John Ba
rry says. “Ralph did some more drawings, which were the navy-blue Death Star, based on this concentric concept of the corridors running around. I figured that although the Death Star is enormous, you have to always build it on the curve to remind yourself that you are in a round shape.”
* * *
PT1145
On the other side of the pond, ILM was making its first attempts at blowing up models. But the explosions were not looking good on film. One errant Y-wing even slid down a wire, detonated, and put a hole in John Dykstra’s leg. ILM’s predicament was not improved by the possible addition of the jungle planet Yavin to their list of imminently due front projection plates.
Another principal-photography-driven deadline involved computer graphics. “Gary and George had just left, and I was working with Jim Nelson, who was the only authority around here,” Ben Burtt recalls. “At this point my assignment was still rather vague. George and Gary gave me no goal, no quota, they didn’t need anything by a certain date. They more or less wanted something to listen to when they got back from England. So in the meantime I started working on other things—specifically, they needed computer graphics sent to England to run on those little screens on the sets and on the dashboards of the spaceships. So I was handling that for about three months at ILM; I had to find some animators to do it. Eventually, Dan O’Bannon took over, but Robbie Blalack and I found Larry Cuba.”
A Cal Arts graduate and already a pioneer in the use of computers to create animation, Cuba was awarded the contract in February and began work in March, with a June 1 deadline. His main task was to give the stolen Death Star plans a computer-graphics form for the big debriefing scene. “George knew enough about computer animation to specify the kind of things that he wanted,” Larry Cuba says. “He wanted the computer to look like it was really drawing the graphics. They also needed background screens moving all the time, and general computer activity.”
The key element of the plans was the trench run that led to the exhaust port, into which the rebels were to fire their torpedoes. “I visualized it as one continuous shot: coming upon the Death Star, flying toward the surface, entering the trench, going straight down the trench, and dropping the bomb at the end into the target,” Cuba says. “It turned out, for very technical reasons, to not be a trivial task to make all those continuous linkages from the different ways of rendering things.”
Before Cuba left for Chicago, where his equipment and setup were located, he went down to ILM for reference material. “I said, ‘Okay, where’s the trench that I’ve got to simulate on the computer?’ ” he recalls. “And someone said, ‘Over there,’ and pointed to a stack of boxes where pieces of the modules were just lying there. So I took one each of the modules.”
“I designed the Death Star modules,” Joe Johnston explains. “They represented, initially, the three trench stages. The theory was that at one end of the trench, where you first enter, there’s not much detail: the buildings are all low, and the trench is shallow and wide. But then as you get closer to the exhaust port, the trench becomes deeper and narrower, and the buildings higher and more detailed.”
“During the process a trench seemed to be forming at ILM,” Cuba says, “so Ben Burtt mailed me photographs that he’d taken to give me an idea of what the trench looked like. But there was no reason to match their design precisely.” In Chicago, Cuba set to work using his PT1145 “basic digital computer,” which was connected to a Mitchell camera with an animation motor. It would take two minutes to do a frame, for about two thousand frames, or three days of continual computer processing, to end up with ninety seconds of animation.
Ben Burtt was also busy doing his other job: collecting sounds. “George did not want anything in the picture to sound electronic, except maybe the robot language,” he says. “Electronic sounds had been in a sense a cliché in science-fiction movies. They wanted to avoid that and have as many organic sounds as possible—real sounds that existed and could be recorded in the world. You can’t beat the reality of sound like that. So I went to Marineland and spent some time recording the dolphins, seals, and sea lions. They were in the middle of draining the walrus pool one Saturday, so I went down there and recorded Petulia, a big walrus. A lot of her sounds became part of the Wookiee. Basically, the Wookiee ended up being a combination of Petulia and a young cinnamon bear by the name of Pooh, owned by a trainer in Tehachapi, California.
“The most interesting stuff came from a place here in Burbank called Pacific Airmotive,” Burtt continues. “It’s a company that builds and tests jet engines. You’ve got four isolated engines sitting in a wind tunnel, and they run up the engine and go into a lot of different maneuvers. I would bring the microphones in their test chambers and get everything from 747s down to helicopter and turbine engines. On a gunnery range in the Mojave Desert, where they actually strafed and were blowing up things, shooting rockets, I got some good material: explosions and swooshes and sounds that were used for some of the laser effects. I also had a friend who was a gun collector, from old black-powder guns up to M16s. We checked out about twenty weapons. We shot up the hillsides, got a lot of ricochets. I tried recording them in an unusual way by putting a mike near the gun and by putting a mike next to the target as well, so in stereo you’d hear the bang and the hit.”
Ben Burtt records Petulia in the drained walrus pool at Marineland.
Several of the nine C-3PO faces sculpted by Liz Moore, with a variety of eye and mouth shapes, were photographed (above). Following the creation of the mold made from Anthony Daniels’ body (third set of photos), pieces were individually constructed, which the actor then tried on—testing, among other things, his ability to actually walk wearing his costume (below, with Liz Moore and Norman Reynolds observing).
Later Lucas and Barry puzzled as to how to attach the approved head design to the body.
ROBOT ARMOR
In England, Lucas and Mollo were busy creating the last costumes, with the latter being the next department head to be impressed by the former’s spartan directives. “George made pronouncements of a general nature,” Mollo says. “First of all, he wanted the Imperial people to look efficient, totalitarian, fascist; and the rebels, the goodies, to look like something out of a Western or the US Marines. He said, ‘You’ve got a very difficult job here, because I don’t want anyone to notice the costumes. They’ve got to look familiar, but not familiar at the same time.’ That was it! It then came down to asking George, ‘Well, is this color right, is this material right?’ and going from there.
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Costume designer John Mollo on the first steps of transforming concept sketches into physical costumes. (Interview by Arnold, 1979)
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“We didn’t look at any films specifically, but had a lot of books—all the books there were on science fiction and science-fiction films, books on World War II, on Vietnam, and on Japanese armor,” he adds. “I started going around the area in London where all the electronics firms are and buying £20 worth of things. I would say, ‘You know, I’m going to be sticking this on a robot.’ ”
The one outfit for the film’s robot-like villain, Darth Vader, had a budget of £500 pounds ($1,173). “Vader was fixed in the McQuarrie painting,” Mollo says. “To realize that costume, Vader became a combined operation between the costumiers and us. The costumiers made the basic costume out of leather, while we in the studio made the masque, the armor, the belt, and the funny chest box with lights on it. To me it looks like a Nazi helmet and pieces of trench armor that they wore in World War I. So it wouldn’t be too hot and uncomfortable for the actor, we made it in pieces, so that you could take bits off quickly on the set.”
While Vader was to appear in only a few scenes, Anthony Daniels as C-3PO was going to be in nearly the whole picture. He also had only a single outfit, but it was budgeted at the much more grandiose sum of £7,750 ($18,189). The road to a finalized C-3PO design had begun with Lucas; gone through McQuarrie’s mind, then the sho
ps of John Stears and John Barry, where Liz Moore took over; and finally returned to the hands of Lucas on February 11, 1976. “George had this concept of what the thing should look like, but I did a lot of very simple line drawings of little expressions,” Barry says. “Then George wanted to go for a slightly more humorous, silly look, so Liz Moore modeled nine faces. We stood them up at head height all the way around the stage, so that George could look at them, but they were kept well apart so that they didn’t interfere visually with one another. Then George, in fact, found two coins for the eyes, and we poked into the clay to make the mouth. He didn’t quite like the made-up mouth.”
John Barry’s sketch of the sandcrawler.
John Barry’s sketch, based on the designs of McQuarrie and Johnston, helped his crew draw up blueprints for the sandcrawler base and tracks, dated December 9, 1975.
Ingenious production design enabled the wheel assemblies to be broken down and packed into trucks for transportation to Tunisia.
Following the costume show for Lucas, the art department concentrated on personalizing the robot exterior to fit its sole inhabitant. “They told me they had to cover me in plaster,” Daniels says. “The glamour of films really hit the dirt when I was standing there cold and shivering, with practically nothing on, and these two laborers came up with buckets of plaster and Vaseline. It was one of the most disgusting experiences in my life. They were very worried about doing my head because they said a lot of people faint. So they stuck a couple of straws up my nose. They said if you feel at all funny about it, wave your arms and we’ll yank you off straightaway.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 25