That afternoon, Sir Alec and Lady Guinness arrived in Tozeur, but weather conditions continued to worsen, forcing Lucas to halt shooting at 5:57 PM due to “bad light.”
By the fourth day, despite the several setbacks, cast and crew were becoming familiar with their surroundings and one another. The location caterers, working in the mobile kitchen, managed to produce steak-and-kidney pie, while Mark Hamill and Gary Kurtz had discovered a mutual love of Carl Barks’s Donald Duck comics.
Daniels had to be pulled out of the sand after he’d waved on camera and then walked off camera behind a sand dune and fallen over.
The bleached bones were first assembled and approved in England before being shipped to Tunisia.
“We worked like stink, twenty hours every day,” Robert Watts says. “It was a very good shakedown period for a crew. To really get together out on location, and do it up front before you get to the studio, is good— to eat out of each other’s pockets, particularly in a small town like Tozeur.”
Because the production stayed in that one town for a few days, word went around that they were sometimes hiring, and Watts ended up employing a local youngster. “When I’d leave in the morning and every night when I’d come back, this kid is standing outside the hotel. So I’m not going to give him a job, because the minute I do, all his buddies will ask me for jobs. In the end, though, I decided I needed an office boy. He worked out very well because he worked very hard.”
But in order to make up for the time they were losing, production had to split into two units. The second unit covered “Jawa activity shots with robots in front of sandcrawler,” while the first unit shot scene B32 with stormtroopers, played by “six local men” who were paid 8,500 dinars for the day ($6.50). The delays necessitating two units were partly due to unusually bad weather, but also to the earlier, unnatural holdups caused by the studio.
“It was purely a case of Fox not putting up the money until it was too late,” Lucas says. “Every day we would lose an hour or so due to those robots, and we wouldn’t have lost that time if we’d had another six weeks to finish them and test them and have them working before we started. Whereas before there were only about five or six people involved in the special effects, once we were on location with 150 people involved, we were paying much more in salaries—so that six-week delay cost an enormous amount of money. Ultimately, we had to scrap whole days out there in Tunisia and say, ‘Okay, we’ll try to pick that up when we get back to the United States.’ ”
Another robot crisis occurred when the truck carrying several of them caught fire, and two robots slated for the homestead set were damaged.
Lucas directs the stormtroopers.
Lucas talks things over with Kurtz.
Lucas sets up the shot with his camera crew.
His camera crew films the six stormtroopers.
The six stormtroopers afterward pose for a group shot following their work’s completion.
Black-and-white photography taken on location.
“We had a black all-in-one leotard for the stormtrooper costume,” Mollo says, “over which the front and back of the body went together; the shoulders fit onto the body, the arms were slid on—the top arm and the bottom arm were attached with black elastic—a belt around the waist had suspender things that the legs were attached to. They wore ordinary domestic rubber gloves, with a bit of latex shoved on the front; the boots were ordinary spring-sided black boots painted white with shoe dye. Strange to say, it all worked.”
SCS COMP: 5; TIME TAKEN: 6M 46S; DAILY STATUS: 3/4 DAY OVER
REPORT NOS. 5–7: FRIDAY, MARCH 26–SUNDAY, MARCH 28, 1976 CANYON IN TOZEUR; SETS: EXT. ROCK CANYON; SCS: 37 [LUKE AND C-3PO FIND THE FUGITIVE R2-D2]; 38 PART (SOME OF THIS TO BE SHOT IN USA) [LUKE ATTACKED BY TUSKEN RAIDER]; 39 PART [ARRIVAL OF BEN KENOBI IN CANYON]; 40 [LUKE FINDS INJURED C-3PO]
Problems with the landspeeder also played a part in the decision to do pickups in the United States. The scene with the banthas, however, which were to be portrayed by elephants, had always been scheduled for later. “By the time we would have dragged out two circus elephants and fought with them and waited around endlessly with the crew, entailing all those associated costs, it was clear that it was not a practical idea,” Barry says.
Despite slow going, the one scene completed on Day Five—in which Luke finds an errant R2-D2—helped Hamill better understand his character. “George is Luke,” Hamill says. “He is. I always felt that way. We were in the desert one time—it was the scene where I had just found Artoo after he ran away—so I ran up and said, ‘Hey, where do you think you’re going?!’ And to Threepio, ‘Do you think I should replace the restraining bolt?!?’ But George came up to me and said, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ He acted it out, just walking up and saying, ‘Noo, I don’t think he’s going to try anything.’ At that point, I was thinking, Well, he’s doing it so small, so I’ll do it just like him—and he’ll see how wrong he is. So I did it like that—and he said, ‘Cut. Print it. Perfect.’ So I thought, Oh … I see.
Sir Alec and Lady Guinness are greeted upon their arrival by Lucas.
Sir Alec and Lady Guinness chat with Mark Hamill.
Lucas confers with his DP, Gil Taylor.
They shoot Luke looking into the skies while tending to a moisture vaporator. “Luke’s poncho was just a straight blanket with some edging to it,” Mollo says. “There were all sorts of funny sombreros and hats, but eventually we abandoned the hat for Luke.” In total, five outfits were made for Luke at a budget of £2,020 ($4,700). “The moisture collectors were made out of airplane junk,” John Barry says, “but somehow they look believable.”
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
On location in Tunisia, late March 1976, John Stears radio-controls a droid, while Mark Hamill is filmed watching the skies. (No audio)
(0:46)
When Luke (jumping out of his landspeeder perched on its carousel arm, left) finds his dead aunt and uncle, Hamill thought it would be appropriate for his character to fall on his knees sobbing, but Lucas preferred a more neutral performance, so that audiences would be able to project their feelings onto him. Lucas knew that later on he would edit the sequence in keeping with the art of montage as explained by early Russian filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov, in which the juxtaposition of shots would arouse emotion, rather than just the actor’s performance.
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) arrives to find his home in flames and his family murdered.
Mules once again were used to help carry equipment to remote areas, such as the spot where they filmed the arrival of Ben Kenobi; while Lucas conferred with his crew, however, delays with the little robot persisted.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Sir Alec Guinness clowns around with Kenny Baker and then films the scene in which Ben and Luke discover a damaged C-3PO (note that only the droid’s torso would be in the shot, so his pants are “off”). (No audio)
(0:42)
“After that, I often felt like I was playing George; I even went so far as to do his little beard gestures,” Hamill adds. “George even gave me his nickname, The Kid; they used to call George The Kid until he grew his beard.”
Daniels was also getting into character. “See-Threepio is a kind of English butler, a cross between Laurel and Hardy with his friend,” he says. “He loves being around Luke because that’s his purpose—to look after people—he wants to make them happy. I think that’s one reason why the part works. This unlikely shape has all the human attributes and possibly more, though it seems outlandish, because he isn’t human. The odd thing was I kept acting the whole thing out, facially, if I were emotionally upset in a scene or angry, even though no one could see me.”
Friday’s shooting again wrapped earl
y due to heavy rains—and on Saturday the bad weather reached its peak, developing into a terrific storm. “We get up in the morning, and though we are supposed to be in the sun-drenched southern part of Tozeur, it is pissing rain and there’s a wind like you wouldn’t believe,” Watts says. “So I call a rest day, and I go down to Les Dilley and take him out to the salt flats. We drove out in the Land Rover all right—but when we got out of the car, it was so slippery we couldn’t even stand up. Luckily the local security guards had these Wellington boots, with the heavy treads on the bottom. We had one each supporting us, so we could get out to see the damage to the sets. The top had gone off the homestead and that was already halfway to Algeria somewhere.”
“It had blown away,” Barry says. “It blew three miles in the night, it just rolled and rolled and rolled.”
“The sandcrawler had been completely blown apart!” Lucas recalls. “Stuff had gotten stuck in the mud. Then the army trucks that came to pull the stuff out of the mud got stuck in the mud—and stayed there until the weather changed.”
The crew regrouped and rebuilt, however, and on Sunday, Guinness appeared for the first time in costume as Ben Kenobi. “What I remember about Sir Alec Guinness was that, before going on camera, he lay down in the sand in his brand-new clean costume and dirtified himself,” Bunny Alsup says. “I thought this was unique and wonderful. Only later did I realize that George probably asked everybody to do this because one of his goals on the film was for everything to be used and dirty.”
Having arrived several days earlier, Guinness was playing the scene in which he finds Luke in the canyon after the Tusken Raiders have attacked. “We worked about a week without him, but we’d see him,” Hamill says. “I think Tony Daniels and I had dinner with him and his wife, Lady Guinness, twice.”
As they quickly filmed the canyon setups, Hamill adjusted to working with the vastly experienced older actor. “At first, I felt very much like you do when you go before the principal, but then I thought I should be more myself, because that’s what he’s like. So we loosened up to the point where I could just sit next to him and not say anything for an hour while they were setting up. I know he really liked that. He felt that we were taking each other into our confidences. Two or three times, he would say, ‘May I suggest something?’ And, gosh, I wish he would do that all the time, because he was always right. He would say, ‘Stop and think of what you’re saying. Are you talking about going or are you going there?’ Because it’s not the fact that I’m going but where I’m going. Little things like that. You’d think about it, and, usually after you’d shot it and were on your way home in the car, you’d understand what he meant.”
Lucas, Guinness, and Hamill watch and wait before filming Obi-Wan’s first scene.
“We did work in Tunisia on these extraordinary salt flats,” says Guinness, who was enjoying himself. “There’s a great feeling of strange space that stretches on for hundreds of miles; it’s genuine, real and gritty—it’s not some made-up world.”
SCS COMP: 7; TIME TAKEN: 11M 0S.
REPORT NOS. 8–10: MONDAY, MARCH 29–WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 1976
TOZEUR; ROCK CANYON; SCS: 38 [TUSKEN ATTACKS LUKE]; 47 [VIEW OF MOS EISLEY, “SCUM AND VILLAINY”]; 35 [TUSKEN RAIDERS ESPY LUKE IN LANDSPEEDER]; 17 [JAWAS NEUTRALIZE R2-D2]; 18 [JAWAS CARRY R2-D2 TO SANDCRAWLER]; B42 [LUKE AND BEN DISCOVER DEAD JAWAS]; E42 [JAWA BONFIRE]
By Monday, on a logistically complex day, with first and second units working on the salt flats and in the canyon near Tozeur, several scenes were completed: Obi-Wan’s arrival; Luke watching the battle in space; and stunt supervisor Peter Diamond playing the Tusken Raider who attacks Luke. The veteran stuntman and actor rehearsed without costumes—but when the cameras rolled and Diamond donned the Tusken headgear, he realized he couldn’t see. As Hamill dodged the blind stuntman’s violent blows, his look of fear was real.
The rest of that day was spent climbing up to the cliff from where they’d command a breathtaking view of the canyon below, which would later be replaced by a matte painting of Mos Eisley. The crew gathered their equipment for the trek—including an indispensable (for the English) tea urn—and packed up the mules and porters. When they got to the top, Daniels was put into his metal outfit just in time for tea and, to his annoyance, had to wait inside his prison for the duration of the break.
At the end of that day, the shot that bad weather had foiled three or four times before—scene 29: Luke and the twin suns—was attempted once more. With the clouds dissipated, they set up the VistaVision camera, waited, and got it.
By Tuesday, Day Nine, production was concentrated in the rock canyon during what was another day of fairly intense filming for the Jawas. Playing those diminutive creatures were Kenny Baker’s cabaret partner, Jack Purvis; Gary Kurtz’s two children; the son of an English truck driver; Mahjoub, a little Tunisian who usually worked for the hotel in Tunis; and local children aged eight to ten. “The Jawas had to be designed from scratch,” John Mollo says. “They were supposed to look like little rats, sort of grimy and filthy. George produced a prototype, which he subsequently felt was too theatrical, so we pulled it back to just a black stocking mask and these eye-bulbs, which were wired on, a little brown cloak with a Russian Cossack hood, and a scarf. Then we’d put other bits and pieces on them the day of shooting just to make them look a bit more formidable.”
For the shot in which Daniels had to drop a Jawa cadaver into a bonfire, the body was placed onto his already outstretched arms; fighting his limited visibility, he then tried to coordinate his movement with Luke’s, as his landspeeder was swung around by the carousel. Hidden beneath his armor, Daniels was also able to quietly analyze his relationships with fellow actors: “Without being unloyal to Kenny Baker,” Daniels says, “he didn’t read the script from beginning to end, so I was totally on my own. In fact, it was very difficult because I would say something to him and there would be absolute silence. Often it was very lonely doing scenes with him, for he wasn’t there. As for Mark, I used to kid him that even when I wasn’t speaking in our scenes together, nobody was going to look at him because I was gleaming and shining in all the lights, nodding and upstaging him generally—but one of the things that is a delight is the way Luke talks to See-Threepio. The same with Alec Guinness, though he must have had a very difficult time in his career to suddenly start acting with robot scrap heaps.”
Alec Guinness as Ben Kenobi chases off the Tusken Raiders and revives Luke, who lies next to his landspeeder (its supporting post is concealed by a rock, below).
Peter Diamond, without mask, rehearses with Hamill and crew the scene in which a Sand Person attacks Luke with a formidable weapon, because Diamond would be literally blind when the cameras rolled and he was aiming blows at the actor (mattresses were placed to cushion their falls—and Daniels wears shoes because his feet are not on camera).
Hamill inspects the weapon with some trepidation.
On Monday, March 29, Mark Hamill prepares and then plays the scene in which his character reflects on his dreams. The second sun would be added in postproduction.
“I found him to not be an easy guy to get close to,” Baker says of Daniels. “We didn’t argue or anything, but we were not close friends.”
Daniels also overheard a brief difference of opinion between Taylor and Kurtz, as they hurried to catch the fading light for a shot of the Jawas loading R2 into the sandcrawler. “I didn’t grasp them all but, ‘Who’s meant … be lighting this … movie,…or me, because … you’re … it, I’ll … off!” Daniels says.
By the second week of location shooting, the radio-controlled robot problems had formed a frustrating pattern: “In the morning we had perfect reception,” John Stears says. “But by two o’clock we had all sorts of problems with interference.” They would pick up other radio stations, which Stears hypothesized may have been due to mica buildups under the sand. Some problems were resolved by playing around with the aerials, but as the days wore on new difficulties arose.
“We got some weird signals from Arabic radio stations,” Hamill says. “It was really frustrating. We’d get things almost all ready—and the robots would go bananas, bumping into each other, falling down, breaking. It took hours to get them set up again.”
Also by this time, several questions that had been developing in relation to the script had been posed—and a solution found. The problems were essentially two: Ben Kenobi didn’t really have anything to do in the film following his escape from the Death Star; and the Death Star, theoretically a very dangerous place, was too easy to escape from. In short, the film needed more drama. The answer to both structural problems was to kill off the Jedi Knight. At one point C-3PO and Chewbacca were also candidates for death, but Ben was the most logical choice—as it also enabled Lucas to make an important point about death and its relation to the Force. Kenobi wouldn’t just die, he would disappear, joining the Force with his consciousness intact.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 28