In Ben’s home on Stage 7 with the lightsaber (which glowed when viewed through the camera).
The middle child of seven brothers and sisters in a family that moved often, including two and a half years in Japan, Hamill adapted easily and enthusiastically to life on the set, and could relate to his character’s family problems. “I think Ben Kenobi is like the father I always wanted, because I can’t really relate to my uncle,” Hamill says. “My uncle is an isolationist and wants to just have a farm. But when I find out that Guinness knew my father and was involved in the same sort of things, I think there’s a great connection there—and it was easy for me because I couldn’t help but be in awe of the actor who was playing it.”
“I tried to make him uncomplicated,” Guinness would tell The Sunday Times on May 2, a few days later. “I’m cunning enough now to know that to be simple carries a lot of weight. The laser sword seems to be a marvelous weapon. It’s rather like a Japanese sword with a row of laser buttons. But I must confess I’m pretty much lost as to what is required of me … What I’m supposed to be doing, I can’t really say. I simply trust the director.”
It would also seem that Guinness was relaxed enough to improvise, for while the script had his line as “You must do what you feel” when Luke hesitates about becoming a Jedi Knight, what Guinness said was, “You must do what you feel is right, of course.”
John Stears and company had worked out the problem of the lightsaber just in time for their scene. When Hamill “ignites” it, what he’s really holding is a spinning wooden sword, partly coated with a reflective material that, when photographed by Gil Taylor through a half-silvered mirror, looked like it was illuminated from within.
While Hamill and Guinness did repeated takes, Daniels sat quietly in the background, worrying. “My feet crossed beneath me in a yoga position, I moved up only with the help of Alec and Mark,” he says. “But I had to warn Alec that I was really a lethal instrument, because I could very happily chop off fingers without knowing. If they put their fingers where the arm went in or where the knees joined, I would just crack their fingers without being at all aware.”
At 5:30 PM Lucas and company were still filming the cave scene. The director had already been obliged to stop scenes several times in midstride and wasn’t about to do so again. “When we were on location we could shoot a twelve-hour day,” he says. “But when we got back to the studio suddenly they were chopping me off at 5:30. I said ‘Wait a minute!’ Because what happens is you get a scene completed, except one or two shots that would’ve taken about forty-five minutes to finish—but they’d say no. If instead you finish the scene at the end of the day, then you move to the next stage that night; you don’t take up shooting time for it—because they won’t shoot after 5:30, but they can move their equipment. I would have picked up an hour or two every day, but they wouldn’t let me do that.”
“It’s a holdover from the labor situation in England,” Kurtz explains. “It would’ve been helpful had they decided to work past five thirty, but they never did, which annoyed George quite a bit some days, particularly when he only had one or two shots left to complete a scene—forcing him to make a time-consuming set move in the middle of the next morning.”
“But there was a provision in the contract that said if I was in the middle of a shot, I could take what they called a ‘quarter’—fifteen minutes,” Lucas adds. “I was allowed to take up to four ‘quarters’ to finish a shot. So I set up a very elaborate, long dolly shot in the Obi-Wan scene, and I took the four quarters—but the crew was very angry with me. I was a bearded kid, around thirty years old. I was just this crazy American who was doing this really dopey movie.”
That Friday evening, after the first unit wrapped Ben’s cave, Lucas and Barry did a walk-through of a Monday set, the first on the Death Star: a simple corridor in which Darth Vader catches a glimpse of Obi-Wan and follows him. The following Monday the panels Lucas requested during the walk-through to close off the corridor had been added—and Darth Vader, played by David Prowse, quickly completed his scene.
“George told me he was making a space fantasy and asked me to consider playing either Chewbacca or Darth Vader,” says Prowse, who had played many a large person in films such as A Clockwork Orange, and who owned a chain of weight-lifting gyms that made him independently wealthy. “I turned down Chewbacca at once. I know that people remember villains longer than heroes. At the time I didn’t know I’d be wearing a mask. And throughout production I thought Vader’s voice would be mine.”
Another looming problem was taking shape in the form of John Jympson. While Lucas had been in Tunisia, rushes had been delivered to the English editor, who had started cutting the scenes together. However, Lucas hadn’t been able to see the dailies himself until now, and when he started viewing Jympson’s assemblies, he wasn’t happy: Jympson’s selection of takes was questionable, and he seemed to be having trouble doing match-cuts. Yet, just as Lucas had been patient with the robot problems, he was hesitant to criticize the editor for similar reasons: Everyone in the production was operating without enough prep time and, in this case, with less guidance than perhaps needed. “Jympson is in an impossible position, cutting material that I haven’t even talked to him about,” Lucas said to one of the crew at the time. “It’s totally unfair for me to judge him now.”
Strangely, it was the editor who became very impatient with Lucas, complaining loudly about how things were being done. “I think the editor was very unsympathetic to George,” Barry would say a couple of weeks later. The situation was all the more uncomfortable for Lucas, who was now coming to grips with the more negative aspects of doing a large-scale production. “His films were always very private before,” Barry says. “Because of the low budgets, no one would see them. So George is now fairly touchy about people seeing rushes, and I can understand his point of view. He knows what he’s going to do with it, but someone else might ask, ‘Well, why does it look like that?’ He doesn’t want people to start losing confidence, in him or the picture.”
SCS COMP: 45; SCREEN TIME: 44M 29S.
The highly reflective floors had to be kept clean for the scenes of Darth Vader (David Prowse) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guinness) walking through the hallway built on Stage 2.
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Behind-the-scenes footage of David Prowse being dressed in his Darth Vader costume at Elstree. (No audio)
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On June 25, 1976, a gag in which a gonk droid finds itself alone in a Death Star hallway is shot (this doesn’t make the final cut). Jack Purvis plays the droid. (Note that colored film “slugs” in the sequence indicate where film has been taken from this daily and used in the final edit, or one of the early edits; the slugs fill up the holes so the audio is still in sync.)
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REPORT NOS. 27–32: TUESDAY, APRIL 27–TUESDAY, MAY 4, 1976
STAGE 2: INT. DEATH STAR, SCS: BA53 [VADER SPEAKS WITH A COMMANDER]; 113 PART [HAN AND CHEWIE JUMP THROUGH BLAST DOORS]; 107 PART [HEROES VIEW FALCON THROUGH BAY WINDOW]; A110 [LUKE FIRES AT STORMTROOPERS]; B110 PART [LUKE AND LEIA ARRIVE AT CUTOFF BRIDGE AND SWING ACROSS]
STAGE 4: INT. DEATH STAR CONTROL ROOM, SCS: A124 [VADER: “THIS WILL BE A DAY LONG REMEMBERED …”]; D42 [VADER AND TARKIN DISCUSS LEIA’s RESISTANCE TO MIND PROBE]; SS225 [TARKIN: “EVACUATE?! IN OUR MOMENT OF TRIUMPH?”]; 66 PART [LEIA: “THE MORE YOU TIGHTEN YOUR GRIP …”]
STAGE 1: INT. DEATH STAR CONFERENCE ROOM, SCS: 22 [VADER: “I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING”]; 76 [REPORT PER DANTOOINE]; 89A [VADER REPORTS OBI-WAN’s PRESENCE TO TARKIN]
While Tuesday’s filming was uneventful, Wednesday, April 28, featured Luke and Leia’s swing across the chasm. Though the stage floor
was only about a dozen feet below—a matte painting would be added much later to simulate the bottomless pit—harness expert Eric Dunning had been called in on April 21 for an evening meeting with department heads to discuss logistics and safety.
“First they practiced with two puppets on one string dangling from the roof just to see if the rope was strong enough,” Fisher says. “Then they put all these cardboard boxes down on the ground, but I couldn’t see how the boxes were going to prevent me from breaking any bones. After kissing Mark, George wanted me to say, ‘For luck,’ which sounded obscene because the words blended into one another. Then I was supposed to shoot the gun and swing. On the swing across, I was going to hold the gun, which is real heavy, and that scared me because I thought I’d drop it. I was also afraid my hair was going to fall off. But it was funny that day— everyone was laughing—and we only had to do it once.”
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A printed daily from April 27, 1976. In a gag that won’t make the final cut, the heroes, just out of the garbage masher, conceal their weapons from Imperial officers in a Death Star corridor (Chewbacca doesn’t conceal his, which may have been one reason to cut the gag).
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Harrison Ford evidently enjoyed playing the somewhat trigger-happy Han Solo.
Harrison Ford, as Han Solo, running through the same hallway that Guinness sneaked through on Stage 2.
“I always knew that I couldn’t get the girl,” Ford says. “Han knows if he gets the girl, it will just be a one-night stand.”
Leia’s “ear-muff” hairstyle was inspired by photographs taken by Edward S. Curtis of Native Americans and photos of Pancho Villa’s rebel women. “I was a little afraid of it,” Fisher says. “I still am a little afraid of how I am going to look in it.”
The swing was just one of Fisher’s physical performances, which dominated her first days on the film. “I’d be running down a hallway and my hairdo would start falling apart,” she says. “I didn’t like having my breasts taped in. In space, they don’t bounce. Princesses don’t do that, so they taped me.”
Fisher’s first appreciable dialogue occurred with Peter Cushing in the Death Star control room the following Thursday. It was here that she started to understand how Lucas worked with his actors. “Up until the scene with Peter Cushing, I was just running down corridors, and George didn’t talk that much to me,” Fisher says. “But in my scene with Peter, I was doing too sarcastic and George wanted real anger. But I liked Peter Cushing so much that, in my mind, I had to substitute somebody else in order to get the hatred for him. I had to say, ‘I recognized your foul stench …’ But the man smelled like linen and lavender.”
“You see, I always lavishly slosh lavender water all over myself whenever I’m filming,” Cushing says. “I also use a tube of Colgate Dental Cream, because I’m very conscious of bad breath. In fact, if I’m watching a boring love scene in a movie, I can’t help thinking: I do hope they’ve both brushed their teeth.”
While Carrie struggled to muster her anger, Cushing, like his compatriot Alec Guinness, was trying to make sense of his lines. “There was a great deal of the script I didn’t understand,” he says. “Especially the technical jargon. And I wasn’t alone. Many of the stagehands came up to me and asked, ‘What is all this about? I can’t understand a word of it.’ I told them, ‘Neither can I. I’m just saying the lines, and trying to sound intelligent.’ ”
By the end of the day, though Fisher had done her best to sound authentic, she thought she had failed. “George didn’t say anything, which I took to mean, He’s mad,” she says. “The next day, George came up to me with his hand on his beard and said, ‘You were great yesterday.’ And from then on I knew that when he didn’t talk, that it was okay—that less was more with him. Sometimes George would just say, ‘Anything goes. If you want to change the dialogue, you can,’ or he’d say, ‘Faster’ or ‘More intense’—and I didn’t know what that meant, either, at the beginning. I just thought it meant that I was not very good. But then I found out that it was okay. I think Harrison told me.”
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A printed daily from April 27, 1976, in which a stormtrooper’s squib continues burning after the trooper falls. When “cut” is called, stunt coordinator Peter Diamond runs to the fallen trooper to make sure the stuntman is okay.
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Lucas shows Fisher how to hold and shoot the gun—and then she and Hamill swing across.
“Basically I show up and George points me to where he wants me to stand and tells me in his own way what he wants me to do,” Ford says. “When I’m done doing it, we either have a discussion about it, or he says, ‘Do it again, faster and better.’ That’s one of the nice things about George, which gives me real confidence in him. That whatever the problem is, we will be able to work it out when we get there. It’s no big thing. I think that’s the way he likes to work, too.”
“Carrie had just started when she did her scenes with Cushing,” Hamill says. “I came in about eleven and left when they finished. I watched a lot of what Carrie did, but I didn’t want her to know I was on the set because it would have been a distraction. The next day, between takes, I did go and get his autograph. Cushing is the ultimate English gentleman. So distinguished. He was surprised I knew that he was in that Laurel and Hardy film Chump at Oxford, and he told me about working with them. Pictures were taken for publicity, and though I never worked with him, there was no way I would have missed meeting him.”
Hamill had also learned that the fairly recent death of Cushing’s wife had tremendously affected the actor, who wrote about it in great length in his autobiography. “He used to cycle to her grave every morning,” Hamill says. “He was very fragile, but a wonderful guy, really sweet.”
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A printed daily (a pickup) of the swing across the chasm, late April/early May 1976.
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SCS COMP: 53; SCREEN TIME: 54M 17S.
On April 30 cast and crew members received an invitation for cocktails from Sir Alec Guinness.
Death Star Control Room
“There was a lot of ingenious work done to make one set look like a lot,” Lucas says. “But most of the Death Star really is just one set.”
“Because of the amount of work there was to do here, we had the Death Star panels made by an outside company in plastic,” Barry says. “In fact, we have used these panels on a lot of other sets as well, because they’re so quick to put up. They’ve been quite a big help, although they were quite expensive.”
In addition to his scenes with Fisher, Cushing had scenes with Prowse as Darth Vader in the control room and the conference room. For the former scene, Larry Cuba had actually created a computer graphic for the big screen, with architectural representations of hallways, as Tarkin and Vader were originally going to monitor the whereabouts of the heroes as they fled through the Death Star. The room itself, like the corridor, was also changed just before filming.
Cushing, Lucas, and Fisher.
Computer graphic created by Larry Cuba.
“Originally George wanted to have the feeling that you got in Things to Come [1936], just a huge, silent, sophisticated interior, so it was going to be just the screen,” Barry says.
“All I wanted at first was a big room with a giant screen and with some control towers,” Lucas says. “The rest of it was John’s design. He came up with those little podiums and everything.”
“When George decided he wanted another wall on the right,” Barry adds, “we just cast all the panels over from the other stage and put them up quite quickly. I knew, with those panels, t
hat I could afford to sail close to the wind.”
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A printed daily of Peter Cushing as Governor Tarkin and Carrie Fisher as Leia. It’s possible Cushing is having problems remembering some of his lines in this take.
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“I was very pleased with the way that Death Star door worked. I think you do get the feeling it’s coming down diagonally, though it’s really just sliding down horizontally,” John Barry says. “The whole concept of the Death Star set was what George called the ‘Tinkertoy.’ The basic set was probably six units, which could be assembled in endless ways. The big panels were about six by three feet, the smaller ones, three by one foot, and so on, because we had to build those big sets fairly quickly, and then rebuild them around what George was shooting. Sometimes we’d change the ‘continual corridor’ while they stood and waited. I had a very good crew. Very friendly—much more friendly than I am, thank God—who would do it on the spot.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 31