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Death Star Conference Room
“That was another one of those scenes where I didn’t have a very strong idea,” Lucas says. “I knew I wanted a big conference room, so I said, ‘Design a round room around a round table.’ And John showed me the drawings and I said, ‘That’s great.’ Sometimes I had very specific ideas about what I wanted and sometimes I had very vague ideas.”
“I designed the chairs so they were all basically the same, with a slit in the back,” Barry says. “Except the two taller ones, whose backs were extended, to accent the man sitting in it. Those chairs just weren’t quite like anything we could have bought, particularly in the number we needed, so we made them.”
“He decided he wanted to keep the round motif, so he made more round rooms in the Death Star,” Lucas adds. “Intellectually, it’s all wrong, because of the fact that they’re the enemy; the interiors should really be very angular. But it works.”
In his scenes Cushing was often shot from the waist up. “The problem was, I have very big feet,” he says. “I wear an English size 12 shoe, which is perilously close to the Frankenstein monster category. Unfortunately, the boots they gave me were far too small. I was in absolute agony wearing them. But there wasn’t enough time to get me a pair which fit properly, so I said to George, ‘I don’t want you to think I’m asking for more close-ups. But whenever possible, could you please shoot me from the waist up? These boots are killing me.’ He very kindly agreed.”
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Production designer John Barry discusses the process of designing sets with his draftsmen, working with other departments, and Lucas’s involvement in the art department. (Interview by Charles Lippincott, May 17, 1976)
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REPORT NOS. 33–36: WEDNESDAY, MAY 5–MONDAY, MAY 10, 1976
STAGE 2: INT. DEATH STAR, SCS: 83 (CHEWBACCA GROWLS AT MOUSE DROID); 84 [WAITING FOR ELEVATOR TO PRISON LEVEL]; 109 [HAN CHASES STORMTROOPERS]; 110 [CHEWBACCA SEES HAN RUNNING AROUND CORNER]
STAGE 9: INT. PIRATE STARSHIP HALLWAY, SCS: 80 [EMERGING FROM SMUGGLING COMPARTMENTS]; 67 PART [LUKE TRAINING WITH SEEKER; HOLOGRAM GAME]; 63 [C-3PO: “I FORGOT HOW MUCH I HATE SPACE TRAVEL”]; AA118 [LUKE: “I CAN’t BELIEVE HE’s GONE”]; A119 [SOLO: “WE AREN’t OUT OF THIS YET”]
Back in the United States, ILM continued to work on the plates for front projection with an increasing sense of doom. They were spending around $30,000 per week now on operating costs, but were hopelessly behind schedule. “As a result of the six-week delay and a couple of other things, we were behind just about the period of time that the hiatus encompassed,” Dykstra says. “So my head was in a shit because it looked like we weren’t going to have the plates out on time and people were getting really depressed. They were working really long hours, but they weren’t happy about what they were doing because they knew it was second-rate. But we felt we had to do it because it was going to cost $10,000 a day to have a crew sitting around if we didn’t have the plates out on time.”
Their forward progress hadn’t been helped by the departure of ILM production supervisor Bob Shepherd just as principal photography had begun. But he had previously committed to Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Had someone been here who had the power to do things George would accept, it wouldn’t have taken so much time,” Shepherd says. “John Dykstra said to me, ‘If you’re going to leave then you’ve got to find someone else to do what you did.’ But I didn’t know anybody else.”
Shepherd was eventually replaced by Lon Tinney, but John Dykstra’s job hadn’t been made any easier. One bright spot at Van Nuys was an April 1976 hire, Dennis Muren, who was chosen to work with Richard Edlund in the camera department in order to help move things along. “I was very much aware of the project for about a year and a half before I got on to it,” Muren says. “I’d heard that John had gotten the job, so I called him up and I showed him some of my footage, but I didn’t hear back for about ten months, so I thought the show had folded. Then all of a sudden I got a call to come on in and meet Richard Edlund and see the place. They had already been set up there for months; they were almost hiding out, and it was just a neat place. I didn’t know quite what the quality of work was going to be and I’d never seen that sort of electronic equipment before, so it seemed like an opportunity to try and figure the stuff out, plus meet a lot of people that I didn’t know. I was hired on to shoot backgrounds of stars moving by and planets for the foreground spaceships that Richard was going to be shooting.”
In Chicago, Larry Cuba was also struggling with his deadlines, in his case for the computer animation. “I thought we’d start work in December,” Cuba says, “but the actual contract was not decided on until February, and they said the actual deadline was June 1. So based on the data, I thought we could still make it—but in the middle of April they said, ‘We made a mistake. The shooting schedule just arrived from England, and we noticed that the scene we need your stuff for is May 6. So we actually need it in April for them to prepare over there.’ So I called George and he said, ‘Well, we can change our shooting schedule.’ So they rearranged it for the last day the set was available: May 17—which meant we had to send it on May 6.
“So we went at it. All the shooting was done in the last week in April. But then the hardware just kept breaking down during the crucial weekend. I had even decided on Saturday night that I would call them on Monday and say, ‘I tried but you are going to have to do bluescreen.’ I decided to go to sleep. Usually the computer rooms are air-conditioned to keep the hardware cool, but I figured I’m going to be comfortable, so I turned the air conditioner off. I went to sleep at midnight; at three I woke up and I thought, ‘Well, it’s gotten warmer in here—I’ll try it.’ And the computer ran continuously all day Sunday from then on; it crashed maybe two or three times during the whole day. We were lucky and we got it out on time.”
On Stage 2, Lucas watches and advises as Hamill, Ford, and Mayhew await and then board the Death Star elevator.
ATTACK OF THE GIANT SETS
Back in England the frenetic pace of the shoot, which was now four days behind schedule, was taking its toll on cast and crew. The scope and complexity of the sets were particularly challenging. Production supervisor Robert Watts happened to be interviewed by Charles Lippincott on May 10, 1976, so his words relate exactly what the crew was experiencing: “The biggest problem on this picture is that we have a large number of sets that we shoot on for a comparatively short period of time. So it has been a case of trying to keep up with the set construction. Though we’re employing a large number of laborers, we’re literally only one day ahead on the set construction. People have been working on weekends; people have been working overtime in the evenings to get this thing done. But it’s been necessary, because we couldn’t have kept up without it.”
In the middle of all this was Lucas, whose experience on sets up to this point had been dramatically different, because he’d either been on location or on a tiny set on a small sound stage. THX 1138 and American Graffiti had had a total of about 40 people on the payroll, whereas The Star Wars had 950 paid employees, simultaneously working on fairly massive sets within two large studios.
“We’d really be on a set for only about one day,” Lucas says. “We’d finish shooting and then we’d move on to another set; and we’d have to tear down the previous one and build another one right away, because we didn’t have that many sound stages. At EMI there were eight sound stages, but that’s a little better than a week if you’re shooting a set a day. Sometimes we’d put two or three sets on a stage, which would give us that advantage, but no matter how you did it there was a tremendous amount of pressure to get sets finished and redressed. It was really like riding a freight train at about 120 miles per hour and having the guys trying to build the track in front of you as you go.
“One of the results was to make it hard to have complete control over things,” Lucas adds. “I would
tell somebody to do something and that somebody would tell somebody else and by the time the guy who was actually nailing the fixture to the wall got the message, it was usually the wrong message. That was not only frustrating for me, it was also frustrating for John Barry. He would bang his head against the wall and say, ‘Why can’t they just do it the way I tell them?’ And that’s what I would say, and we were both in the same fix.”
“George will sometimes tell some carpenter on the floor to change something without going through the chain of command,” Watts says. “But if one thing is changed and it doesn’t go over the production office desk, the ramifications of that one change may affect four different departments. So it should always come through here, which is now happening. But that’s, you know, a minor consideration.”
“You cannot control it, unfortunately,” says Barry, who was interviewed just a week later, on May 17. “You can dictate the letter, but it’s going to come out in somebody else’s handwriting. It’s driving me potty, doing the sets, because it’s so absolutely time-consuming—and even though you work seven days a week, you can’t do everything, but you can’t delegate, either. That’s the director and designer’s problem: Basically, you are dependent on somebody else, because of the time scale. Ironically, the more you do get involved, the more it ends up like a Stanley Kubrick film, taking fourteen months instead of eight weeks. And the sets all are terrific, but nobody notices that the actors are very dull.
On Stage 9 Guinness, Hamill, Ford, and Daniels quickly ran through several scenes in the Falcon’s main hold.
For Ford, the line, “Kid, I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other …,” perfectly explained his character.
Hamill, on the other hand, complained to Lucas about his line “Gee, it’s lucky you had these compartments” while they were shooting their exit from the smuggling vaults (hair stylist Patricia McDermott). “But George said, ‘Just get in the compartments and do it,’ ” Hamill says. “And he was right.”
“Fortunately, George knows that a lot of things can be changed and altered, and is always ready to discuss it, to come and look at the sets after the rushes,” Barry adds. “We’re always walking around the sets at eight o’clock at night, so nothing’s a horrid surprise when George gets on there in the morning.”
Most of the film’s numerous and rapidly built sets continued to the very outermost edge of the stages, and Lucas would photograph them with two, three, or four cameras. “I shoot fairly rapidly but I pick out shots as I go,” he says. “I like to stand on the set and see the scene take place and decide how I’m going to shoot it. I’ll watch the scene through the camera, move the camera around, watch the scene various ways, and get rough ideas about things. That’s why I use a couple of cameras.”
The combination of the size, number, and resulting costs of the sets, mixed with Lucas’s unorthodox shooting style, turned out to be very confusing for Fox executives and the crew. Both were expecting lots of wide establishing shots of the elaborate sets, whereas Lucas would often start in close, or dispense with more ordinary coverage. “George says he wants to make it look like it was shot on location,” Barry says. “So if you’re shooting on an ordinary suburban street, you don’t do a great big shot of a suburban house, because everybody already knows what it looks like. He wants to give the feeling that everybody knows about Mos Eisley or whatever; he wants a newsreel sort of feeling.”
“There was a lot of negative reaction coming back from England to the US,” Alan Ladd says. “People were saying, ‘We spent all this money on these big, elaborate sets and he’s only shooting a piece of it!’ George wasn’t doing the 360-degree camera angle, exposing the entire set.”
“They wondered when they were going to see more sets,” Lucas says, “but they didn’t really make a big issue out of it. I think Laddie kept things under control, and obviously that’s the office that can come down on you and really cause trouble.”
“Sometimes people get upset because of the way George shoots,” Watts adds. “Maybe he’ll not do a master first or something like that. But it’s his prerogative—because every member of the crew, from the top to the lady who sweeps the offices out, is only here for one reason: and that’s to help George tell a story. That’s my belief. Sometimes you can work with a director and really think you’re getting a lousy picture, and that’s depressing. But that’s not the case here at all. I think that if we can make as good a picture as American Graffiti, then I think we’re in. I wish I had a piece of the action …”
SCS COMP: 65; SCREEN TIME: 60M 01S.
“The prison floor is made up of plastic pallets for fork-lift trucks, which we bought off the shelf,” John Barry notes of the set built on Stage 4.
Hamill’s scene in the prison cell has him, for the first time in the film, speak the name of his character—“I’m Luke Skywalker …”—which had been Starkiller until just a few weeks before.
REPORT NOS. 37–38: TUESDAY, MAY 11–WEDNESDAY, MAY 12, 1976
STAGE 4: INT. DEATH STAR, A42 PART [LEIA’s CELL AND BLACK TORTURE ROBOT]; 89 [LEIA: “AREN’t YOU A LITTLE SHORT FOR A STORMTROOPER?”]; 88 PART [ARRIVAL AT PRISON LEVEL, FIGHT]
Production continued to speed from stage to stage, moving on to the prison cell set, with the help of assistant director Anthony Waye—one of those chosen by Watts and Lucas for his toughness—while the second unit filmed inserts and R2-D2 putting out a fire in the pirate ship hallway.
On Wednesday, May 12, in her prison cell scene with Vader and the torture robot, Fisher again had to work up fear for someone whom she found not very threatening. “I was in a little box of a room, so I used the idea of claustrophobia to make it scary,” she says. “But it was hard to be afraid of Darth Vader. They called him ‘Darth Farmer,’ because David Prowse had this thick Welsh accent, and he couldn’t remember his lines—
I guess I could’ve been afraid of that.”
The morning of the second day on that set, Fisher prepared as she usually did: “Coca-Cola first thing in the morning. I used to sit in the bathtub the night before and go over my lines, like the one in the prison hallway when I would say, “This is some rescue. When you came in here, didn’t you have any plan for getting us out?’ I planned a reading for it. But when I went in the next day to do the scene the entire hallway was blowing up—so there was no other way to do it but, ‘THIS IS SOME RESCUE! WHEN YOU CAME IN HERE …’ After that, I would memorize my lines and wait to see if we were being blown up or not.”
“Carrie is the funniest girl I ever met,” Hamill says. “She makes me laugh, almost always, and she has a great sense of humor about herself. She doesn’t take herself seriously, which would probably be very easy for her to do. I actually didn’t know how the Princess was going to be. I did the whole hologram scene before I even met her. So Carrie comes in and she’s like Carole Lombard: beautiful to look at, but with a sense of humor.”
As a child Fisher used to “read” books before she could actually read the words, making up stories to go along with the cover or illustrations. After progressing through an “Archie and Love comicbooks phase,” she became an avid reader of Hemingway, Shakespeare, and Fitzgerald. She would also fake being sick so she could stay at home and watch Andy Griffith, I Love Lucy, The Real McCoys, and old movies on TV.
As their scenes together multiplied, Fisher and Hamill were finding a rapport, as were Hamill and Ford. Played as written, they were supposed to simply exit the elevator into the prison area. The day of shooting, however, they ad-libbed, facing the wrong direction when the door opened, to add a comic touch. A few days before, they’d improvised with Peter Mayhew: As they marched down a Death Star corridor, Chewbacca growled at a mouse droid, which, radio-controlled, did an abrupt about-face and scurried in the opposite direction. In short, the actors were creating the all-important chemistry that Lucas had hoped they would. One point that seems to have drawn them all together was Ford’s cabalistic handling of his dialogue.
“I had al
ready been shooting for four weeks, going on five, when Harrison came in,” Hamill says. “He visited the set once and then I went over to his hotel room. We were going to go out and have dinner, and I’m flipping through his copy of the script—and I see lines of his just crossed out completely. He’d written things in the margins, saying the same thing basically, but his way. He had an amazing way of keeping the meaning but doing it in a really unique way for his character. Well, I was … you know, the script was the bible for me. There were lines I just couldn’t say, but I learned to say them. It might have even helped my character, in a way, that sort of stilted dialogue. But I also kind of kicked myself and wished that I had been loose enough to do what Harrison was doing.”
Ford, Hamill, and Fisher on the set.
Hamill, Fisher, Mayhew, and Ford in a publicity shot.
A few of the rigging department crew at Elstree Studios.
“I used to go over lines with Harrison and Mark,” Fisher says. “Harrison would always change his lines. I was very impressed that he could do that. I didn’t know what to do with them. They seemed fine like they were. I was also being agreeable because I kept thinking they were going to realize their mistake soon about hiring me.”
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 32