“I make virtually all the explosive charges,” John Stears says, “which is highly illegal and highly irregular—unless you have a manufacturing license, which is dreadfully impossible to get. You need about a hundred acres and various buildings about fifty yards apart. But the authorities know we do all this here and that we’ve got it under control.”
“Unfortunately, it didn’t work out,” Lucas says. “It’s very hard when you are hiring people to know if they are going to mesh with you and if you are going to get what you want. In the end, I don’t think he fully understood the movie and what I was trying to do. I shoot in a very peculiar way, in a documentary style, and it takes a lot of hard editing to make it work.
“I got rid of some people here and there, but it is a very frustrating and unhappy experience doing that,” he adds. “I realized why directors are such horrible people, in a way, because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate.”
SCS COMP: 98; SCREEN TIME: 79M 18S.
REPORT NOS. 52–62: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2–WEDNESDAY, JUNE 16, 1976
STAGE 2: DEATH STAR COMMAND OFFICE; 82 PT [LUKE CONVINCES HAN TO HELP RESCUE LEIA]; 94 [C-3PO TALKS WITH LUKE DURING PRISON BATTLE]; 99 PART [DROIDS PRETEND THEY’d BEEN TAKEN PRISONER]
STAGE 2: INT. POWER TRENCH; A105 PART [OBI-WAN SHUTS OFF THE TRACTOR BEAM]
STAGE 8: INT. SANDCRAWLER; 20 [C-3PO AND R2-D2 ARE REUNITED]
SHEPPERTON STUDIOS
H STAGE: INT. MASSASSI MAIN HANGAR DECK; 136 PART [LUKE REPROACHES HAN]; A132 [HEROES WELCOMED IN CRUMBLING TEMPLE]; 251 [LUKE RETURNS WITH R2]
EMI: STAGE 8—INT. PIRATE STARSHIP; 62 PT RETAKE, A67–E74 RETAKE
“I did say some rubbish to Alec once in the control room because I couldn’t think of the right words,” Anthony Daniels says of their scene in the Death Star. “Rather than screw up the tape, I mumbled. He never batted an eyelid and just carried on. Of course, that takes his kind of skill.”
After Guinness as Obi-Wan left to disengage the tractor beam, on June 2, Hamill, Ford, Daniels, Mayhew, and Kenny Baker completed the scene in which they plot out their ad hoc strategy to rescue the Princess. “Occasionally, I would stop like a real actor and deliver a line absolutely still, like ‘the Princess is going to be terminated,’ ” Daniels says. “You can’t fool about with that line because it is really quite serious. What George instantly spotted was that I only existed when I moved. If I didn’t move, the voice could be coming from anywhere. So I very carefully had to think out how to move as I spoke, to speak the lines with my head, physically.”
The physical side of the robot costume was not improving for the walled-up thespian: Numerous progress reports attest to his continuing discomfort, chafing, and skin irritation. “There was a very strange system of filming, which did very much get on my nerves,” Daniels says. “It took a half hour for me to get dressed up in this thing for the master shot. Then, generally, we’d do everybody else’s ones and twos and close-ups, and then we’d get to me. But toward the end of the film, I couldn’t bear the costume any longer. I’d take it off as soon as I finished a shot, which meant wasting a lot of their time because I’d have to get dressed again. And they never got on to the fact that if I’d been allowed to do all my scenes at once, it wouldn’t have taken nearly as long.”
Daniels’s partial solution was to dress only as much as was needed for the shot. “I would, whenever possible, look through the viewfinder in the camera and discover how much of me was visible,” he explains. “Believe me, if you see just my arm or just my head and shoulders, that’s all I’m wearing in that scene. There is a magical shot in the control room where you see just my hand come into frame and pick up a comlink. But it still took about twenty attempts to do that; they had to put a sticky pad in the palm of my hand. Then I had to watch very carefully out of camera, watch this sticky pad come somewhere near, and then close up, because my hands were hit and miss. Every day was a new experience.”
Although quite far apart in the script continuity, nearly all the scenes in the Falcon cockpit were filmed one after the other on Stage 8 late in May and mid-June.
Lucas’s experiences with the robots, however, had become maddeningly similar. “See-Threepio hasn’t been fixed, and neither has Artoo-Detoo,” he says. “Artoo cost us at least a week just because his head wouldn’t work. It just wasn’t well designed and it was not that well executed in the end. I said I want those heads to work, to turn, and we gave them a lot of time and put on more people during production toward the end when we were really using them—and they never worked.”
“There was a problem with Chewbacca’s eyes,” Stuart Freeborn says, listing another headache. They would separate from the hair on the inside and look as if they were separate from the mask. “It’s quite a problem, and really we haven’t got a 100 percent answer to it, and we never will.”
While all of these irritations persisted, the solution to the front projection shots was to opt for bluescreen instead. New plans and budget estimates were made, and Dykstra, Edlund, and Blalack were scheduled for a trip to Elstree. “Everyone was very clear that if photography in England of the actors against the bluescreen, which was to be shot in VistaVision, wasn’t correctly lit, then we were going to have to do a salvage job on top of our normal workload,” Blalack says.
On Stage 3 in mid-May several scenes were shot with the half-Falcon: the arrival of the stormtroopers via the elevator and the shootout (—with sandbags in the elevator shaft). Stunt coordinator Peter Diamond, Guinness, and Lucas discuss Obi-Wan’s duel with Vader in the forward bay on the same stage. Following two pages: Lucas demonstrates to Guinness how to surrender himself to the Force, and the scene is shot with a special effects rig standing in for the departed Jedi Knight.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Printed dailies from June 1, 1976, of the Death Star hangar shootout. Several shots are filmed with three cameras for maximum coverage so Lucas will have lots of choices while putting the sequence together in editorial during postproduction. (Again, colored slugs indicate film taken out and used in actual edits.)
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SHOOTING ON A CRANE STRING
From June 9 to 14 production moved back to Shepperton Studios, where the throne room had been converted to the giant Rebel hangar. “We changed that in maybe three or four days,” John Barry says. “They were both enormous sets, but they’d been built on huge wheeled units, forty feet tall. We had trucks lug them into place, and then George came back again.”
As the earlier conversation between Taylor and Lucas had suggested, H Stage was too small for the hangar, which was supposed to be hundreds of square feet—as big as a real one. Attempts had been made to rent a genuine hangar, but permission to film there proved unattainable. Instead they had to use light and magic. “The sound stage at Shepperton, although it’s 250 feet long, is a little bit small for the Massassi hangar,” Barry says. “So the back half of that set is all in perspective, where the lights go away on the back of the runway. Although they are good old-fashioned tricks that they’ve used all the way through things like Gone with the Wind, it does limit the director. And people don’t like that, which is why those tricks are unpopular.”
Another trick of the trade included using painted cutouts for the starfighters in the background, as well as filming the two real ships that they’d built in such a manner that they could be multiplied in postproduction. But even the real ships created difficulties. “We got the guy into the X-fighter and the hydraulics brought down the canopy,” Barry explains. “That was great. It closed. But then we couldn’t get it open again. We were all struggling with it—but we had to drill a hole, finally, in order to get him a screwdriver so that he could let himself out. That’s moviemaking, of course.
“There is video content at this location that
is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
A printed daily of Ben’s duel with Darth Vader (with Prowse speaking Vader’s lines).
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“When the X-fighter takes off and it goes up in the air, there was a lot of fuss about it,” he adds. “People were saying, ‘We can’t get a crane in here and we can’t do this and that.’ So I said, ‘I’ll tell you what: Get one of those gigantic cranes.’ So we had a huge crane outside the biggest stage in Europe, way over the top, and we hacked a little hole in the roof, and the wire came right down through the roof and just lifted the ship up.”
A FAREWELL TO GUINNESS
Back at EMI on Guinness’s last day, June 16, the first unit filmed a retake in the pirate ship hallway. It was during this sequence that the actor felt his skill at one moment sagged. When the planet Alderaan blows up, Obi-Wan reels backward and clutches his forehead—“an unpardonable cliché” in Guinness’s opinion. “I still go hot and cold when I think of that scene,” he says.
His own criticisms notwithstanding, Guinness’s performance still stands today as part of the essential charisma that was found during filming—something the other actors were well aware of at the time. “He was the strongest, most solid thing,” Hamill says. “From the very first day he worked, he just had something there. You could see it. A lot of times you couldn’t see it on the set, but when the film was developed, you’d say, ‘I didn’t know that was going on.’ There was just an aura. I think he was playing a wizard, but he had magic all of the time.”
One evening after the day’s filming, Guinness, Fisher, Hamill, and some others went out and got to know each other a little better. “He was funny the night he took us out to that Greek restaurant for dancing, Carrie and all those people,” Hamill remembers. “The owner came out with his daughters and taught us Greek dancing, and we rolled up our pants. Alec has a really whimsical sense of humor. It doesn’t come out all of the time, but in spending a long time with him, I found out that he’s real funny. He was real funny that night. He talked about experiences, and so forth, but if you ask him about what he thought about winning an Oscar, he’s more thrilled at getting nominated for his screenplay The Horse’s Mouth [1958]. That was much more important to him.”
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Mark Hamill interviewed during principal photography at Elstree by Gary Kurtz (off screen).
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Sir Alec Guinness.
“I gather he displayed his real personality to much greater effect than I ever saw,” Ford says. “Got real drunk and started dancing around with his pants rolled up. But I never saw him that loose. He revealed his personality to me by doing things like trying to find me a place to live on one day’s acquaintanceship.”
“Good actors really bring you something, and that is especially true with Alec Guinness,” Lucas says, “who I thought was a good actor like everyone else. But after working with him I was staggered that he was such a creative and disciplined person.”
SCS COMP: 112; SCREEN TIME: 92M 30S.
In the Death Star command office, Ben leaves on his mission (with Larry Cuba’s computer graphics in the background).
Luke then convinces Han to go on a more spontaneous adventure to rescue the Princess.
When the robots are discovered, Daniels had to shoot an insert of his robot hand picking up the comm unit—a shot that proved quite difficult to accomplish.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Printed dailies from the Death Star command office scene with Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca speaking the Wookiee’s lines in English.
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John Barry came up with the idea of putting a giant crane outside the studio, whose hook could descend through a hole cut in the sound-stage roof in order to lift up the X-wing so it would look like it was flying.
Various moments from filming on the rebel hangar set, including an unpainted and then painted X-wing life-sized prop.
Back at Shepperton Studios, Hamill suited up in Rebel pilot gear.
Others also suited up in the dressing room.
Lucas and company next to the full-sized X-wing.
REPORT NOS. 63–70: THURSDAY, JUNE 17–MONDAY, JUNE 28, 1976
STAGE 8: INT. PIRATE SHIP HALLWAY AND COCKPIT, SCS: A125 PT [HAN: “NOT A BAD BIT OF RESCUING”]; C120 PT & C121 PT [FALCON/TIES FIGHT]; 118 PT [SOLO: “I HOPE THAT OLD MAN MANAGED TO KNOCK OUT THAT TRACTOR BEAM …”]; 239 PT [SOLO: “YOU’re ALL CLEAR, KID”]; 245 PT [SOLO: “GOOD SHOT, KID. THAT WAS ONE IN A MILLION”]; A122 [LEIA AND CHEWIE HUG]; AA58 [CHEWIE IN COCKPIT]; A–Z120 [DOGFIGHT SCENES]; INT. X-WING AND Y-WING COCKPIT (WITH BLUE BACKING), SCS: 140, 143, 152, ETC. [CHATTER DURING DEATH STAR ATTACK]
STAGE 2: INT. SANDCRAWLER, SC 25 [C-3PO SENSES SANDCRAWLER STOPPED]; INT. DISUSED HALLWAY, B105 [LEIA AND HAN ARGUE AFTER ESCAPE FROM GARBAGE MASHER]; INT. DEATH STAR HALLWAY, SC: G163 [VADER: “WE’ll HAVE TO DESTROY THEM SHIP TO SHIP”]
STAGE 4: INT. GARBAGE ROOM, SCS: A97 PART [SOLO: “WHAT AN INCREDIBLE SMELL YOU’ve DISCOVERED”]; A100 [WALLS CONTRACT]; A102 & A104 COMP [LUKE’s SIDE OF DIALOGUE WITH C-3PO]
As first and second units scrambled to complete the film, which had fallen more than fourteen days behind, the situation wasn’t helped by a nagging sense that special effects work had stalled in the United States. “That part was the biggest problem that we encountered. Our biggest frustration,” Kurtz says. “Because we were shooting and shooting and getting closer and closer to the end—but we knew that nothing was being accomplished in Los Angeles.”
But at ILM, the feeling was mutual. “George is in England, you know, and I don’t care how articulate he is at describing what he wants, or how articulate I am at understanding what he wants, the truth of the matter is without him being here to see the film, it’s really tough to get that cohesive spirit of working together,” Dykstra says.
The reality was that during the entire length of principal photography, ILM completed only two shots, in which the escape pod disengages from the Rebel ship and sails toward Tatooine with the robots inside. “George had gone to England and John was busy, so Richard Edlund designed this whole shot, and Jamie Shourt and I stuck it all together,” Grant McCune says of the first shot. “We took the escape pod and tied the entire box that held the tube and took it up to the roof of the building. Then we took a great big volleyball net, with four guys holding it. I had a trigger to push the electronic pulse through the whole system. Richard took the high-speed camera that was mounted on top of the box, and we said, ‘We’ll try it and hope that the pod doesn’t break when it hits the net.’ We dropped it twice that day. When we got the film back the next day, the first shot was perfect—just exactly what they wanted. For three or four months that was the only shot that the shop was able to put out, so everybody was real happy about it.”
On Stage 2 Daniels worked with children as Jawas inside the sandcrawler interior.
The second was shot by Dennis Muren about a month later during the latter part of principal photography (with Doug Smith and Edlund, who took a look before his departure to London). “Richard was gone to England for four days, with John and Robbie,” Muren says, “so when they needed to do this shot of the pod dropping, they already had the background painting, so I composed the shot and gave some motion to the background through the stars and shot the pod using the big camera. I think it was Grant that came up with the idea, or maybe John, to have the pod mounted off-axis, so it would look like it was tumbling. When it goes down a distance, I had it sweeping in toward the planet all of a sudden, like the planet’s gravity is taking over. We didn’t want it to go in front of the planet, though, because we hadn’t worked out all of the bluescreen problems. I lit the shadows of the
pod with orange light, as if it were being reflected off Tatooine. That was about it; it was very smooth. I shot it in one afternoon.”
Meanwhile, Ben Burtt, when not working at ILM, was diligently collecting sounds. “Seventy percent of the time I was recording,” he says. “About every two weeks I’d send a tape representative of what I’d recorded to England. I probably sent about twenty tapes during their shooting. I’d have my voice on the tape, saying, ‘Here’s ten examples of explosions; here’s some examples of jet planes; here’s a whole bunch of bear sounds.’ I even tried to make them do some phrases. I said, ‘Here’s a Wookiee getting angry, here’s a Wookiee being lovable.’ I never got any response, but they told me they did hear it. I honestly think they were so busy they probably never had a chance to listen to the tapes. I think Bunny Alsup heard them, you know, but I don’t think George had time. But that was the only way they knew I was doing anything. The other 30 percent of the time I was doing odds and ends at ILM.”
Joe Johnston did concept sketches of the escape pod being jettisoned, dated May 11, 1976.
The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition) Page 34