The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  The list of candidates included dozens of names, many of them more known for their television work—such as Lewis Gilbert, Mike Newell, and John Hough—and contained inexperienced as well as veteran English and Australian directors, notably: Alan Parker (Midnight Express, 1978); Peter Weir (Gallipoli, 1981); Bruce Beresford (Breaker Morant, 1980); and Peter Yates (Bullitt, 1968). A shorter list of American directors included Jeremy Kagan (Heroes, 1977), TV director Robert L. Markowitz—and two directors recommended by Lucas: William Fraker and David Lynch. The former was a sometime director and veteran cinematographer who had recently shot Spielberg’s 1941 (1979); the latter was a hot young director, thanks to his relentless and powerful film Eraserhead (1977), and his comparatively more sober Elephant Man (1980).

  Lucas and Kazanjian took advantage of their time overseas to see some of the English directors; Kazanjian met over a dozen and Lucas, a few, including Beresford on March 6.

  Not long before, Richard Marquand’s agent had told him of the directors being considered by Lucas and that they were looking for someone with TV experience who could come in on budget. Marquand decided to throw his hat into the ring. “There were some preliminary meetings with Howard Kazanjian and we got on well,” says Marquand. “I was doing a fine cut of Eye of the Needle when George was over here with Steven Spielberg and John Williams doing the music for Raiders. I was at Twickenham and they were at Elstree for three days, and George asked to see what I had done. I don’t like to show a fine cut to anybody much, but I knew George was a moviemaker. The version he screened at Elstree was in fact 12 minutes longer than the final version, because United Artists cut out a lot of emotion at the end, but he sat through the whole thing—which was apparently a terrifically good sign.”

  “As George watched Eye of the Needle, he was particularly impressed with its visual style and the way Richard worked with actors,” says Bloom. “Kate Nelligan and Donald Sutherland did a great job and it was a really exciting movie. George also knew Richard had cut his teeth on a lot of work in television. He thought Richard was a director that he would feel comfortable with—one who could understand that essentially it’d be George’s movie. And because of all that he decided to meet him.”

  “In the process of seeing a lot of movies that one jumped out,” Lucas says. “I was very, very impressed with the directing. It’s a very tight, very clean, strong movie, with narrative, character, and just getting the most emotional value out of a concept.”

  Lucas took a car to Twickenham. “I didn’t know then about the George Lucas mystique,” says Marquand. “So I wasn’t prepared for this young man in beard, blue jeans, leather jacket, and tennis shoes who sat opposite me. I’m a very upfront person and I guess George appreciated that. We connected immediately. But I knew he was feeling me out, because this was long before he needed to decide who his director was going to be. So we just talked about how the hell, in the allotted time and money, you get a movie to look so real that the audience is convinced.”

  The list of potential directors expanded afterward, however, with serious competition for Marquand, including: Richard Donner (Superman, 1978); Desmond Davies (Clash of the Titans, 1981); Hugh Hudson (Chariots of Fire, 1981), Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, 1981), with a note mentioning that Gilliam was American but not a signatory to the DGA; Stephen Frears (at that time, a TV director); Richard Attenborough, who was working on 1982’s Gandhi; John Boorman (Excalibur, 1981); John Carpenter (Escape from New York, 1981); Roger Christian, who had been the set dresser on Star Wars but was now a director; David Cronenberg (Scanners, 1981); Joe Dante (The Howling, 1981); Richard Lester (Superman II, 1980); and Tony Scott, the brother of Ridley Scott and an up-and-comer.

  “ ‘I like you,’ George said,” adds Marquand. “He wanted to see everything I had done and I said, ‘Please, not everything!’ But he said, ‘Yeah, everything!’ Then he said that I wouldn’t hear anything for a while. There were other directors on the list …”

  “When we came back to the United States,” Kazanjian concludes, “I took that director’s list and just ranked everybody ‘a,’ ‘b’—or ‘c,’ which was the reject list.”

  Concept art of the rebel “war room,” by Rodis-Jamero, December 1980.

  Rebel war room concepts by Rodis-Jamero, circa December 1980.

  An Ewok concept by Johnston, early 1981.

  A Johnston concept shows two distressed Ewoks hiding behind a tree as another Ewok has its head pinned to the ground by an Imperial thug, March 1981 (no. 081).

  THE MALTESE JABBA

  Following the return of Lucas, Kazanjian, and Bloom to the United States, a tentative creature construction breakdown list was decided upon. Stuart Freeborn’s shop in the UK would handle Jabba, with a deadline of mid-January. Jabba was considered a “high priority” monster, requiring full articulation for his eyes, mouth, forehead, and body; he would need to be able to drink liquids and eat food. “He must have a convincing use of his arms and hands to hit people and grab things,” read meeting notes, which also mention that Jabba might be required to leave his pedestal, if an inexpensive method could be found.

  The UK shop would also handle makeup for the Emperor, who “must look like Emperor from Empire,” a human with facial appliances or a full mask. “Pay close attention to eyes, must deliver dialogue and have full range of facial expressions.”

  Other creatures or parts of creatures consisted of a full-sized rancor arm for set photography; Bib Fortuna, a human in creature costume; and Ewoks, about 34 of them “to be very elaborate, full-body and facial articulation; must be able to swing on a vine, fight, run.” Ten would be mid-foreground to near background and 24 background Ewoks. “We plan to use midgets or dwarfs in costumes; also some female and child Ewoks in secondary and background categories … Prepare costumes for possible rain work.”

  For creative and logistical purposes, Lucas also planned to open a Monster Shop at ILM, with Phil Tippett in charge. Star Wars had featured the Cantina scene, populated with a barful of exotic aliens, while Empire, comparatively, had nearly no new creatures, aside from a couple of bounty hunters and Cloud City’s “pig men.” Jedi was going to surpass the monster-count of both films combined. Two shops were therefore necessary, with the United States responsible for the full-sized rancor costume, a completely articulated creation about 12 to 15 feet tall, with the “ability to eat Jabba’s guards in two to three bites … Must dress a man in his costume.”

  “George came by and asked for a number of designs for specific characters that he wanted to start thinking about concurrently with writing the script,” says Tippett. “We were just finishing up Dragonslayer, so, as work on that phased out, I began setting up shop.” Decades later he would add: “I was a stop-motion animator—what did I know about running a creature shop? I just got anointed with this, ‘Do you wanna do it?’ and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ But I was in sort of a panic.”

  “Long before there was a script, George had said a couple things,” Kazanjian would say. “One was, ‘We’re going to have a lot of monsters in the film, so you’d better start putting that together.’ So I talked to Phil and he started designing creatures when we really didn’t have a script or know what that was all about. Later George said, ‘We’re not going to use Yussems,’ and the reason for that was if you have a Yussem 20 feet tall and an Ewok three feet tall, it’s real hard to put both of them in a frame together.”

  Tippett began by conceptualizing a wide range of creatures, including Jabba’s guards—who needed to be approximately seven feet in height, with the ability to work in 100-degree desert temperatures—along with assorted background aliens for Jabba’s palace. This menagerie of oddball grotesques added up to 56 monsters for the US, and 47 creatures, primarily Ewoks, for the UK shop. “For two months I was sculpting and designing creatures for Jedi, which was a lot of fun,” Ken Ralston says. When Star Trek II arrived at ILM, however, Ralston moved on to that show. Tippett’s stop-motion partner on Star Wars and Empire, Jon Be
rg, also worked for a while on creature design, as did Chris Walas and others.

  “Some of the story points weren’t clarified, but I have the feeling George works through telepathy,” Tippett says. “He says, ‘I want something kind of like this, so make some creatures for me. I wanna see some stuff and I’m gonna write to that.’ But you see something in his eyes and that give you an idea.”

  “Jabba is based on evil sultan-like characters,” Lucas says. “I guess Sydney Greenstreet would be a good example; and Marlon Brando in the Godfather would be a good example. There’s always been rotund, evil sultans who sit on their beds while others are tortured in front of them.”

  “All that I needed to do was put a fez on Jabba, and he would’ve been Sydney Greenstreet,” Tippett would say, referring to the actor most famous for his role in The Maltese Falcon (1941). “Jabba the Hutt was kind of a design free-for-all. George just said, ‘Okay, here’s the competition: You all, Joe and Nilo and Chris Walas, see what you can come up with.’ I thought, I know what that is. So I did this thing that was Greenstreet and George said, ‘Yep, that’s it. That’s Jabba right there.’ ”

  “George wanted something farther out,” says McQuarrie. “My vision wasn’t where he was. He kept asking for something more far out. Phil Tippett, who is the best ghastly monster guy going, came up with a worm-like critter model that looked really horrible and George settled on that. But Jabba seemed to be so ponderous that I wasn’t sure that he … When I think of someone powerful and threatening, I think of someone who can move quickly. Even with Greenstreet, you could sense that if he got angry, he could launch across a room and squash you like a bug. But then, who knows what powers these creatures have, you see? You just see them for a few moments in the film and you get a general impression of what they are. You don’t have time to think about all these possibilities.”

  “I kept presenting Jabba as a man in a suit, thinking, How can I modify a man, but Phil came in with a maquette, his version of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland,” Rodis-Jamero would say. “I turned to Phil and said, ‘That’s not fair.’ And George goes, ‘What’s not fair?’ I said, ‘He’s using a model and I only have paper. A model always wins.’ So George goes, ‘What’s stopping you from making a model?’ ”

  More monster concept sketches by Ralston (nos. 003 and 004), spring 1981.

  Monster Shop concept art for “critters,” by Ken Ralston (no. 001), circa spring 1981 (the central creature on a leash wouldn’t make it into Jedi, but would be revamped into a kind of Klingon “dog” for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 1984).

  Monster concepts by Johnston.

  Concept art of Jabba as more worm-like, by McQuarrie, early 1981. “George was fishing for designs and he had told us to see what we could think of,” says Tippett. “We started off with a design that was an ugly, wormy creature. George took a look and said, ‘Too terrible.’ We went to another version with forearms. ‘Too human. Try again.’ ” Tippett hit the conceptual jackpot with his maquette.

  A Polaroid of the maquette, April 26, 1981.

  An early Monster Shop chart assigned artists to creatures: Dave Carson, Ken Ralston, Mike Cochrane, Tony McVey, Phil Tippett, Judy Elkins, Tom McLaughlin, et al.

  Another Jabba concept by McQuarrie, early 1981.

  Jabba concept and color sketch by McQuarrie.

  AN ILM TOUR

  At around this time a journalist was shown around Lucasfilm’s San Rafael offices, which included building D, in which ILM was housed. The average age of the 90 young, “multitalented, craft-oriented people” at ILM was less than 30 years old and the reporter observed them busily finishing Raiders and Dragonslayer, in addition to conducting technology research. Several crew were checking the last-minute flight of a great, winged dragon; nearby a sign read, IN THE DARK AGES DRAGONS WERE JERKY. DRAGONSLAYER IS NOT A STOP-MOTION FILM. Not surprisingly, given its groundbreaking Academy Award–winning work, ILM was now booked solid with Poltergeist, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Star Trek II and was trying, for the first time, to right-size, while dealing with the facility’s superstardom in the effects world thanks to the first two Star Wars films and new competition engendered by the same phenomenon.

  “That’s Udo [Pampel],” says Tom Smith, showing the reporter around. “He’s a lathe operator. He used to work for Volkswagen. He speaks German and he never makes a mistake. We need more people like him, instead of filmmakers. What we need are sculptors, machinists, and rubber-mold workers. What we do not need are filmmakers who say and do anything to work for you.”

  More financial worries had surfaced not long ago, however, when Smith himself noted in a report that wages at ILM were too high: “When ILM was first formed in San Rafael, there were good reasons to pay better than the average to induce good people to work here. I think the time has passed that we need to lead the industry with high wages in order to attract good people. In the future, we may find it harder to compete with other special effects facilities if we continue to pay more and carry employees at a 50-hour minimum work week, even when our workload does not justify it.”

  The upshot had been to eliminate merit raises, given that the union contract had automatic escalations, and to lay off about 11 employees, some temporary, some permanent. Smith also issued a confidential “Guide for Budgeting of Special Effects at Industrial Light & Magic,” which attempted to solve the problems of predicting visual effects costs for outside producers. An hourly cost was thus calculated for each department, with an average two-element motion-control photography shot, composited with background, running anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000.

  Behind the scenes, ILM was also suffering from personnel growing pains. “We weren’t a company,” Muren would say. “We were like separate groups, separate teams on separate films.”

  This lack of cohesion was felt one day when Muren wanted to borrow a “cloud tank” that had been used on Raiders, but which originally came from Close Encounters. “I’ve got this shot for Dragonslayer, because Matthew Robbins wants a smoke cloud coming toward the camera,” Muren explains. “But I’m not allowed to use it. Here’s this tank not being used 90 percent of the time and Matthew is a friend of Steven’s, but I have to come up with this awful way to do it that didn’t really work. That sort of thing would happen.”

  “Everyone had to learn a different way of working with each other,” Ken Ralston would say. “Instead of us all doing one movie for one guy, we were doing several movies with different people involved with different studios, and no one wanted to hear anybody was getting preferential treatment.”

  “We had separate dailies,” matte photographer Craig Barron would say. “So the Raiders people couldn’t see the Dragonslayer dailies and vice versa, and that was divisive. We hadn’t had that experience when we worked on Empire.”

  “You’d get caught in these things where someone would bring you into a room and say, ‘I want this person or that person working on the show,’ ” Lorne Peterson would say. “Or [visual effects supervisor] Richard Edlund would call you into the room and say, ‘I want this and this and this,’ and his film has a bigger budget, so he says, ‘You’ve got to devote more time to my show’—and I’d be like, Oh, my God, how am I going to do this?”

  “ILM was in its ugly adolescence,” Bill George would say, who had recently been hired to build model prototypes. “We were growing as a company and it was just part of our growing pains. Definitely when it came to personnel, it was like, ‘I want this person.’ For the first time, we were in competition with each other.”

  BEFORE SKY SOUND

  Next door to ILM, Lucasfilm was constructing the Sprocket Systems facility, or C building, which would house, at least temporarily, its film editing, sound mixing, and computer research facilities. Lucas had mixed nearly all of his films down south, out of necessity, with Raiders being the most recent.

  “Even before Jedi I had a conversation with Howard Kazanjian,” Sprocket’s general manager Jim Kessler would say. �
��I asked, ‘Where are we gonna do our postproduction work?’ And he said, ‘We’ll do it in L.A., as usual.’ I told Howard I thought we could build a postproduction stage here, but he said, ‘That would cost too much.’ And I said, ‘Well, if I can figure out if it’s gonna be the same as we’d spend in L.A., would that make sense?’ And he said, ‘Sure, that’s fine with me.’

  “So at that time I recall mentioning to George, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to build this facility with a dubbing stage now, knowing that we’re gonna build another at Skywalker Ranch? We can make all our errors here in San Rafael—’cause we don’t wanna make our mistakes later.’ That went over pretty well and that’s how we started building postproduction facilities.”

  “If we do a sound mix in L.A., I have to fly down three or four days a week and it’s a drag,” says Lucas. “One of the reasons we had to build that building is that we wouldn’t have that mixing facility at the ranch until 1987, and it’s a long time between now and 1987. So I just said, ‘Look, let’s just build a quick and dirty building next door and use it as a prototype.’ We’ll be able to mix in it for the next five years, plus it takes the pressure off the ranch if Revenge is not a successful movie. I’ll still have this and it can support itself, even if Revenge doesn’t make any money.”