WHERE THE WILD THINGS MIGHT BE
Watts and Reynolds returned to LA for the Academy Awards in April. Reynolds did not win for Empire, though he and four others had been nominated for Best Art Direction (John Williams lost, too, though Empire did win for Best Sound and garnered a Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects). The two then traveled up north to San Rafael for long production meetings on how the respective crews on either side of the Atlantic Ocean would coordinate their tasks.
In mid-April, another recce was undertaken, this time with Watts, Reynolds, Bloom, and Miki Herman, who had become an expert on the northwestern coast. In their search for an Ewok home, they traveled to Crescent City and Eureka in California, then to Vancouver. “Robert Watts would whistle the Raiders theme as we hiked along or fought our way through dense undergrowth or walked across log bridges,” says Herman. “His second favorite theme was the Monty Python number, ‘I’m a Lumberjack.’ Robert and Norman have this wonderful saying when they find a location they like: ‘I can smell the bacon and egg sandwiches!’ No self-respecting film company in the Western world would miss its morning bacon and egg sandwich, preferably toasted, and 90 percent of the time eaten on the run.”
“I think George had wanted to shoot in the redwoods a long time ago,” says Reynolds. “It may even have been going through his mind on Empire. He’d spoken at one point about a Wookiee planet and I suppose a natural choice for that would be redwoods. We’ve also decided that Ewoks live high up in the trees. I’ve approximated them to other primitive people, like the aborigines or early man. They make all their weapons from natural materials, wood and stone. Yet in some ways Ewoks are rather like normal families with children, parents, and so on.”
“I felt that I’d run out of environments by the time I got to Jedi,” Lucas would say. “The only thing I could come up with were giant Sequoias.”
“George and Norman would much rather have photographed in a nature reserve or a National Park,” says Bloom. “But I knew from the very beginning that was unlikely: We were going in to shoot a battle sequence, with large explosions, troops running about, and Imperial walkers crashing through.”
Although Watts and Reynolds flew back to the UK on April 16, Herman returned to the relative wilds of the north to see one more possible location for the Ewok village. She was going to meet with a Crescent City/Smith River local contact. Herman had been having no luck with private lumber companies, until she spotted from a helicopter a patch of redwood forest that looked promising.
“I still couldn’t get in the front door until I learned about a local guy named Lenny Fike,” she says. “So, that first day at the Miller-Rellim Redwood Company, rather than having to go through the introductory letters and telephone calls, we just pulled up at the main gate with Lenny in the car. The guard said, ‘Hi, Lenny.’ In we went and that was it!
“We clawed our way through the underbrush and finally got to a high spot,” Herman continues. “In front of us was about a 40-acre ground area that was relatively flat. You got a lot of good fog ebbing into the area and it was carte blanche in terms of the shooting.” Moreover, the location was only 15 minutes from Crescent City and 10 minutes from Smith River, two locales that would enable Bloom to house the entire crew.
Star Wars was re-released for the third time on April 10, 1981—this time numbered as Episode IV. The first time the chapter number had been associated with the first film was upon release of the book The Art of Star Wars, in 1979.
At a Budget rental agency sit Jim Bloom, Miki Herman, and Norman Reynolds during their recce to northwest America.
A sketch by an unknown artist for a Lucasfilm ad to appear in the Mill Valley Film Festival program was to feature Yoda walking among giant redwood trees (could he be on the forest moon of Episode VI?).
NOT FROM TEXAS
An intriguing set list based on the rough draft was drawn up by Reynolds and Watts, and sent to Lucas and Kazanjian on April 27, 1981. Over the 16-week period of principal photography, they would need to build roughly 36 sets, interiors and exteriors, the most expensive being a forest-moon clearing/Falcon landing site at $360,000. Several sets were slotted for Had Abbadon, including Vader’s chamber, the Emperor’s throne room, and an exterior landing platform. A peasant hovel was planned for Tatooine at $80,000. Snowspeeders from Empire would be repainted in multicolored hues and used on the Rebel Alliance grass planet, Sicemon, which was also allocated several sets, including a war room and living quarters. A two-legged walker with a breakaway rear end was budgeted at $90,000. The dune sea, sloth pit, skiff, and barge—with only a segment of barge planned for construction—would cost $150,000.
While Lucas and his producer pondered this list, they also honed their list of directors to only a few candidates. They had sought out colleagues and asked them about each finalist’s ability to work with actors and to direct; about their camera movement and editing. Only those on the A-list were contacted and asked if they were interested. “You get a list of the directors who are available,” says Lucas. “Then you go and ask them if they would like to do the movie and half of those drop out because they don’t want to do a Star Wars movie. Who knows what personal reasons they have? You get a whole mass dropping out. So you are left with a group of, say, 20 to 30.”
Kazanjian then interviewed more crew who had worked with those directors—is he positive, how does he work with the crew, did he come in on budget, did he care about the budget? Lucas read the reports, and the list shrank to 12 candidates. Finally, Lucas met with each director, which was a more personal moment: Could they work together for “two long years”?
“I do a quick interview with them and then knock it back to five or three,” says Lucas. “I see everything they’ve ever done in terms of work and then I have long interviews! I spend the day with them. Come over to my house, talk, go back and forth.”
One of the select few was Marquand. “I came up and we chatted about all kinds of things,” he says. Marcia Lucas cooked “a beautiful roast and we kicked ideas around and I talked about myself, George about himself. We continued to talk about the Star Wars saga, what it’s really about, what it really meant to me. We all sat around the kitchen table and talked and talked into the night.”
“The next thing you look for in a Star Wars director is somebody who doesn’t just think it’s kids’ junk,” says Lucas. “Somebody who understands what’s going on. A lot of people don’t understand; they think it’s some quick and easy kind of thing you throw out, with not much behind it. But the truth of it is, there’s a lot going on behind it, and the director has to have that sensibility.”
“I just loved that way George told the story,” Marquand continues. “I also talked about the way that Carrie Fisher was portrayed—she meant a lot to me in Star Wars—that she was this perfect little doll-like creature and how terrific it was. We discussed other movies that we like and that kind of thing.”
They also spoke about potential writers, as Lucas intended to hand over his version of the script at a later point for a rewrite. Marquand wondered why Kasdan wouldn’t be that writer. “Being slightly out of the Hollywood swing, I didn’t know that Larry was, in fact, coming off of directing a movie that he had written. George said, ‘Well, there’s no way that we can get him because he wants to direct his own stuff. He’s not going to be a writer anymore.’ But I said if anybody owes you something … I’m sure he would do it. Then he said, ‘Well, look, why don’t you come over to ILM and I’ll show you around.’ ”
The next day at ILM, Lucas studied Marquand’s reactions to his state-of-the-art effects facility as he introduced him to Tom Smith and others. “I’m looking for a lot of things,” Lucas says. “Somebody who has a lot of technical expertise, who can get the job done and has had enough experience to handle something this big. It’s not an easy kind of movie to make, so that’s a prerequisite. You’d be surprised how many directors aren’t professional enough to handle something this complicated.
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�So I showed him a few of the preliminary design sketches, and we talked about them a little bit, but it was more to show him what the relationship was between him and myself, which was to say, ‘Yes, I am involved in the project, but at the same time, these are the bases that I cover and these are the bases that you’ll cover—and between us we should survive.’ ”
“The first time I met Richard, he was wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots with a big cowboy belt buckle, so I thought, This guy’s from Texas,” Rodis-Jamero would say. “So then when he started talking, I was really thrown for a loop, because he had this English accent. I cracked a joke and because of that we got along.”
“When we finally went up to the top-secret area in the Art Department where Joe Johnston lives and works,” says Marquand, “and George showed me some sketches, some McQuarrie drawings—I was really thrilled. I hadn’t read the script, but I got this glimpse, which was nice. I felt very privileged to be shown this stuff, but there was no way I was going to make any comments on it because I thought, Who am I? I’m not one of the team yet.”
Another Imperial guard costume concept by McQuarrie, circa early 1981.
Palace guard concept by Rodis-Jamero, April 1981.
HEAD ERASER
Indeed Lucas had not made a final choice, though he was close. Consequently, on April 28, Kazanjian sent to Lucas a Confidential Memorandum per the DGA, in which he advised total withdrawal of all Lucasfilm divisions from the Directors Guild, explaining that Lucas could hire a young DGA director to work on Jedi, but that this director might then be scrutinized for the rest of his career by the guild and his peers, the “Ma Maison” crowd (an “in” Hollywood restaurant). The guild would also pressure him to stop shooting; he could essentially be blacklisted and would have a difficult time being reinstated.
A subsequent memo indicated that Paramount labor relations agreed with Kazanjian’s appraisal of the situation and addressed David Lynch in particular: “The labor relations lawyers also state it is not necessary for David to quit the guild to be able to direct Jedi. Since Lucasfilm is not a signatory to the guild, again, we would be asked to join. Consequently, David would be pressured to leave the picture; if he refuses, he would be fined, etc., etc., etc.”
Meanwhile, Marquand had flown back to LA to wait. “It was a very boring time indeed,” he says. “I had a few little projects that were gently moving toward some kind of action, but my last film hadn’t been very well liked. So nothing happened and nothing happened.” Marquand called Kershner, who told him, “Lucas will leave you alone, more than any producer you’ve ever worked with.”
Up north, while revising his rough draft, Lucas decided to interview Lynch. “I was asked by George to come up and see him, and talk to him about directing the third Star Wars,” David Lynch would say. When telling the story decades later, he makes it clear, at least in hindsight, that he was not predisposed toward the idea. “But I had always admired George. George is a guy who does what he loves and I do what I love […], so I thought I should go up and at least visit with him.”
Lynch flew to Northern California. “I came into this office and there was George,” he continues. “He talked with me a little bit and then he said I want to show you something. Right about this time I started to get a little bit of a headache. So he took me upstairs and showed me these things called [Ewoks] and now this headache is getting stronger. He showed me many animals and different things. Then he took me for a ride in his Ferrari to a lunch; we’re flying through this little town in northern California. We went to this restaurant that only served salad. Then I got really kind of like a migraine headache and I could hardly wait to get home.”
At around the same time in early May, Marquand became impatient. “It made me crazy, simply crazy,” he says. “I said to my wife, ‘Hell, why don’t we just drive up the coast.’ So I actually called my agent and asked, ‘What do you think if I just give George a call?’ And all the advice I got was, ‘Hey, if he really wants you as director, he is not going to turn you down because you call him.’ So we drove up and stayed in all these little places, the most beautiful drive. I was staying in a motel in Monterey that didn’t have a telephone, so I’m in this little phone booth outside with mist swirling around; it was like some horror movie. And his assistant Jane Bay says, ‘George would love to see you. Come up for lunch tomorrow.’
“So I did. I said to George, ‘I’m not pushing you. I know I am great, but I don’t really have a great ego and if you can just listen to me for 15 minutes …’ I told him that I really felt seriously that I should direct this movie. And that’s when George said there are only two: ‘One other guy and you. I’m going to have to make up my mind and I promise to make it up this weekend.’ It was extraordinary.”
After Marquand departed, Lucas was true to his word and decided. “George called me up Saturday and said, ‘I want to go with David,’ ” says Kazanjian. “So I called David Lynch and he was thrilled—but within three days he declined. He was a DGA member, but he declined for other reasons. Not long afterward David announced that he was going to do Dune. So obviously he was being simultaneously romanced by De Laurentiis. Richard doesn’t even know this story. Nobody knows that story. I mean they were that close.”
Lynch would recall a slightly different version decades later. After his lunch with Lucas, “even before I got home, I crawled into a phone booth and called my agent and said there’s no way I can do this,” he recounts. “He said, ‘David, David, calm down. You don’t have to do this.’ And so, George, bless his heart—I told him that he should direct it, it’s his film; he’d invented everything about it. But he doesn’t really love directing. I called my lawyer and he said, ‘You just lost millions of dollars!’ ”
“David obviously was a very out-of-left-field kind of idea,” Lucas would say. “I like David a lot. I love his work. He’s a very, very creative thinker. But I think I may have gone a bridge too far on that one. And I think he realized that when he started thinking about the actual reality of what was going to happen, and that was good.”
“David Lynch decided he didn’t want to do a George Lucas movie,” Hamill would tell a reporter in 1983. “He felt he couldn’t be constantly answering to another producer. George didn’t want to restrict someone that original, so they came to an amiable parting of the ways.”
“The final decision, you know—it’s instinct,” says Lucas.
“Then we went back to Richard,” says Kazanjian. “Both of them were good.”
“I got a phone call from Howard Kazanjian,” says Marquand. “And he said, ‘Richard, I thought I ought to tell you …’ I ran into my agent’s office, but he had gone to lunch, so I grabbed the first person I could find—my agent’s innocent, young secretary—and said, ‘We are going to drink so much champagne!’ We charged across the street in Century City and found a place where we could just sit in the bar and drink, and I behaved quite disgracefully. Then I found out where my agent was, burst into his luncheon in a very chic restaurant with some incredibly important East Coast lawyer—I was dressed in jeans and T-shirt—grabbed him by the shoulders, kissed him, and rushed out. Then I got in my car, weaved home to my wife in the Valley, fell into the pool, then went out and bought another bottle of champagne and got completely drunk. I called George and asked, ‘When do I get a script?’ And he said, ‘Just relax.’ And I did. I went back to London and began to arrange my affairs.”
Marquand also telephoned his teenage son, James, who would remember: “He said, ‘Listen, I have two pieces of great news: I’m directing the next Star Wars film! And Carol’—my stepmother, his second wife—‘is having a baby.’ I asked, ‘So when do you start on the Star Wars film?’ I completely bypassed the good news about my soon-to-be-born brother.”
Concept illustration by Johnston of the rebel war room (no. 110), spring 1981.
Rebel war room concept by Johnston.
Dennis Muren, director Richard Marquand, Joe Johnston, and George Lucas in the art dep
artment, discussing the bike chase (Lucas’s hand gesture indicating that the bikes would race side-by-side), not long after Marquand was hired, mid 1981.
“ATTACK, ALL MONSTERS!”
By the spring, box-office tallies abroad confirmed that Empire would mirror its domestic performance: While, again, a huge hit, the sequel was not going to top Star Wars. An International Report on Foreign Gross revealed that in no major country did the sequel equal or surpass the original, except in France, where Empire made $4,061,000, beating out Star Wars’ $3,895,000. Total foreign film rentals at this point were $46,482,000 compared with the first film’s $73,425,000; Empire was still scheduled to open that summer in Singapore, India, and Malaysia.
With a director hired, Lucas’s next priority, apart from the script, was building and designing creatures on two continents. To that end, Stuart Freeborn flew in from the UK on May 4 to discuss “monster coordination.” Not allowing for his jet lag (productions never do), Freeborn met that same day with Tippett, the US creature crew, and Lucas.
“George’s original instructions for the rancor were: ‘Do whatever you want to do, but I want this big monster in a pit,’ ” says Tippett. “So I designed a couple of things that he rejected. Joe took a crack at it, but those drawings were rejected, too. Finally Joe came up with a design based around a man in a suit.”
The rancor would drool and the actor in the rancor suit would have to be very strong, possibly a wrestler or weight lifter. “I took that design and refined it into something that a human could never fit into: long spidery arms, little ape-like legs, and a head that wouldn’t really allow a human head to go inside,” Tippett adds. “Naturally, George loved it. I pleaded, ‘Oh please don’t make us do that. We don’t know how to do that. It’s going to be so hard. I don’t think it’s going to work.’ ” Tippett lobbied instead for other tried-and-true techniques, such as stop-motion, which Lucas was against because it often looked fake, or go-motion, which ILM had developed for Dragonslayer. “Or something!” Tippett concludes. “But George said, ‘Try it.’ ”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 10