Marquand: I felt that about Ben the first time I saw Star Wars.
Kasdan: But that one worked like crazy.
Lucas: Yes, I know. But we’ve done that. The same thing with Han. The biggest reaction we got was when people asked, “How can you leave the movie half finished?” Well, the main thrust of this one is that it has to be fun.
Kasdan: All of our material here is not fun.
Lucas: Well, I know we’ve got the serious side.
Kasdan: We have a lot of grim stuff here.
Lucas: Well, that’s why we have to concentrate on the fun.
Kasdan: There isn’t much fun stuff. There is the Jabba stuff.
Lucas: That’s fun.
Kasdan: And the Ewok stuff and that’s it.
Lucas: There are three parts to the movie: Jabba, the Ewoks, and Luke and the Emperor. Luke and the Emperor are not fun and the other two are. I think that we can roll along with the fun parts and still have this undercurrent of a fairly serious study of father and son, and good and evil. The whole concept of the original film is that Luke redeems his father, which is the classic fairytale: a good father/bad father who the good son will turn back into the good father. We can have a serious line and still have a fairly light film.
The whole point of the film, the whole emotion that I am trying to get at the end of this film, is for you to be real uplifted, emotionally and spiritually, and feel absolutely good about life. That is the greatest thing that we could possibly ever do.
THE BLIND MERCENARY
Marquand: Howard [Kazanjian] suggested that Han should be blind after he is melted.
Kasdan: Temporary blindness that slowly wears off.
Lucas: But during the skiff battle, he is blind.
Kasdan: On the skiff, it’s great: He almost steps off the skiff into the Sarlacc pit because he can’t see. Luke is taking care of everybody and Han is sort of standing around, which gives Harrison a neat thing to play; he’s never played a blind man.
Marquand: Every actor likes to play a blind man. They all just love to.
Lucas: Maybe we could make him drunk, too. The drunk blind man. Cut off his legs, like his legs didn’t come out of the carbon freeze, and put him on one of those little skateboards and put a cup around his neck.
Kasdan: It could help the scene when he comes to life and embraces Leia, and he just feels her face.
Marquand: There won’t be a dry eye in the house.
Kasdan: He won’t be able to see Jabba give her a big wet one.
Lucas: On the skiff, Han could be swinging a bat around. He grabs onto something while Luke is going into action and says, “I’ll get them!” He swings around and misses them, and then he swings again and misses them. Luke is distracted while Boba [Fett] gets up—when Han whacks him one and sends him like a homerun into the pit. That would be one of those blind swordsman/samurai assassin things.
Kasdan: George has come a long way in his attitudes!
Reynolds’s set concept of an industrial structure on Had Abbadon, with Vader and Luke (detail; notes indicate that the set would be a full-sized build accompanied by foreground miniatures), June 1981.
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A PROBLEM LIKE BEN KENOBI?
Lucas: We also have to cope with another problem: Ben. How do we deal with Ben? We have to deal with Ben, even to the point of using Alec Guinness in one more ghost scene. I’ll get him to do it somehow. We have to do what is right for the plot and the story.
Marquand: Why did Ben not tell Luke?
Lucas: In the early script, I wrote that he wasn’t ready to be told.
Marquand: Well, I think that is true.
Lucas: If Luke had known, he wouldn’t have become a Jedi and he wouldn’t have been able to deal with it.
Marquand: I think that is absolutely true.
Lucas: That’s the most practical reason why.
Howard Kazanjian: He probably wouldn’t have learned in the same manner.
Lucas: For a lot of people there’s a big issue there, which we can’t skirt around.
Marquand: The fact that Ben lied.
Lucas: The fact that Ben lied, but he didn’t really lie; he didn’t really lie, because in the first film he says that Vader betrayed and murdered his father, which doesn’t necessarily mean that he killed him—but that the bad/Vader half of the person betrayed the good part of the person/the Skywalker half. It’s easily understood.
Kasdan: The first movie is not as much of a problem as the second one, where he has every opportunity to tell him.
Marquand: Yes, I agree.
Kasdan: You could get rid of all of this.
Lucas: But I still tend to want to bring Ben into it. He’s one of the main characters and he’s still a strong presence. I sort of agree with Larry that the best way to handle that is to let him stay in another world and to say there is nothing more that he can do now and that Luke is a Jedi now and that his job is done. It could be a goodbye scene to Ben, which is, “I am never going to appear before you again …”
Kasdan: You want to bring him shimmering back at the end?
Lucas: We can do that. They are guardian angels who are standing there; Luke has the power to see them.
Marquand: That’s nice. That works.
Lucas: They become the Force. The concept is that when you die, your energy drains into the Force, which is made up of all living beings. We are just personifying it a little bit, which I think is all right. The biggest thing is that we give Alec a good scene to get him to do it, a chance to act. The problem with Empire was that he doesn’t act; he just tells Luke something. He wants something that is hard to do, but what he really wants is to be funny; he wants some jokes, some good snappy lines; he wants what all actors want.
Marquand: To talk about the Force.
Kasdan: But it’s so boring.
Lucas: He doesn’t want to talk about the Force. That’s what he objects to.
THE SCIENCE OF SARLACC
Lucas: I’m assuming that we’ll start with Vader’s Star Destroyer, so we recognize it. We see a shuttle going from Vader’s ship to Had Abbadon and we’re able to establish the moon. The one thing that does is set up the geography. Vader goes down and walks through the triumph of the troops and approaches the Emperor in the throne room. They have a scene and during that scene we’ve got to set up the relationship between Vader and the Emperor. But we can’t just have that scene and then cut to Tatooine.
Marquand: What if the Emperor says that he knows where Luke is?
Early Jabba’s palace concept by McQuarrie, a variation of which can be seen in the background of his production painting (below) of Luke walking the plank between two barges. Note the Sarlacc tentacles reaching up to grab him, circa early 1981.
Lucas: The problem is if he knows where he is why doesn’t he do something about it? The idea is that he says there is no sense chasing him—“He will come to us.”
Kasdan: The Emperor?
Lucas: Yes, the Emperor says, “Don’t worry, Lord Vader. I am on the job here and he will come to us, in time.”
Marquand: That’s good.
Lucas: Then we can cut to Tatooine, and then we can cut to the robots going along the road, “beep beep,” complaining, sand blowing …
Marquand: Really nice cut.
Lucas: … trucking up this road by themselves; I sort of like that image.
Marquand: Oh, it’s wonderful.
Lucas: Saying, “Why us, why me? How did we get into this mess, what are we doing?”
Marquand: Can I suggest that Lando is actually in Jabba’s in disguise, that he has infiltrated?
Kasdan: The real problem is to figure out a plan; if you figure out a plan you can stick those people in anywhere you want.
Marquand: What if the next arrival is Chewie in chains, with a bounty hunter, which is in fact Leia dressed up. Luke’s not there yet.
Lucas: I could go with that.
Marquand: I think if you go along with that idea, then she could be di
scovered, which is why she is then turned into a dancing girl. That would be neat.
Lucas: It isn’t until it’s revealed that she is Leia that you realize the whole thing is a trick.
Kasdan: Then you don’t have to deal too much with how Luke was going to use Chewie. He just wanted him in there. We have to give Chewie something meaningful to do, but it may just be physical.
Lucas: The only thing that makes me nervous, is that it’s the same trick that they used to get Leia out of the Death Star, which was to dress Chewie up like a prisoner.
Kasdan: Is she speaking in an alien language?
Lucas: She can speak in an alien language if you want.
Kasdan: Then it’s a great Shakespearean court scene: girl dressed up as a boy. To work back from the skiff, I was wondering if Artoo, when Luke says these droids are my gift to you, instead of putting Artoo to work as a janitor, which is not doing that much good for us, what if Bib says, “We need a translator and Artoo is perfect for our barge where we lost our Artoo unit,” which is part of Luke’s plan.
Lucas: Yes, that’s possible.
Kasdan: See the trick to me is that we have to work back from the Sarlacc pit.
Lucas: What Luke wants to do is to get on that barge and the only way he can do it is as a prisoner. He has to become a prisoner and Chewie has to become a prisoner; they have to unfreeze Han and they all have to be at the same execution, which is what his plan is. He figures once he kills the rancor, then they have to go to the pit. He knows that’s where the execution is going to be anyway. What they do with ordinary nuisances, or solicitors, is they drop them into the rancor pit. Luke knows or doesn’t know that is what would happen, what kind of trap they have laid for him. He’s assuming that when he is discovered and when he is subdued, which he will be, that he is bound to end up with Han and Chewie in the skiff over the Sarlacc pit.
The plan is, “I am going to knock everybody overboard into the pit and we’re going take off”—but it goes a little awry because Boba Fett screws everything up and suddenly they are in trouble and they get into the fight.
Kasdan: You can assume that Luke’s plan is multilayered and the court of last resort is they are going to take him to the Sarlacc pit and they’ll all be in place. But when he comes in and says, “I want to bargain for Han,” he is hoping that will work.
Lucas: Yes.
SOLLOZZO STRIKES AGAIN
Lucas: When Han and Leia are discovered, you just see a huge wall stuffed with a giant crowd of monsters, floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Jabba is sitting back there and says, “So you like to kiss? I like to kiss, too.”
Kasdan: I love this.
Lucas: Jabba knows that at any moment she could try to kill him, but he loves that. He loves the fact that she’s going to be there by his side as her boyfriend is thrown to the lions; he can slobber in her ear, listening to Han scream bloody murder as his arms get ripped from his body.
Marquand: Would be nice to have a chain around her ankle, a leash, which Luke can dispose of just like that.
Kasdan: How do you feel about her being the one that causes Jabba’s death?
A transitional concept sketch toward the approved design of Jabba’s palace, by McQuarrie, early 1981.
A concept sketch by Johnston of Jabba’s palace (no. 037), February 1981.
Concept sketches of Jabba’s palace exterior by McQuarrie.
Approach to Jabba’s palace concept by Johnston.
Lucas: That I could go for. She could strangle him.
Marquand: With the chain.
Lucas: She jumps around and wraps the chain around him and strangles him. Jabba is kind of a rubber character, so we could have this big, ugly tongue come out, uggghhhh … It’s The Godfather [that is, the death of Luca Brasi in the 1972 film].
Concept art of Jabba’s throne room and production illustrations by McQuarrie, April 1981, which explore some of the shapes and forms of Tunisian architecture that had been established for Tatooine in Episode IV (the bottom one bears Lucas’s red exclamation mark of approval).
LEAPIN’ LAZER SWORDS
Kasdan: Why don’t the guards just shoot Luke? How is he fighting them?
Lucas: Well part of it would be fun if he could fight them with his lazer sword, except I don’t know how he could get his sword in the middle of all this.
Kasdan: But that could be part of his plan—what if Artoo had it secluded in his—
Lucas: That would be a good idea.
Marquand: That is brilliant. I love it.
Kasdan: Luke’s plan gets better and better, because Artoo is on the deck and he goes over to this little cubbyhole and ejects the lazer sword.
Lucas: I got an idea you can use with Artoo: What if Luke is about to walk the plank—“Well, so long, old buddy”—and he whistles, as you do in those movies where you whistle for your dog, and then you cut to the top deck of the ship. Artoo is there and a little launcher pops out of his head. Then Luke goes over to the plank, drops, jumps back onto the ship, grabs the sword, and starts fighting. We do the acrobatic thing where he flips himself back up.
Kazanjian: Mark lost his lazer sword didn’t he?
Lucas: He did lose his lazer sword, when his father cut his hand off.
Kazanjian: So whose lazer is he using? Should I have brought it up?
Lucas: You should because that’s what everybody will ask.
Marquand: Well, it didn’t occur to me.
Lucas: The way I was explaining it in the scripts before was that he made another one. But it’s going to be impossible, given the structure of the way the film is now, to explain where that lazer sword came from.
Marquand: It’s a line of dialogue later.
Lucas: Well, I don’t know if we even need to explain it. The worst thing about that is you get a letter in Starlog magazine. Big deal.
Marquand: He made it, that’s the answer!
Lucas: That’s not going to drop the audience out of the film. People aren’t going to stand up and say, “I just don’t buy that, I’m leaving.” But you will get lots of letters, so we’ll make a form letter explaining that Luke made it.
Kasdan: Maybe it should be a new color.
Lucas: Yes, it could be totally different looking. We can work that out. But the idea running throughout the whole trilogy is: First he’s given his father’s sword, because his father lost it in the fight with Ben Kenobi: Ben cut his hand off and Vader fell into the volcano, so Ben then pried the lazer sword out of the hand and kept it for the son. So then what the father did was cut his son’s hand and lazer sword off—and that was a way of severing the relationship between father and son. Not only did Luke lose his weapon and was castrated, but at the same time his father split that relationship. Luke was carrying his sword for his father. Now he is not doing that anymore. In this one, he’s built his own. He has built his own lazer sword; he is his own man, he is not a son anymore. He is an equal.
SANDSTORM REUNION
Lucas: The story between the movies is that Lando finally located Han; he’s at Jabba’s and sends the signal back to Luke, “Hey, I found Han. Get over here quick.” Leia jumps in an X-wing and flies over, and parks next to the Falcon. They make their plan and then we start the movie.
Marquand: Now the other thing is, during the sandstorm, Luke doesn’t get captured; we’ve taken away the fighting, so it’s a reunion moment and then, “Let’s go.”
Lucas: They come up to the vague outline of the Falcon and maybe you see an X-wing in the middle of a raging storm, the ramp of the Falcon comes down and they all go inside.
Kasdan: And Chewie is hurt, too.
Lucas: I don’t want to do this and I’ve struggled and got myself in all these drafts because I wanted to avoid this moment.
Marquand: You don’t want three pages of dialogue.
Lucas: The bullet that I bit the other day was to realize that there wasn’t any way to get around the issue and I had to do it.
Marquand: It was before lunch.
Lucas: It was before lunch and I said we have to accept the fact that we’re going to have that lull there. The thing that has made me feel comfortable with it is that it is exactly like Raiders: You have this fantastic action sequence at the beginning of the movie and then you have a chance to rest for a second. Everything slows down.
Marquand: You’re not going to rest for nearly that long again.
Lucas: The scene with Yoda picks it up. In the Falcon, they aren’t going to be saying anything that anybody cares about, but when you get to Yoda, Yoda is going to be saying things that people have ears to hear: Who is the other and this is your father.
Kasdan: Let me try to write a thing in the Falcon, because we have so little camaraderie time. Here what we have is Han, Luke, and Leia together again; they haven’t been since the beginning of the last movie.
Lucas: It’s the kind of scene that the writer has to make work. It’s a tender reunion scene, hopefully some snappy, funny dialogue where they’re kidding each other.
Kasdan: Okay, I’ll try to write it. The thing is there is a lot of stuff that actually has to be dealt with even if it’s obliquely: That Luke recognizes that Han and Leia are a couple for the first time and Han has seen that Luke is pretty amazing.
Production painting of the droids approaching Jabba’s palace, by McQuarrie, circa May 4, 1981. As Lucas says, the droids are “… trucking up this road by themselves; I sort of like that image.”
Another illustration by McQuarrie pitched another form for the ceiling of Jabba’s palace, circa spring 1981, but his vaulted version won out (as seen in a Rodis-Jamero pencil drawing of the “droids looking for Han,” ABOVE, early 1981).
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 15