In scene 6, C-3PO and R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) approach Jabba’s gate and speak with a mechanical eye.
In scene 15, Luke meets Bib Fortuna (Mike Carter).
Mike Carter (Bib Fortuna) has his prosthetic head applications fitted by makeup artist Nick Dudman.
REPORT NOS. 4–5: THURSDAY–FRIDAY, JANUARY 14–15; STAGE 3—EXT. EWOK VILLAGE, SC. 78 [HEROES ARRIVE, MEET LEIA, C-3PO REVEALS “POWERS”]; 2ND UNIT: STAGE 6—EXT. JABBA’S PALACE GATE & MAIN HALLWAY, SCS. 6, 7, 15
The Ewok village was unusual for several reasons, not least of which was its vertical placement several meters above the floor. It had a painted cyclorama background of trees and sky, and whatever was shot there would have to be matched later in Crescent City. It was also the first set to feature large groups of Ewoks, 39 to be exact, with Kenny Baker playing Wicket or R2, depending on the shot.
Marquand had asked that mirrors be used in the training of the Ewoks so they could see themselves and refine their movements with the choreographer; he’d also given them a library of gestures and body language, how they should scratch for fleas, so they were as prepared as could be.
“By the time they reached me, they were very much fitter and more energetic than they had been when they’d been cast,” the director says. “The problem was that you didn’t know who was who, so it was very difficult to communicate. You’d make eye contact with the real face and then all the heads would go on and you’d lose everybody again. That was the hardest thing.” It didn’t help that the Ewok extras could barely see under normal conditions, but were now on a set with a very low light level.
“To make things even more interesting,” Warwick Davis would say, “the Ewoks had lots of campfires, so the special effects team burned lots and lots of incense to create this thick smoky haze, just to make sure we really, really couldn’t see a damn thing.”
“The huts, hopefully, reflect their lifestyle,” says Reynolds. “But the nature of redwoods—long and thin—do not lend themselves readily to cinema-screen proportions. We’ll have to do matte shots, looking up and down, adding the extreme tops and bottoms of the trees, which will be locked off VistaVision footage.”
“This set was a damnable thing, ridiculous, really, absurd,” adds Marquand. “Okay, so you are going to be in an Ewok village up in the trees, so you go up in the trees? I mean, surely there must be some way invented by now in state of the art cinema so you don’t have to do that. But, in fact, your four-foot-six camera with a wide-angle lens is going to shoot the floor unless you are 30 feet off the ground—and then you are going to see that it doesn’t go down forever. But it’s highly dangerous!”
To carry the captured actors, props needed long poles and ropes, while scattered on the set were a slew of extra items: baby Ewok toys, spears, and drums; firewood; an iguana and 12 chickens; nylon for moving the branches manually; fall boxes for stunts; wind machines; a turntable for C-3PO’s revolving chair; practical fires, torches, smoke, and mist. Because of the hot lights, crew often had to give salt tablets to the costumed Ewoks. “You’d be doing a scene with them and sometimes they would just fall over, fainting from the heat,” says Fisher.
It wasn’t particularly comfortable for Hamill or Ford, either, hanging by their wrists and ankles from poles. “Harrison is terrific, what I call a trouper,” says Marquand. “He really is—if he’s going to do a movie, then he’s going to be there one hundred percent. In fact, the poor guy has got a slight back condition, which makes it very hard for him to hang upside down for long periods of time. So I said, ‘Well, hey, we’ll put a bench under you for the closer shoots and a cushion.’ And he said, ‘No, I’m hanging here, I’ve got to look uncomfortable. I want to be uncomfortable.’ ”
In addition to just launching a franchise with Raiders, Ford had recently filmed Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), so was about to pull off a back-to-back character trifecta rarely, if ever, matched in the history of cinema: Han Solo, Indiana Jones, and Rick Deckard.
“Harrison’s probably one of the best friends I’ve had in my life and yet I won’t see him for months and months at a time,” says Hamill. “I don’t feel like I have to be entertaining.” One night the two actors made “massive tacos” together, buying all imported ingredients.
Hamill had also been busy between films, shooting Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980) and Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital (1982). “I did a small part, an airhead who is stoned out of his gourd,” says Hamill. “My mother warned me, ‘Don’t you think it will be surprising for your fans to see you smoking pot?’ But that’s exactly what I’ve got to break out of.” He also filmed The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia (1981) and appeared on Broadway in The Elephant Man (1981). “Georgia was the first film I did with no reason other than I really wanted to work,” says Hamill. “I thought I should start getting over the idea that each movie should have the potential to be the best of its kind.” The theater job actually cost Hamill almost more than it paid because his bodyguard, necessary to keep Star Wars groupies away, earned nearly as much as he did.
Watts, Lucas, Kazanjian, and Reynolds pose next to the X-wing on the sandstorm set.
Wardrobe mistress Janet Tebrooke talks with Fisher next to the Y-wing on the same set.
THE MONSTER MASH
On Friday, Reynolds flew to the States to check on set construction in Yuma and Crescent City, while Femi Taylor (Oola) had a costume and makeup fitting. “One of the characters I wanted is an alien dancing girl,” says Marquand. “I knew a black girl who was a terrific dancer, one of the leads in the London production of Cats. The alien face and appearance was designed to her. I wanted to keep the color of her skin, but add a purplish haze with gold dust over it. George said, ‘No, no. She’s green!’ I said, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘Yeah green.’ And then I thought, That really is rather good.”
During the weekend, while the gate and hallway sets were struck, Lucas and Marquand, with the art department, blocked out shots for Jabba’s throne room. “The difficulty is that Jabba can’t move,” Lucas would say. “I had to plop him down somewhere and have the scene happen around him, which made for some inconvenient staging in the revelation scenes.”
The other difficulty was that Jabba himself was not finished. “Stuart is slow,” Kazanjian says. “He just drives you crazy.”
Watts had taken to calling Jedi “The Monster Movie,” because of all the new aliens and perhaps because of the terror they inspired in its producer and co-producers. “Creatures are terribly difficult because you are breaking new ground each time,” he says. “You never know when they’re going to be ready—and if they’re ready, are they going to work?!”
“It was pretty devastating,” the director says. “All the creatures looking at me, saying, Now what? George and I, and the mime artists, were all on that stage plotting it out, deciding exactly where everybody would stand. But very few of those creatures can move around much; they are mostly up through holes. For the first sequence they would be in one place, for the second sequence they would be moved around, so it’d look as though they weren’t just rooted to one spot.”
One of the mimes was Gerald Home, who had been cast as a Squid Head (Tessek). “I got a call from a mime director called Desmond Jones,” Home would say. “The brief was that they were looking for performers who could move well and act without words, purely with their bodies. Nine of us were finally chosen, though we came from vastly different backgrounds: some dancers, circus performers, puppeteers, street mimes, a couple of actors, like myself, who had learned mime and puppetry. When we eventually started rehearsals, we worked out lots and lots of ‘business’ to be used in the film. Of course, once the set filled up with the people, we got lost in the crowd …”
Lucas with his daughter, Amanda, on the Ewok village set, circa January 15, 1982.
Ford and Hamill on the Ewok village set.
REPORT NOS. 6–7: MONDAY–TUESDAY, JANUARY 18–19; STAGE 3—EXT. EWOK VILLAGE & INT. EWOK HUT, SCS. 78, 79
[C-3PO TELLS STORY]
While a “second camera” unit had already been used for pickup shots, Lucas had decided that not only was he going to be needed on set full-time, but a full-time second-unit director should be hired. David Tomblin had already been promised second-unit duties for those extended action scenes in Crescent City, but that would be after the main unit had wrapped; until then, he would be required as first AD. On January18, Watts therefore wrote to Painted Lady Productions Ltd., to confirm the services of a “second” second-unit director, Roger Christian, who would start four days later.
“We had been meeting daily—George was already having absolutely no time to rest,” says Marquand. “But I had warned him that that was the way I wanted to work. I just said, ‘Look, George, if I am going to do this properly, you’ve got to give me your time.’ I mean he hadn’t necessarily planned to be in London at the shoot. But I said, ‘You’ve got to be there. I like my producer around. And you’re more than the producer—you wrote this goddamn thing, so let’s get it right.’ ”
Marquand was also perhaps acknowledging that he had never done a film nearly so complex and effects-laden as Star Wars—nearly no one had, apart from Lucas. “In trying to get somebody who could handle something that big, basically I was pretty naïve about it,” Lucas would say. “There just weren’t very many people that had any experience doing it. So I knew by that time, especially after doing Empire, that I was going to have to be there the whole time; I was already resigned to doing that. As it turned out, because this one was even more complicated than the last one, I had to be there every day on the set working very closely with Richard. But I was thankful to have Richard there because I did get to spend time with my daughter, Amanda; I did get to go home.”
Fortunately for all concerned, Roger Christian was a Star Wars veteran, having been the set decorator on the first film—one of the key people in John Barry’s art department—and had since gone on to directing. Indeed, Lucas had enabled Christian to make his first short, the 25-minute Black Angel (1979), which had played before screenings of Empire in Europe, a common practice at the time in the UK and on the Continent.
“I was at home waiting for Paramount to trigger The Sender, to go green on it,” Christian would say of his 1982 film. “And then Robert Watts called me and said, ‘What are you doing? George is doing second unit himself and he feels that he needs to spend a lot more time with Richard, so would I be able to come and take over?’ I was and I walked straight into it. Robert and George said, ‘Would you mind not having a credit, because we already promised it to Dave.’ And I said, ‘It’s fine.’ I felt, you know, it’s like family. George had essentially got me going with Black Angel and I felt we were friends, so you do that kind of thing.”
“We had been meeting pretty regularly with George,” Roffman would say. “And the idea had been that George would go over to London for the first week and just get Richard started, because the ranch was getting built and there were lots of things going on in the U.S. that required his attention. But it was wishful thinking to think that Marquand, who had never done a big movie at all, who was nowhere near the league of Irvin Kershner, could handle it. We found out that George was changing his schedule and staying in London, because all of a sudden he couldn’t do any of those executive meetings anymore.”
“Richard would come in only at 12:00 or even 1:30 PM during preproduction at Elstree, because he didn’t understand a lot about the building of sets and the preparation,” Kazanjian would say. “Richard didn’t have that much to do, so I had called George before we started filming and said, ‘George, you’d better plan on staying the entire time.’ Eventually he did stay the entire time, and really there was never a time when George was not on the set.”
“A movie company operates on the split second, like a football game,” Lucas says. “If you are not there when the decision has to be made, you’ve lost the moment. Those moments add up to hours, days, and weeks. Empire had gone 10 weeks over schedule and over budget. It was excruciating. I couldn’t afford to go through that again.”
Costumed Ewoks (Davis and Purvis), after months of costume work, filming scenes on the village set. Dental drills were used for working on the acrylic Ewok teeth.
First AD David Tomblin rehearses the Ewok artists without costumes for the scene in which the Ewoks carry in their captured prisoners.
Ford, with bad back, tied to a spit.
“I did enjoy doing, from a design point of view, the Ewok village,” says Reynolds. “I’d never done anything like that, to have actually built a set halfway between the floor and the ceiling of the stage, which made it probably about 25 feet high to the floor of the set. It was really quite an undertaking.”
ENTER THE EMPEROR
In addition to Christian being hired, a new Emperor was recruited, partially due to the record cold England was experiencing. “Alan Webb got snowed in and he got the flu,” says Marquand. “And then finally he wrote me a letter saying he was very sorry, but he felt that the part was too big for him and he would hate to let us all down and he was very sad.” Indeed the sadder coda is that Webb would die not long afterward, on June 22, 1982.
“It looked for a while as if another actor would play the part, but in the end, it was decided that he was too frail,” says McDiarmid. “So I got a call from my agent and he said, ‘George Lucas would like to meet you. They’re sending a car in a couple of hours.’ It was lunchtime when I got down to the studio, so I met George and Richard, and we talked for about 10 minutes, not about the film, but about life. It was very inconsequential. George paid me a compliment about my nose and I thought, I think I’ve got it.”
“I can tell this story because I don’t lie to actors,” says Marquand. “I used to be an actor and I know that they prefer the truth. They know you’re considering 30 people for one part. So I was able to be quite straightforward with Ian and say, ‘Look, actually, I was right in the first place. It’s better to have a young man who can carry this role and Mr. X has dropped out, so I would really appreciate it if you would play it.’ And Ian said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to.’ ”
“All I care about is good acting,” says Lucas, who approved his casting. “Star value is only an insurance policy for those who don’t trust themselves making films.”
With production a half day over schedule, McDiarmid arrived for an eye fitting with Ann Silk at 1:45 PM on Tuesday, January 18, while production commenced the scene in which C-3PO tells the story of the first two films to a group of Ewoks huddled around a fire. While only taking up a minute or so on screen, Daniels had spent a good deal of time preparing. “I made up the whole story in English,” Daniels says. “I worked out most of the scene without the suit first. I spent the evening and I got all these ideas, though I knew the costume had certain limitations. During the rehearsals, I felt so silly, because here I was saying, ‘And then we went to Cloud City, which was very beautiful, and there was this bad man called Darth Vader …’ And Harrison Ford was looking at me like I was a real idiot.”
“There was a scene where, purring like a cat, I hug Han Solo’s leg while See-Threepio tells the stories around the campfire,” Warwick Davis would say. “The look of surprise and then resignation on Harrison’s face wasn’t acted.”
“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 Anthony Daniels as C-3PO telling the story of the saga so far to the Ewoks—in English, minus the sound effects—as directed audibly by Richard Marquand. (2:12)
“The addition of Warwick Davis was a breath of fresh air,” Hamill would say. “I mean here comes this kid who’s just like sunshine in shoes, just so upbeat and so optimistic. It put the three of us on our best behavior. It guarded against a kind of creeping cynicism that was coming into play. Meaning that I thought the script was a letdown after the first two and Harrison wanted a heroic death and really didn’t want to do th
e script that was written.”
“I was so ill I wanted to die,” says Daniels of the actual shoot. “I had the worst cold you’ve ever seen. Without going into details, just imagine not being able to blow your nose for two hours. When I finally took the mask off, I really had to disappear—it was disgusting.”
Han, Leia, and Luke listen to C-3PO tell their epic story to the rapt Ewoks gathered around the fire, circa January 18, 1982.
Marquand’s sketch and notes for the celebration scene, the “Ewok Dance.”
Second assistant cameraman Simon Hume marks the scene with his clapperboard dated January 21, 1982, for take one of scene 132E, part of the end celebration.
C-3PO and the Ewoks enjoy the festivities.
Costume reference Polaroids of Prune Face and a rebel alien pilot of the same species as Nien Nunb (#10, later named Ten Nunb), both for scene 132.
Fisher talks with Lucas about the scene in which Leia is told by Luke that they are siblings, circa January 22, 1982.
Luke reveals to Leia that she is his sister.
Marquand, Ford, and Fisher discuss the scene in which Solo finds Leia distraught after she has learned that Luke is her brother (while crew take measurements for the camera team).
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 27