“But Vader doesn’t quite understand the Emperor’s plot. The whole plot of the Emperor is to get Luke to turn to the dark side and become his apprentice, by killing Vader. Vader doesn’t quite understand that he’s on the chopping block, until he gets into that fight. He thinks that his job is to kill the kid, but of course he can’t really kill the kid, and the Emperor knows that he can’t really kill the kid. The Emperor is playing the two against each other to see which one wins. It’s not until Luke cuts off his father’s hand that it occurs to Vader what’s going to happen here: He realizes, Wait a minute, I’ve been set up. Then he also realizes that his son is what Vader was at one point, when Luke’s choice was his choice. His son refuses to kill him—and that is such a revelation to Vader—it reminds him of what he once was.
“So Vader is not powerful enough to kill the Emperor, but he does so in a very unexpected way. He does it not out of thinking or fear. He does it out of the super energy of wanting to protect his son, out of compassion. Vader finally has compassion for his son and realizes that his life has been a sham.”
“The Emperor uses the word ‘friend’ a lot and I thought he must think that that is the most despicable thing that a human being could do, to form friendships, which is something that is completely alien to him,” McDiarmid would say. “Because he has spent his life destroying other people. So I just thought, I’ll focus on that word and make it a hate word from the Emperor’s point of view.”
On Friday, Fisher took the Concorde to New York City while second unit shot Jabba’s barge and the rebel briefing room. Oz met with Freeborn at 5:30 PM. A long memo from US art director Jim Schoppe to Reynolds outlined ideas for building the barge sails, for a cost of $70,000 for two complete sails, rigged, plus $16,800 for the work of Commodore Warwick Tompkins—a genuine sailor who, far from any sea, would be needed on the desert location.
SETUPS: 601; SCS. COMP: 35/132; SCREEN TIME: 53M 42S/120M
A ROSE IN SAN RAFAEL
Before ILM could throw every man, woman, and department into Jedi, the facility had to finish shots for Steven Spielberg’s E.T., which was due out that summer. Ralph McQuarrie continued to be on good terms with Lucas and ILM, despite his departure, and he designed the alien’s mothership (based on a dream he’d had long before). The ongoing problem of the effects company was fragmentation, with several groups working on different films without much coordination.
Edlund was generally characterized by other ILMers as “a real technical guy” and the one responsible for pioneering new kinds of cameras and printers. Muren was thought of as more artistic, with a great eye when setting up and lighting shots, and more at home with the animation, matte, and art departments.
“Dennis is a real artist,” says model maker Paul Huston. “He didn’t care how it was done. Richard would do something just because it hadn’t been done that way or because he wanted to build a really cool something. Dennis stressed the creative rather than the technical, like how to make something look real by making it random or by closely observing nature, whereas Richard would get a bunch of stuff and put it in front of a really cool camera and blow it up. That was his happiness.”
“I don’t think that analogy is fair at all,” Edlund would say. “I got interested in photography because it’s an art that is realizable through gadgets. I’m a generalist. I understood chemistry, so I could deal with the photo lab. I had been a still photographer with my own darkroom for many years and had built all sorts of strange photographic apparatus in order to create ideas that I had. So it all starts with a creative concept and then you have to figure out how to create equipment that will get you to that level. At ILM, we built the most fantastic optical printers known to man, from scratch.”
A source of unhappiness, at least to some at ILM, was the telematics that were now being generated for the space battle and its warring armadas. “I did not like the videomatics,” says Ralston. “I thought it was a waste of time. The bike stuff was great, but for the space stuff, especially the real complex stuff, the video system was so limited that we couldn’t get across the impression of what we wanted in the final shot. It cost too much and took too much of my time, ’cause I winded up shooting most of that.”
“It didn’t work as well for the spaceships, making it difficult for George to get a good idea of the movements on the video,” says Edlund. “You have to be very careful. If you start cutting for the animatic and then you ask for the shots to be done like the black and white image of toys and props, you may find the frame count is all wrong when you go to a Panavision color comp of the shot. Color makes it twice as hard to recognize things in a short time, so you usually have to lengthen everything by about 20 to 50 percent.”
Clowning around during a publicity shoot with ILM’s VistaCruiser camera are visual effects supervisors Ken Ralston, Richard Edlund, and Dennis Muren.
Another source of anxiety were the Ewoks, which were raising eyebrows at ILM. “You could go in the back door of the screening room sometimes,” effects cameraman Scott Farrar would say. “One day someone says, ‘Hey, I hear they’re running some dailies from London. Let’s go look.’ And it’s all these black-and-white rough cuts of these little teddy bears on these fake trees. We come out of there and we go, ‘My God, what are we involved with? What is this movie?’ We were flabbergasted.”
“When we were working on E.T., the first thing I ever saw of the creature was this black-and-white photograph,” Bill George would say. “I looked at the photograph and I went, ‘That is the ugliest, most ridiculous looking thing I have ever seen.’ So when I first saw the designs of the Ewoks, I thought, Now, wait a minute, we’ve got to give these things a chance.”
By this time Rose Duignan had also rejoined ILM, rehired back in August 1981 to bring order to the sometimes fraught productions. Duignan hadn’t worked on Empire because of a personal project, but had been key at ILM on Star Wars. “Production manager Lon Tinney said, ‘It is really happening and we need a coordinator,’ ” Duignan would say of her first job interview at ILM back in 1976. “So I show up and walk into this very dingy reception area with a beat up couch and sit down, and I start chatting up the receptionist, saying, ‘I’ve heard of George Lucas and I know American Graffiti, so I think this could be interesting.’ I’m trying to find out if George Lucas is a nice guy. And I’m sitting beside this kid, shoes up. But when I get called into my interview with John Dykstra, this guy gets up and follows me in—so I’m thinking, He’s a cheeky runner. Of course he turns out to be George Lucas. He asked me only two questions: ‘Do you take shorthand?’ I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Can you start Monday?’ ”
“Poltergeist and Raiders were a nightmare and they both went way over budget,” Muren would say. “E.T. was small, but it was a very hard show because it was shot in bright sunlight. We did it in 4-perf, because we had no money, but also because Richard had all the VistaVision cameras tied up. I said, ‘Well, heck, let’s just do this in 4-perf, because I hate VistaVision anyway.’ I wanted to shoot with the production cameras with the same shooting crew, so everything matches. But I hardly had any material [technical equipment] for E.T. At one point I was so frustrated, I remember almost walking out and just saying, ‘I can’t deal with this anymore.’ ”
(By shooting in 4-perf—that is, with regular 35mm cameras—Muren was able to do many of the effects shots in camera, instead of relying on the 8-perf VistaVision format and optical compositing.)
“Dennis was extremely upset,” Duignan would say. “It was really a ludicrous situation where Richard Edlund had the three best cameras tied up and he was only going to be using two of them. That is where it did get into some heated conversation.”
“Rose was brought in as production supervisor to manage the groups, so there would not be one person in there being able to dominate any department,” Muren adds. “Rose split us into three units: me, Ken, and Richard. If anyone had a problem, we could go to Rose and she’d fiddle out someway to get it to work.”
“Dennis and I were at creative loggerheads, to some degree,” Edlund would say. “But I think that we complemented each other greatly on shooting. Dennis and Ken were monstrously talented guys, both of them. It was fun to work with them at some points; sometimes it was exasperating, but for the most part it was a positive experience.”
“It was three separate teams, completely driven by the creatives,” Duignan continues. “There were no producers. We were called coordinators, but I insisted on being called a production supervisor, because I needed the clout. Anyway, I will always love Richard, but he is not a good sharer. He needs to be the boss. Yet I could always go to Richard and say, ‘This isn’t fair. You have three cameras tied up for one shoot and you’re leaving the guys the shitty camera, so here’s the deal: If your camera jams and you need another camera, we’ll accommodate that, but as long as your cameras are working, these guys get it.’ ”
“It was very loosey-goosey in a great way,” Ken Ralston would say. “If someone needed your help on another movie, they might grab you and you’d walk across, through the black curtains, to another setup for another film, help them out, and then go back to your movie. But I’m sure some people were trying to hang onto stuff more than others, so it was hard to use certain pieces of equipment. We had one motion-control camera we really liked and then some crummier ones, and there was specialized equipment that we all wanted to use.”
“There was Richard’s guys and there was Dennis’s guys, but there was a definite kind of tension for resources and for crewing shows,” Huston would say. “Lorne Peterson used to say that somebody would want somebody on his show, and then they would be fighting about it and get all mad at Lorne if he couldn’t get this guy to be on one show only.”
“Richard would take a crew skeet shooting during lunchtime across the bay,” matte painter Chris Evans would say. “He had a real fun persona. He would shoot from the hip, literally. He was kind of a military man, soldier of fortune; he’d wear a military fatigue jacket and had a gun collection in his office, I think. He’d laugh and go—Bang! It was hysterical. He was very macho and there was a real sense of camaraderie.”
“I actually inspired competition between the shows, because I felt we needed to get fiscally responsible,” says Duignan. “Nobody in accounting was sharing with the show whether they were ahead or behind, and George really cared about not having to subsidize these movies. So we started tracking actual costs and sharing them during the weekly production meetings. People did not like this. We’d have screens up and the accounting guys would show each show against each other, what percentage complete, what percentage spent, how much to finish. So you could see that my crew on Star Trek II was 50 percent under budget and exactly on track. Richard’s crew on Poltergeist was way over budget and way behind schedule and things weren’t working. That created some real pain, but I think ultimately it was very effective, because all of a sudden everyone knew.”
“Poltergeist was extremely difficult as a visual effects project because it was a realistic movie, happening in the house next door kind of thing in modern times,” Edlund would explain. “We didn’t have the cloak of fantasy or romance that you had in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which got you over certain hurdles.”
“I don’t think the dynamics at ILM during this period ever changed, but I think Rose was good at making all the issues business issues, rather than personal issues,” Huston continues. “She was a really good communicator, she could make things really explicit. Things that were kind of undercurrents, but not being talked about, she could make explicit in ways that wouldn’t make anyone angry. Then they could get it out there, deal with it, and move on.”
“Rose Duignan is an enormous character,” coordinator Patricia Blau would say. “I actually learned quite a bit from her. I don’t even really think I know how much I learned from her.”
“Rose also initiated luncheons,” Peterson would say. “So Rose and Dennis and me and Phil would go out and have a two-hour lunch or something like that. It was a little bit of a pressure releaser.”
“During the crunch period, we would say, ‘Okay, we need 10 finals and 15 temps today,’ ” Duignan says. “You’d plant that seed and that helps the crews so much, when you hit your targets. Everybody loves that. I monetized it and helped people see their success. People would always look at the board—‘What do we need today?’—and cheer when we would get it!”
REPORT NOS. 37–40: TUESDAY–FRIDAY, MARCH 2–5; STAGE 4—INT. DEATH STAR, EMPEROR’S ROOM, SCS. 52, 73, 96, 107, 114, 118; SECOND UNIT: STAGE 5—BLACK VELVET (HOLOGRAM), SC. 132 (VADER “GHOST”); STAGE 9—INT. MILLENNIUM FALCON GUNPORTS, SC. 129 [GUNNERS FIRE AT TIE FIGHTERS]; INT. TIE FIGHTER COCKPIT, SC. 129; INT. Y-WING COCKPIT, SCS. 102, 120, 126
On the Death Star docking bay stage are DP Alan Hume in foreground, camera operator Alec Mills, Marquand directing—and Prowse as Vader seemingly trying to get a good look from behind them.
Stunt coordinator Peter Diamond rehearses the climactic duel with Bob Anderson as Vader.
Aided by a miniature trampoline, stuntman Colin Skeaping performs his own backward flip, filmed by DP Alan Hume and his crew with two cameras.
Bob Anderson and stunt coordinator Peter Diamond.
Doubling for Mark Hamill is stunt man Colin Skeaping.
Shaw returned on Tuesday, having been recalled for the pickup shot against black velvet, which Lucas supervised; the unmasked Vader would now appear as a “ghost” along with Yoda and Ben at the end. Ironically, Kazanjian had changed his mind about this being such a good idea. “I’d started thinking about it and I said to George, ‘Why? This guy—he’s like Hitler. He’s killed. He’s done all of these terrible things and now we’re saying he’s equal with Yoda and Obi-Wan, as if he’s gone to heaven or whatever.’ And George pointed at me, he was real close, and he says, ‘Isn’t that what your religion is all about?’ And, boy, that was like being slapped on the side of the face, because, yes, it is what my religion is all about, and obviously his, but I hadn’t thought it through.”
“I decided that the scene would give more closure to Luke’s relationship with his father,” Lucas would say. “When Vader joins the Force he is able to retain his original identity because of Obi-Wan and the Jedi Order, because they’ve learned how to do it.”
“George Lucas actually directed me, in my final bit,” Shaw would say. “I look like me in that scene: I haven’t got any of that awful makeup on. Alec wasn’t there, it was all put together afterward. When we were filming that sequence, I didn’t know why we were doing it; I thought it was for publicity or something. George just said, ‘Look happy, smile.’ ”
After a few quick takes, the Progress Report noted, “Mr. Shaw has now definitely completed his role in this production.”
Elsewhere in the world, huge efforts were under way at the Crescent City location. A large crew was widening existing trails and clearing new roads. Thirty-one greensmen, nicknamed the Fern Brothers (perhaps a nod to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers of underground comic fame?), whose van they painted with their name, were employed full-time up to 12 hours a day for nearly eight weeks, stripping away tangled undergrowth and adding plant life where necessary (some of the local crew were very pleased to be making $9 an hour). Bulldozers and earthmoving equipment “rearranged” the terrain to suit the story, under the supervision of set dresser Douglas Von Koss. Farther south, in San Rafael, the Monster Shop was finishing up a rancor body suit, and articulating the Nien Nunb mask, originally a background creature, and the Wicket Ewok head sent from England.
On set, stunt swordsman Bob Anderson and fight coordinator Peter Diamond were present as shooting of the climactic duel began, some of which would be completed by second unit. “I had wanted that fight to be bigger than the fight in Empire,” says Marquand. “And then when George came, he said it doesn’t have to be bigger because, basically, it can’t be. George is very blunt. He said, ‘It’s just a couple of guys banging sticks against each
other. Don’t worry about that.’ He said it’s bigger because of what is going on in their heads. He said that we actually needed some dialogue in the middle of that fun and that Luke goes through three changes: one is just straight forward anger; the next is not wanting to fight and withdrawing; and then the last one is, ‘You son of bitch, okay, I’m going to kill you.’ So it’s three different fights.”
“The final resolution to the conflict between Vader and me is surprisingly not action fireworks as much as two characters confronting each other,” says Hamill, who found the duel among the more difficult scenes to shoot. “George retreats from raw emotion. He sees it as more stylized, so the audience can read their own feelings into it, not communicating with their fathers or saying things they wish they’d said.”
“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 behind-the-scenes shot on March 3, 1982, of Luke’s duel with Vader (Bob Anderson, here, as stunt double), as performed by Hamill and his stunt double (Colin Skeaping; sometimes shot in reverse) on the throne room set at Elstree Studios. (0:52)
The result of Lucas’s thinking meant that the script had been altered earlier—with Vader’s intention to corrupt Leia triggering Luke’s fury. “There’s no question that Luke is now an equal swordsman to Vader,” adds Hamill. “But Luke isn’t a sadist; he would never make Vader suffer, because I’m better at what a Jedi does than Darth Vader. So the question is, how do I resolve it?’ We were much more interested in the drama than in a long flashy fight.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 34