by Edward Gross
STEVEN MELCHING
In those years before Empire and really until the release of Episode II, we fans fleshed him out in our own imaginations, and poured all our fantasies into him, fueled by the Expanded Universe. Only much later did we learn that Fett was supposed to be the main antagonist in Episode VI, with the bulk of the Luke/Vader/Emperor storyline intended to be the spine of Episodes VII–IX.
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Frank Oz could be described as the most famous actor that you’ve never seen. Prior to his role as Jedi Master Yoda in the Star Wars saga, Frank Oz had already made a career for himself as a puppeteer and performer for Jim Henson’s The Muppets and Sesame Street—providing the much-beloved personalities for the roles of Miss Piggy, Grover, Sam the Eagle, Bert, and many more. He would go on to portray those roles and characters for over thirty years. While Jim Henson was himself first asked to portray the role of Yoda, Frank Oz would step in and become instrumental in the creation and characterization of this beloved character.
Oz would eventually add writer/director to his résumé, codirecting the 1982 film The Dark Crystal with Jim Henson (and George Lucas on as a supportive producer), the 1986 film Little Shop of Horrors, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, as well as many others. But he has continued to portray the character of Yoda and an occasional role on the Muppets when the circumstances arise.
One of the most surprising success stories of The Empire Strikes Back is the way that the character of Jedi Master Yoda—a puppet manipulated off-screen by a team and voiced by Frank Oz—interacts with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
IRVIN KERSHNER
The floor of the Dagobah set was about five feet above the actual floor of the stage. We built it up and put Yoda there, and there were splits in the floor so that they could manipulate him. Below the floor were about five TV sets and Frank Oz and his crew. One person would control the ears, one person would blink the eyes, another person would move the mouth, one person moved one arm, another moved another arm. It was all scrutinized carefully and all they could see were the television sets around them.
FRANK OZ
(puppeteer/voice actor, “Yoda”)
I just do the voice and I get all the credit. It’s amazing how people don’t understand that I’m the guy who gets all the credit for just doing a day of work, and for the character itself. I don’t work in a vacuum. Back then it was remote control, but it was always me and three other people and we had to perform him. One person was on the left hand, the other guy the right hand, and another guy with a cable was RCing the unibrow. I remember one guy was doing Yoda’s blinking hard before the eyes met. The other guy doing the eyes knew he couldn’t move the eye until after the blink. But for me, it was a piece of cake. I was just doing the voice.
IRVIN KERSHNER
Because we were getting sick from all of the smoke on the set, I was wearing a gas mask with a microphone in it and I had a speaker, through which I would talk to Frank and Mark and the crew. And Frank would use a speaker for rehearsal, so that when Mark would say to Yoda, “Can you tell me where I can find the Jedi Master?” he would hear, “Why do you want to know?,” which was Frank answering him through a speaker somewhere. But when we actually did the take, Mark didn’t hear anything; Yoda’s dialogue was put in later. We rehearsed until we got the rhythm and then we’d do the take and he’d say, “Can you tell me where I can find the Jedi Master?,” there was a pause and then he’d say, “Well, I want to know…,” pause … “It’s my business.” And so on. See what I mean? Mark would know exactly how long to pause. He did a wonderful job of reacting to nothing but memory. Though Mark couldn’t hear him, he could see him. I wanted Yoda to look like he was Luke’s equal. I wanted Yoda to look like he could climb around. I wanted to give the illusion that he had emotion. It was not something that was put into stop-motion like King Kong, which is a miniature put in later. This was actual time.
FRANK OZ
With Yoda, you can’t perform spontaneously, because you drag three other people along with you. If I tried spontaneity, they wouldn’t know when to do the eyes when I do the ears. In this kind of situation, the satisfaction you get working with two or three other people occurs after you rehearse and rehearse and suddenly the role opens up to you. It’s a living organism. It just happens. It unfolds like a flower, because you are so in tune with each other. It’s a wonderful moment.
IRVIN KERSHNER
These challenges are what make films so exciting, when you have interesting, believable characters and you see how they react to each other and their surroundings. The characters have to be real, no matter how fantastic the situation.
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Although shooting started in Norway on March 5 (more on that to come), filming moved to Elstree Studios on March 13, 1979, where all eight existing stages were used and a new one was built for footage on the ice planet Hoth and the jungle planet Dagobah. Things progressed, though the production was delivered a setback when production designer John Barry (who had worked on Superman: The Movie and parts of Superman II between Star Wars and Empire) collapsed on the set and died as a result of meningitis. Stepping in to replace him was Norman Reynolds, whose previous credits include, as art director, Star Wars and Superman. Some of the sets, or their elements, offered particular challenges.
PETER SUSCHITZKY
(director of photography, The Empire Strikes Back)
There were some very tricky setups indeed. We had one set with a glass tube in the middle of it, with Luke Skywalker suspended in a kind of liquid [a bacta tank]. For it, I had to devise a method of lighting this tube so that it would be very bright and the rest of the scene would be extremely low-key—the tube would be the main source of light in the set—and I hit upon the idea of suspending a large mirror halfway up the studio above the set and a searchlight down below. The light from the searchlight would bounce off the mirror, which worked marvelously well until the mirror shattered once or twice, I believe, from the heat of the searchlight. There were other sets which presented their own difficulties.
LAWRENCE KASDAN
I visited the set in England, but only briefly. I had done almost all of my work by Christmas of ’78. That’s when they took off for England. We continued to correspond with drafts through early ’79. The changes that happened after that were during shooting—most of them are in the line of dialogue changes, which often happens on the set. I feel those are of varying degrees of success, but every screenwriter is dissatisfied with what happens by the time the words get to the actors’ mouths. The only other area of change (during production) was a certain amount of condensation of sections of the movie that were dictated by logistics or mechanical problems.
NORMAN REYNOLDS
(production designer, The Empire Strikes Back)
On Empire, I didn’t actually have a day off, I worked every weekend for a year, because it was such a horrendous picture in terms of volume of work. There were sixty-four sets on Empire. I don’t know a way of avoiding that. It’s like doing a painting: You have to look at it, and if it works for you, it works. If it doesn’t, then you have to do something else to it. If you’re responsible and you want it to look a certain way, you have to be there and be looking at it. There’s no shortcut. You really have to like what you’re doing.
RALPH MCQUARRIE
(design consultant and conceptual artist, The Empire Strikes Back)
The interiors are very effective. The British carpenters and plaster workers are really good. I’m afraid if I was designing the film, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to go as far as Norman did, because he had more of an idea of what these guys could do. While I was working on it, George urged me to just forget about how hard things are to do on film, but make up anything. The stuff I did was used as reference material—it’s there for the designer to look at.
PETER SUSCHITZKY
There was another set in which a sword fight was to take place between two of the characters. When I looked at that set, it struck me as being rather
like a model for a stage set. In other words, it looked unfinished. It certainly had no walls at all; it was a series of ramps and discs and blackness. I was extremely concerned about that set and I thought about it a lot, about how I was going to make it work and look believable and look dramatic. Then I decided to light the whole thing from underneath, as the floors had been made translucent. In the black areas I had shafts of light penetrating the darkness. Then the whole set was filled with steam, which made it photographically very impressive, but physically very uncomfortable, since it was like working in a Turkish bath. We were quite high up in the stage and we all suffered for quite a number of weeks, but it was one of those sets which made me feel uneasy before I entered into the shooting of it, because it looked so unreal, so unworldly and unlike anything I had ever done before.
I was concerned about it looking dull, in fact, because although there seemed to be plenty of material in the set, it was all either on the floor or on the ceiling. The fact is that unless one goes for extreme angles (and you usually can’t do that right through a long sequence), the camera is pointing straight ahead and not up or down. There was nothing for the eye to look at straight ahead except blackness, because all the set elements were on the floor or the ceiling. I was concerned about the scene looking interesting and about the eye having something to look at—but, in the end, I think we succeeded in overcoming those problems—all of us working together.
IRVIN KERSHNER
We sometimes had to begin shooting on one of the big sets even before the construction crews were finished building it. We’d be off shooting in one corner of it, and they’d be hammering away somewhere else. Whenever I could, I would go to the set the night before we were to begin using it. I’d take a camera with me—and have the film quickly developed that night—and I’d make drawings. Our objective though, was not to show how wonderful our sets were; it was to tell a story. I used very low-key lighting. It’s a lovely, aesthetically satisfying effect.
PETER SUSCHITZKY
We did have one set which is probably the most awkward set I have worked in for many, many years. There were plenty of difficult sets, but this one was really physically awkward. It was the house belonging to the Wampa creature, played by a Muppet, and as he was quite small, they built the house to suit him and not to suit a human being. Then we had to place Luke Skywalker (a human being) in the set and he could only sit down in it. Even so, he just barely escaped knocking his head against the ceiling. The set had three sides and virtually nowhere to conceal the lights. It had a fire going and that’s about all. I found it very difficult and painful to light and I had to crawl on my hands and knees into it, as one would in a mine at the coal face.
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One of the things that delighted Kershner was a true highlight of The Empire Strikes Back and cinema in general: when, during a lightsaber battle between Luke and Darth Vader, Vader tells Luke that he’s his father. For audiences, it was a stunning revelation that added depth to the saga’s growing mythos.
IRVIN KERSHNER
I wanted to enhance the characters in Empire, because I knew I couldn’t depend on the action, since I didn’t have a grand climax. It’s like the second movement of a symphony, the slow movement. It presents the problem, but doesn’t solve it. In Star Wars, George came to a grand climax and the third one came to a grand climax, too. I had to have a climax of people and mine came about with two people: the father and son.
ERIC TOWNSEND
(author, The Making of Star Wars Timeline)
During filming, that Darth Vader was Luke’s father remained a secret, even to most of the crew and actors, throughout most of the production of the film. The famous “I am your father” line was not written in the production scripts. David Prowse filmed the scene by telling Luke that Obi-Wan killed his father. Director Irvin Kershner and Mark Hamill were the only people on set during shooting that knew the actual dialogue of the scene. James Earl Jones was also let in on the secret as he had to record Vader’s dialogue.
MARK HAMILL
(actor, “Luke Skywalker”)
At the time Star Wars was being filmed, I had no idea Darth Vader was my father. I don’t think Alec Guinness did, either, because in the scene where I ask him who my father was, he hesitated. I don’t know how George made him do that. I didn’t hear him saying, “Maybe you don’t really want to tell him.” I remember very early on asking who my parents were and being told that my father and Obi-Wan met Vader on the edge of a volcano and they had a duel. My father and Darth Vader fell into the crater and my father was instantly killed. Vader crawled out horribly scarred, and at that point, the Emperor landed and Obi-Wan ran into the forest, never to be seen again.
RAY MORTON
This is arguably the greatest, most unexpected, most shocking plot twist in the history of cinema when Darth Vader announces that he is actually Luke’s father. It’s not certain when and how Lucas came up with this bold and astonishing notion. When asked, he prefers to maintain the fiction that it was part of the story from the very beginning, which it wasn’t. In the rough and first drafts of Star Wars, Annikin Starkiller’s father Kane resembled Vader in that he was half-man/half-machine, but that’s as far as the resemblance went—Kane was and remained a good man throughout. In the final drafts and film of Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader are two different people. Vader was not Luke’s papa in Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, nor was he in Leigh Brackett’s first draft of Empire, in which Luke’s father (identified as “Skywalker”) appears as a ghost who administers the Jedi oath to Luke. The notion of having Luke’s father turn to evil and become Darth Vader, and then to later be turned back to the light by his son, first appears in Lucas’s earliest notes for the sequel. However, Lucas did not incorporate the concept into the script until he did his initial rewrite of Leigh Brackett’s first draft. It is in Lucas’s handwritten second draft that Vader first informs Luke that, “I am your father.”
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
(author, Star Wars novelization and the sequel, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye)
I didn’t really agree with the idea of Vader being Luke’s father, but it worked for a lot of people and you go with it. It just seemed so out of the blue. I saw that and was just as shocked as anybody else, because I had no involvement with the film and didn’t know what was coming. And it just struck me as we’d have to find something to really shock the audience and stun the audience and make them want to come back. I think that was the impetus for that rather than something that flowed naturally from the story. And I knew as soon as that happened, as soon as I saw that on-screen, it was like, “Well, we’ve lost Darth Vader as a great villain, because no matter what else happens, he’s Luke’s father now and there’s always going to be that tinge of his father that has to be redeemed and can’t be all bad.” It just diminished the character for me.
RAY MORTON
Forty years after the fact, Lucas’s decision to spin his core material in such a radical and unexpected direction remains a breathtakingly brilliant and daring one. The concept of a young hero who discovers his allegedly dead father is not only still alive, but has turned evil and become his greatest foe, is positively Shakespearean, and elevates the comic book narrative of the first movie to the level of Greek tragedy. However, as cool and dramatic as Va-der’s revelation is, it has a negative impact on Luke’s personal storyline. When Luke first meets Yoda, the Jedi Master identifies Luke as being impatient and impetuous. Throughout his training, Yoda warns Luke not to give in to this impatience, because doing so will make him vulnerable to being turned to the dark side. Luke initially heeds Yoda’s warning, but after he has a vision of Han and Leia being threatened by Vader, he impetuously decides to leave Dagobah before his training is complete to rescue them. Both Yoda and Ben beg Luke to reconsider, but he refuses.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
I think the entire prequel trilogy is an attempt to justify the ending of Empire, and that’s a lot of material needed to justify i
t. It’s not that Anakin wasn’t an interesting character, and this is a personal thing, I just think Darth Vader works as a really bad guy.
RAY MORTON
The setup in Empire strongly suggests that when the unprepared Luke faces off against Vader, it is inevitable that he will be turned to the dark side. This suggestion is borne out in the course of the lightsaber duel between the two as we watch Vader steadily beat and batter Luke before finally cutting off his hand and trapping him far out on the end of the platform in the Cloud City shaft. At this point, the narrative has arrived at the key dramatic question in the story of Luke Skywalker: Will Luke turn to the dark side of the Force? Having posed the question, the film then fails to answer it.
