Secrets of the Force
Page 33
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Overall, Daley was given an immense degree of freedom, though there were certain things that he wrote that came under scrutiny and ultimately were excised.
BRIAN DALEY
The only scene I remember getting cut occurred at the end. In the next-to-last episode, Han is about to leave the rebel base. I must have been watching Mutiny on the Bounty at some point that day, because I had Han with his shirt off, and Leia sees that his back is terribly scarred. I imagined that he’d been hit by a laser cat-o’-nine-tails or something. That part seemed a little graphic and was left out.
I also included in my script the scene in Star Wars with Jabba and Han in the docking bay on Mos Eisley that was cut from the film. When I learned that they had other plans for Jabba, we changed the character’s name to Heater and kept the scene. Some lines got cut that I just put in more for my own amusement than anything else. Narrative lines like when Luke goes in to see Aunt Beru, and she’s cooking away with her billion-gigawatt, DNA-replicating saucepot. There were also some mistakes that got in, particularly with Leia’s father, who I named Prester, as a tribute to Prester John. His name I found out later is Bail Organa.
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As he was writing the scripts, Daley came to an important realization about the impact of Star Wars in the annals of the genre.
BRIAN DALEY
I’ve had other novels out, but then I look at Star Trek novels appearing on the New York Times bestseller lists and I realize that a vast amount of the public is really keyed into science fiction only through the images they see on TV and in the movies. There are some hard feelings from science fiction writers who don’t realize how marginalized science fiction was before Star Wars. After Star Wars, the whole world wanted science fiction and fantasy. For myself, getting involved with the Star Wars trilogy was one of the best experiences in my life. It was better than drugs, and damn near as good as sex. You cannot buy those kinds of experiences.
8
CELEBRATE THE LOVE: RETURN OF THE JEDI
“I’ll never turn to the dark side. You’ve failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
The success of The Empire Strikes Back immediately led to the third installment of the Star Wars saga being put into development. Empire, of course, was conceived with the idea of a follow-up in mind, but when it came to Jedi, virtually every decision was based on the fact that the film had a release date of May 25, 1983, that couldn’t be missed. The necessity was to work backward from the release date. As a result, every choice from hiring a director to writing the final draft of the script revolved around the date the film needed to land in theaters in the summer of 1983.
JONATHAN RINZLER
(author, The Making of Return of the Jedi)
It was really interesting reading the early outlines, pages of notes and then the script [for Return of the Jedi]. There are things I really like about that rough draft that George Lucas wrote, that was before Larry Kasdan was involved. In some ways, it’s better than the final film. There’s a much more exciting battle. Princess Leia is a much more active character, pretty much all of act 1 is devoted to Princess Leia. She’s alone on the Ewok planet and spearheading this Rebel incursion. They need to grab control of two guns—one of the big guns was going to knock out communications to the Death Star, and the other big gun was going to do something to the city planet that was below. There was this whole city planet—Coruscant was in the first draft, it doesn’t make it to the final draft at all—but the Emperor was in some sort of lava lair below the city planet. It’s not called Coruscant, it’s called Had Abbadon.
When Leia’s on the forest moon through act 1, there’s another alien species called the Yuzzum, who are tall with spindly legs. And the Ewoks are short, so it would’ve been this great contrast, Leia having to deal with both of them. She’s the one who spearheads getting the Ewoks on the side of the Rebels. She’s the one on the rocket bikes, what became the speeder bikes; Luke isn’t involved, it’s just her. It would’ve been really cool.
Leia wasn’t involved [with rescuing Han from Jabba]; she stays on the Ewok planet through the whole movie. Luke begins outside on Tatooine and is plotting with the droids on how to rescue Han—but in the early version, Han has already been unfrozen. We don’t see him frozen on-screen. They had unfrozen him, and now they were going to kill him, so there was more of a time-lock too. So they have to go rescue him. There’s more banter between Luke and Han Solo, which is kind of lost in the final film.
And in a way you can kind of see how Leia gets almost shoehorned into the final version—because they never actually say anything to her in the final film. She’s a prisoner, half-naked and chained to this giant slug. When they actually shot that scene, “cut,” and Carrie Fisher said, “Hi guys!,” you realize there must’ve been some dialogue missing, ’cause there’s no recognition on their parts at all that, hey there’s this person you know real well. Because it kind of got shoehorned in from this other part of the story, they didn’t quite visualize what was happening. And on set, Richard Marquand I guess didn’t have enough latitude, or didn’t really care, whatever.
I think the rough draft was George’s “blue skies” version. He did the same thing with the rough draft of Star Wars. He didn’t do that for Empire, but he did it for Star Wars and Jedi. I think if he had all the money in the world, this is what he’d do. I don’t think he ever intended the rough draft of Jedi to be filmed. It’s very interesting to see how it changed in different ways.
RAY MORTON
(senior editor, Script magazine)
The writing of Return of the Jedi was a somewhat protracted process. Lucas generated notes and a preliminary outline prior to the start of preproduction, but it took a long time for him to pen even a rough draft. Preproduction and creature, set, and prop design were begun off of Lucas’s initial outline and proceeded parallel to the writing of the rough draft, with the design work sometimes influencing story development. Some action sequences were originated in storyboards and then written into the script, rather than vice versa as is the usual procedure.
STEPHEN SCARLATA
(cohost, Best Movies Never Made podcast)
There’s also this cool concept in the rough draft where when Luke defeats Vader, Vader falls into the lava, and it’s almost this flashback for him to the Obi-Wan fight, but here Luke saves him from the lava. Something about that I really dug.
JONATHAN RINZLER
The whole battle [between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor] takes place in this lava lair underneath the city. It’s very interesting, it’s almost a four-way battle, where Vader is much more at odds with the Emperor. That’s another reason why I really like the rough draft, because—at the end of the Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader is ruling the universe, the Emperor is an afterthought. “Join me—we’re going to bring down the Emperor.” The rough draft is much more like that. The Emperor and Darth Vader are at each other’s throats. They’re plotting against each other. Whereas when the finished film starts, something has happened off-screen, and Darth Vader is this domesticated Sith. In the rough draft, Vader is trying to convert Luke still, so in the final battle, it’s a battle of wits, to a certain extent, between Vader, Luke, and the Emperor. Finally, the Emperor realizes Vader isn’t going to kill Luke, and Luke isn’t going to kill the Emperor. The Emperor starts unleashing his lightning, and Obi-Wan and Yoda show up, and act as shields for Luke to the lightning. First Obi-Wan shows up, and the Emperor is like, “Eh, I can deal with you, you’re kind of a light-weight.” Then Yoda shows up, and the Emperor is like, “Holy shit!”
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An approach that could be expensive, historically speaking, it proved to be an intelligent approach to write through the preproduction process, allowing early material to guide physical creation.
DALE POLLOCK
(author, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas)
If the success of Star Wars gave Lucas “fuck you” money, Empire just
reinforced his feeling that he was doing the right thing by being outside of Hollywood and doing things himself.
HOWARD KAZANJIAN
(producer, Return of the Jedi)
Some people thought I was crazy to set dates for the different phases before we had a script, but that was the only feasible way to approach a production of this magnitude. As things progressed, naturally there were some changes that had to be made, but the original calendar remained accurate to within a day or two throughout production and postproduction. If you don’t follow a calendar, you’re not following the budget. If you’re a week late starting the mix, it means you have a week more of offices and cutting equipment or whatever. The budget was $32.5 million because of the special effects work done at ILM. It would have cost fifty million if anyone else had tried to make it. You have to think in terms of money all the time. Should we build this set or should we use miniatures or a matte painting? If we just move the vehicles over this way a little bit more, we don’t need that big a set and we can paint that in.
You know, it might cost $20,000 at ILM to composite a blue-screen shot with a matte painting, but it’s going to cost you $28,000 to build a set, money to strike it, and more money to fill it with a bunch of extras. And maybe you’re taking space on the stage that you could use for something else. At one point we were going to move the Millennium Falcon from the big Star Wars stage to another location for a scene, but then I told George it was going to cost $40,000 to move it and he said, “Let ILM paint it in.” So it became a blue-screen shot and I don’t think anyone realizes it’s a painting when they see it in the movie. So that was a way we saved money and that was George’s idea. At the same time, you have to know when to forget about the budget and spend more money on the set or for an actor or on the shooting schedule or on a hundred different areas where you might spend more money. Then you have to look at it and say, “Now where can I save money? If I give an extra $15,000 to a particular actor that wasn’t budgeted, is it possible to save by having twelve less extras in a particular scene?,” or whatever.
JONATHAN RINZLER
One thing you have to remember with Return of the Jedi is, George Lucas was really disappointed with Star Wars. He was not happy with the way Star Wars turned out. It was very disappointing in two very important ways for him: he didn’t get the cantina scene that he wanted, and he didn’t get the attack on the Death Star that he wanted. So in doing Return of the Jedi, at a certain point, he thought, “Now I’ve got the money, now I’ve got the control, I’m going to redo those scenes.” So Jabba’s palace is kind of a redo of the cantina scene, with as many aliens and creatures as he wants, and the Death Star attack—it is pretty cool. ILM did a fantastic job. They took what was kind of a B film and made it into an A film with those visual effects. At the time it was just mind-blowing. The Millennium Falcon flies into the Death Star, you’ve got 150 TIE Fighters coming at you, it was just unbelievable. It really was much, much more of the attack on the original Death Star. As great as that is, Return of the Jedi is much more visually striking.
STEPHEN SCARLATA
The amount of spacecraft during that battle, it was amazing. I saw it at the right age—and it was just mind-blowing how much was coming at me in that theater.
JONATHAN RINZLER
With the first [cantina sequence] Stuart Freeborn got sick, they moved it up in the schedule, they only had seven or eight aliens ready when they shot it at Elstree, and then they did pickups and they didn’t have enough money. Fortunately, Rick Baker came to the rescue with dozens of masks and such, but it was really kind of a hodge-podge thrown together, and mixed together in the editing room, but I think it was immensely frustrating for George.
DALE POLLOCK
Another lesson Lucas learned from Empire is that when it came time to pick a director—because he certainly wasn’t interested in directing—he didn’t want as independent a director as Kershner, so he hires a lower-rank director with Richard Marquand. He made, I believe, one good movie before he did Jedi.
HOWARD KAZANJIAN
We were looking for a director that was rather young, that was flexible, that had not established himself as a great independent filmmaker, that would follow the tradition of Star Wars, that would let George be as closely attached as he likes to be on these projects. We wanted someone who believed in Star Wars, who really believed that Wookiees and Darth Vader exist and who was a fast-thinking director capable of making a decision and moving on if something wasn’t working.
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Richard Marquand was born in Cardiff, Wales, on September 22, 1937, to Rachel and Hilary Marquand. His father, Hilary, was a Labour Party member of Parliament, and his older brother, David, would also later become an MP to the Labour Party. Richard Marquand was educated at Emanuel School, London, the University of Aix in Aix-en-Provence, France, and King’s College, Cambridge. During National Service he studied Mandarin and was posted to Hong Kong, where he also read the news on the English-language Hong Kong Television. By the late 1960s, Marquand had begun directing documentary films for the BBC, such as 1972’s Search for the Nile. Later, Marquand would utilize those lessons from documentary filmmaking in the 1979 TV movie Birth of the Beatles about the early days of the Fab Four. His first dramatic fictional feature was the Donald Sutherland thriller Eye of the Needle, which earned him enough acclaim to attract the attention of George Lucas, as Lucas was looking for a director for his second Star Wars sequel.
RICHARD MARQUAND
(director, Return of the Jedi)
When I went to see Star Wars, I was completely bowled over by the experience, by the mythological storyline as well as the incredible creations in the story and the way it was technically made. I had never seen anything like it as an emotional human being or as a moviemaker. I felt an enormous surge of pleasure when I discovered there was going to be another one; it was as though a group of long-lost members of my family had phoned to say they were stopping by the house. I believe in the Force and I believe in Luke Skywalker. I absolutely take the myth seriously. I believe in the same way as I believe in the story of Arthur and the Round Table or in the stories of Robin Hood. You don’t approach this type of movie, or indeed any movie, with cynicism, because if you do, you’re dead. You can see it on the screen: you can smell the cynical director. And if you can tell it in any movie, then you can certainly tell it in Star Wars, which is a movie about innocence. I’m constantly being told by friends that I’m an innocent. I take people at face value and then it turns out they’re crooks. It happens to me all the time, but I just think that’s the only way you can get through life, actually, by being starry-eyed. I wear rose-colored spectacles.
And I don’t think it would have been possible for me to do what I did on Jedi for two and a half years of my life so intensely without being a total fan. Now when I say “total fan,” I don’t say I’m the type of person represented by other total fans. I don’t put myself in that category. I couldn’t indulge to that extent. I like the films and stories as they exist on the screen. I don’t need to take it further than that.
BRIAN JAY JONES
(author, George Lucas: A Life)
You read the quotes from Richard Marquand and he’s a fanboy. It’s like if J.J. Abrams came to me and he’s like, “Do you want to direct the movie?” I’d be like, “Yes, please.” Like, I’d do whatever they asked and that’s why I could kind of sense from Richard Marquand that he was just so excited to be there that he was going to do whatever Lucas wanted.
RICHARD MARQUAND
I fit the bill in that it seemed like they were looking for a younger man who has a great deal of experience, can work hard and fast, make up his mind and stick to it, and run a crew very quickly. I knew then what George was searching for was not the old-school movie director who would wait for the weather to get the shot he wanted. He wanted someone who could improvise, think on his feet. And he was in London doing the music for Raiders of the Lost Ark at the time and it was a very conve
nient moment for him to come see what was then a rough cut of my Eye of the Needle. His people called my cutting room and asked if I would screen it for him. I said, “By all means.” At that stage, you don’t particularly want to show your movie because it’s still in a very embryonic stage, but I thought he was a moviemaker who I admire, so let’s show it to him. And I was proud of Eye of the Needle. I felt I had achieved for the most part what I wanted to achieve.
GEORGE LUCAS
One of the most important things is to create an emotion in the audience. The movie can be funny, sad, or scary, but there has to be an emotion. It has to make you feel good or laugh or jump out of your seat.
BRIAN JAY JONES
Return of the Jedi was also when Gary Kurtz was like, “I’m done. We did the Death Star once. I’m not doing that again.”
GARY KURTZ
(producer, The Empire Strikes Back)
I’m not making a sequel unless the script is good, and I approached it from the premise that it’s got to be as good or even better than the original.