Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Lucas had told Kershner, “You make the movie and I’ll leave you alone,” and then of course he didn’t. I think he intended to do the same thing with Richard Marquand, but he liked the fact that this guy came from TV, because the lesson he had learned from Kershner is everything was taking too long and he was burning up his money. Coming from TV, Marquand was used to keeping it snappy and quick, but, more than anything, he would actually listen to Lucas. I don’t think Marquand was a bad decision, but he’s definitely a very different kind of director.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  When we met, I felt extremely comfortable. It was one filmmaker talking to another filmmaker. It was very good. We talked about our films and how we dealt with certain problems. It was not in any sense an interview or the kind of thing that happened in Hollywood where you must put on a tremendous performance to impress somebody. Then came a series of different meetings during which I supplied Howard Kazanjian with films of mine and also began to be aware of the other names on the list. There were many names. And the number slowly whittled down until it was just me and an American director. At that point, I realized that I must get this job, because I really cared about it.

  I told George that, if I was going to direct this adequately, I would need loyalty and support in the areas that were new to me. In a way, being the director of a film of this size is rather like being the president of the Ford Motor Company. You don’t necessarily have to know how to weld a car door, but you must make damn sure the guy who is doing it for you is someone you know, that you know his skills and that he’ll do a good job. If you are the director, you are really the man who says what goes. There are always stories in the movie industry about directors getting pushed around by producers, but all those producers are people who really don’t understand how movies get made. You can only really have one person doing that job. The good thing about George Lucas is he knows that fact. All you can do is tell the story your way. The best way that you can.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Being on set, you could see that he was so subservient to Lucas that it wasn’t really a Richard Marquand film, but it was a sort of George Lucas film through another director and that’s when I think Lucas decided, “I’m going to do the prequels by myself.” He’s also the same guy who told me he hated the process of being on set twelve hours a day and having to communicate with everybody. He would actually say, “People keep coming up to me and asking questions.” So I think he just had to really swallow hard and say, “You know what? I’m not using other directors. I’m going to do the prequels myself.”

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  I must say, I like the way George made Star Wars, the way he set it up and did it was extremely clever. He made it seem to have a very simple surface, but, in fact, it had a very dense, complex background to it. I preferred that surface naïveté to the much more sophisticated way Kershner told his story. His style very much suited the rather more dark, metallic second section of the saga. I think this third segment has a different kind of glow and flavor to it. But I tried to make it simple, because the textures in Jedi are so very complex. There’s a world of new people and some of them are incredibly difficult to appreciate at first meeting.

  IRVIN KERSHNER

  (director, The Empire Strikes Back)

  Let me tell you: after seeing the third one, I was kind of sorry I didn’t do it. It didn’t hold together. It flew off in all directions and I felt the continuity was disruptive. It would move in one direction and then it would skip in time as if they had cut sections out. I don’t know what really happened, because I never even read the script, but it didn’t seem to follow a logical dramatic progression. There were jumps, cuts, jumps, cuts. They got out of situations in kind of miraculous ways, which I didn’t like.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  I like the way George made the three movies that he actually directed. He’s a very deceptively simple stylist. His movies have a look of ease about them, and I now can say with truth it’s very difficult to be that simple. It’s surprisingly complex, but looks easy. That’s part of what makes Star Wars so available to children, and I wanted to go back to that sort of presentation in Jedi rather than the highly sophisticated, sexy way in which Kershner made Empire, which I enjoyed—I thought it looked like an incredible, glossy, glorious sort of machine—but I prefer the other way.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  The truth of it is, that the third one is much more like the first one than the second one is. It’s just the nature of the story, the way it is laid out.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  Having George Lucas as executive producer is like directing King Lear with Shakespeare in the next room. Kershner told his story. His style very much suited this rather more dark, metallic second section of the saga. The actual Star Wars saga from chapters one through nine is a total symphony, if you like, though it’s actually just a movie. I wasn’t making a sequel, I was doing the third movement of a piece of music. I also don’t see it as a science fiction film. Many people get completely carried away by the superficial, the science fiction aspect of the movie. That’s like being completely enthralled with the frame around a Picasso. Science fiction is not really what it’s about. It happens to be set in that world, because that’s where the saga works best. I don’t want to get pompous here, but Jedi does set up some echoes in your mind and in your heart. It deals with life and death of man, which is very important stuff.

  * * *

  To capture that sentiment, Marquand made the decision to often keep the camera stationary rather than moving it around, even with technology paving the way for Steadicam and Laumas Crane shots in the early eighties. He preferred to film the movie in a much more static fashion.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  You can cover a multitude of sins by doing some wonderful crane shot that turns into a tracking shot, but it’s like the tendency to say that the music will sort out a problem. I’d rather solve the problem in the stage of interpretation of the scene itself. It’s really exciting when you can get it right in a medium shot without doing anything with the camera. I like it when the camera doesn’t move. I try to keep it as simple as possible. I believe I was chosen to direct Jedi because I do have a cinematic eye. I don’t shoot what I call movies for the blind. Also helping was my background in documentaries—by documentary films, I mean films about real people, where you follow them around with a handheld camera and really get inside their lives. I don’t mean reportage or newsreel stuff. You see how people behave, you watch them when you’re not filming them and you become very aware of what reality really is—the rough stuff of life, not the well-honed performances.

  * * *

  While these elements were being brought together, Lucas began the “rough stuff” of screenwriting. Between February 20 and June 12, 1981, he turned out three rough drafts of the movie. Doing so, he knew there were several things he had to achieve, most notably completing Luke’s journey from farm boy to Jedi Knight. He also had to resolve the conflict between the Rebels and the Empire, and he had to tie up loose ends left hanging in Empire, including answering the question as to whether or not Darth Vader was really Luke’s father.

  RAY MORTON

  To accomplish all this, Lucas wrote the initial outlines and a rough draft of the screenplay, then brought Lawrence Kasdan in to pen another draft. Lucas did a cut-and-paste revision of Kasdan’s draft, after which Kasdan did a polish. Lucas did the final revisions himself. For me and many others, the result was a significant disappointment. The main reason I found the screenplay for what was originally called Revenge of the Jedi, but was ultimately renamed Return of the Jedi, disappointing was the way it dealt with the material that should have been its main storyline.

  * * *

  As developed over the course of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, the primary narrative of the trilogy was about Luke Skywalker and his adventures on the path to becoming a Jedi. Empire brought that narrative to a crisis point and
left Luke seemingly on the verge of turning to the dark side of the Force. At the conclusion of Episode V, audiences were left with the expectation that the third film would pick up Luke’s story at that crisis point and then tell the rest of his tale. Extrapolating logically from the narrative elements established in the previous two films, the expectation was that Luke would indeed turn to the dark side and then fight his way back to the light in time to defeat Vader and the Emperor (this is certainly what Mark Hamill assumed would and wanted to happen). The final draft of the screenplay for Return of the Jedi did indeed include this material, but rather than make it the film’s primary narrative, it instead compressed it all into a relatively brief segment in the movie’s third act.

  MARK HAMILL

  (actor, “Luke Skywalker”)

  I don’t think this chapter confounded and confused people. It’s the logical resolution to what had gone before. It’s very traditional storytelling. It’s not meant to have an O. Henry type of twist. The trilogy is structured as a fairy tale set to a classical three-act play. Star Wars was act 1. It introduced the characters. The Empire Strikes Back was act 2. It developed the characters and gave them problems, with tragic overtones. Jedi is act 3. It’s the big finish, and everything is brought to an end.

  * * *

  The storyline is set up with two scenes at the end of act 1, where Luke learns Vader is in fact his father, and the only way for the rebellion and “goodness” to win this conflict, according to Obi-Wan and Yoda, is for Luke to kill his father and the Emperor. Later, the third act begins when Vader brings Luke before the Emperor, who sets Luke on the path to the dark side by encouraging Luke to attack him. At this point Vader intervenes to save the Emperor and he and Luke begin another lightsaber duel. During this fight, Luke tries to convince Vader to turn away from the dark side, and in response, the Sith Lord pushes Luke to turn to the dark side by threatening Leia. Enraged, Luke finally gives in to his hate and uses his aggression to beat Vader back, knocking him to the ground, and then hacks off his mechanical hand. Luke is on the verge of actually killing Vader when he realizes what he’s become. At this point, Luke makes a conscious decision to rebuff the dark side, a decision which nearly costs him his life. It is only when Luke is near death at the hands of the Emperor that Vader himself turns away from the dark side, and kills the Emperor to save his son.

  RAY MORTON

  While we are pleased to see Luke’s story concluded so definitively, it is disappointing that it has been disposed of so quickly. What should have been an entire feature film’s worth of drama is crammed into just a few minutes of screen time. They are a very good few minutes—the best, most dramatic, and most satisfying in all of Jedi—but the sequence still feels abrupt and truncated and leaves us wishing much more had been done with this very fertile material and that Luke had been allowed to complete his arc in a much more extended and developed fashion. The other major story component Jedi needed to address was the truth about Darth Vader: was he indeed Luke’s father and, if so, what Luke would do about it—would he kill Vader, join him, or find a way to redeem him? The screenplay for Jedi did incorporate this material, but once again compressed most of it into a short segment in the third act.

  At the top of Jedi’s second act, Yoda confirms that Vader is Luke’s father. Following two brief scenes also in act 2—one with the Emperor and the other with Luke—that suggest Vader has become ambivalent about his commitment to the dark side, the Sith Lord’s actual return to the light is set in motion when the Emperor—furious at Luke for refusing to kill Vader—attempts to slay Luke by shooting him with lightning. At this point Vader decides he loves his son too much to let him die and so kills the Emperor by tossing him into the Death Star II’s reactor, which causes the evil ruler to explode. The blowback from the explosion mortally wounds Vader. The now-dying former Sith Lord asks Luke to remove his helmet, revealing the scarred old man beneath the monster. Thanking his son for believing in his inherent goodness, the once and future Anakin Skywalker dies.

  * * *

  This exciting and effective sequence is another of Jedi’s dramatic highlights. The reason Lucas chose to compress these two important narrative elements and consign them to Jedi’s third act was to make room for an idea repurposed from his first draft screenplay for Star Wars.

  RAY MORTON

  In [the] early script [for the original Star Wars], the Rebels land on a planet populated by primitive Wookiees and eventually enlist the furry giants to help them in their fight against the Empire. Because Chewbacca had been developed to be an advanced, sophisticated creature, Lucas needed to come up with a new race of primitives [for Return of the Jedi]. Since Wookiees were giants, Lucas decided to shrink them down, turn their name on its side, and change the jungle planet to a forest moon and thus were born the Ewoks. The Wookiees help the Rebels by training to be space fighter pilots and then taking part in the climactic aerial raid on the Death Star. Lucas decided to retain the final attack on the Death Star, even though he had already used it in Star Wars. However—perhaps because the idea of training primitive creatures to fly spaceships may have seemed too outlandish—he decided to have a separate squadron of Rebels attack the giant battle station. The Ewoks would assist the rebels in a ground assault, using their primitive traps and weapons to defeat Imperial forces stationed on their sylvan home.

  * * *

  In the final Jedi screenplay, Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, and the droids land on the forest moon of Endor on a mission to disable a generator that projects a protective force field around a still-under-construction Death Star II, but the Emperor is well aware of their plans and intends to capture Luke. What the Emperor doesn’t foresee is the aid of the furry Ewoks in helping the Rebels defeat the garrison of stormtroopers on the forest moon, allowing the Rebels to destroy the shield generator and attack the now vulnerable Death Star.

  RAY MORTON

  The seed of this sequence grew out of the research Lucas had done on the Vietnam War for Apocalypse Now (Lucas was the original director of that film before Francis Ford Coppola directed it himself many years later). Impressed by the way the Viet Cong—equipped with relatively simple and even primitive weapons—had defeated the far-better-equipped army of the United States through sheer tenacity and commitment, Lucas incorporated the notion of a primitive society vanquishing the technologically superior Empire using the same spirit and dedication into his space opera. However, as the narrative for the original film developed, Lucas replaced the primitive culture with a spiritual one—in the final script and movie the overwhelming technology of the Empire was defeated by the mystical power of the Force rather than the power of primitive tenacity. However, Lucas was still enamored by the notion of a stone-age culture using rocks and sticks to defeat a technological giant and so decided to resurrect it for Jedi.

  The problem was that the idea didn’t fit into the trilogy’s overall narrative as it had been developed through the first two movies. When Lucas wrote his first draft of Star Wars, he was crafting a single, stand-alone movie that could well have been focused on a “primitives versus technology” theme. Eight years later, however, the narrative of the trilogy had evolved into a tale about fathers and sons, the potential for both good and evil contained within each of us, and the power of destiny. A “sticks versus lasers” storyline was both thematically and plot-wise irrelevant to the trilogy’s overarching narrative, and there was no way to incorporate it into that narrative without shoving the tale’s primary elements to the side, which is what Lucas essentially did. Unfortunately, he didn’t find a way to make the Ewok material pertinent to the main storyline. Although the Endor sequence is well structured and contains a number of entertaining elements (the speeder bike chase, the Ewoks worshipping C-3PO, the climactic battle, etc.), the only element in the entire segment relevant to the trilogy’s main plotline is the destruction of the shield generator. The rest of the material is essentially just filler and so during all the scenes featuring the Ewoks the movie
tends to feel as if it’s just spinning its wheels.

  * * *

  After the hiring of Richard Marquand, Lawrence Kasdan—who, following the scripting of Empire, had written Raiders of the Lost Ark—was brought back as screenwriter. At that point, he, Lucas, Kazanjian, and Marquand met in San Francisco to talk about and further develop the story over the course of a couple of weeks.

  HOWARD KAZANJIAN

  For five days George, Larry Kasdan, and myself sat in story conference meetings where George laid out the plot. Larry asked most of the questions. We all made suggestions. There were several drafts delivered both by Larry and George and by George and I, and one time Marcia Lucas discussed what worked and what did not. I will tell you now that Darth Vader never was to appear at the end in ghost appearance with Yoda and Ben. Two days before we shot that scene I suggested that Vader be there as well. George didn’t answer, but just looked at me. The next day George told me to prepare to shoot Vader with Yoda and Ben. Later that day I had second thoughts about what I had suggested. After all, two good guys were standing next to a very bad guy. But in the end, there was redemption on Vader’s part, and forgiveness on Luke’s. It worked, and I am still very pleased with my suggestion.