Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  What was most interesting was to try and get hold of the satanic side in a broad, simple way that is the easiest way to get hold of it. I thought, “My task is to go one step beyond Vader, and see how black and uncompromising I can be.” The script was there, of course; a very tight, very good script by Larry Kasdan and George. You wouldn’t have wanted to change the script. And the film’s scheduling was so precise that there wasn’t too much leeway. But within that, I had complete freedom to create the character. I found the voice, which was keeping of my own, and this slightly humorous interpretation, that I was encouraged to go to now and again.

  The first scene we shot was the hangar, where I come down a ramp to meet Vader. That’s one of the biggest studios in Europe, and I hadn’t been in it before. A friend of mine, Michael Pennington, who plays one of Vader’s lieutenants, was there. I walked into this room, in makeup for the first time, my eyes slightly hurting, and trying very hard to adjust to what was happening. I saw what looked like three thousand people—I don’t know how many there were, but they weren’t painted on!—and I said to Michael, who was standing next to Vader, “You didn’t tell me. I thought it was going to be a quiet party just for the three of us!” But it was an extraordinary first day on a movie. Doing it was a fantasy for me. As a kid, I had always wanted to play villains, they’re always the most interesting characters. But I never imagined I would play one of the greatest villains of all time.

  * * *

  McDiarmid leaned on producer George Lucas for a better grasp of the character, which helped him craft the role, but never really put too much thought into it. In a way, he wasn’t much more than Snow White’s Evil Witch with his robe, chilling laugh, and crooked teeth.

  IAN MCDIARMID

  I didn’t come up with much of a backstory, as I recall. I remember joking with George about Palpatine. Richard Marquand directed Jedi, but George was around a lot. And he actually directed the sequence in which Darth Vader threw the Emperor down the hole. I got a chance to spend some time with George then, and I said, “I know how this guy started out. He had a very trying English public school education.” George laughed very loudly. He thought it was a good joke. Of course, it has nothing to do with Palpatine’s history. In fact, that was probably the nearest I came to speculating about how Palpatine turned into this terrible creature. So, I had no idea. I just played him as the oldest, most evil figure in the galaxy.

  In some ways, it was very easy to do that, because all the apparatus was right there for me. In Jedi, we had this throne room and that great swiveling chair. There was a large expanse of studio. And I had those wonderful robes. It all made me imagine Richard Nixon in the Oval Office. Also, I had tunnel vision because of the contact lenses. Tunnel vision is probably a good thing to have if you’re playing an Emperor. So, I could only see straight ahead. As a result, people had to help me around a lot. I used that, as an actor, to play the old man’s frailty in the physical sense. We knew that he was frail, but he still had a laser-like mind.

  * * *

  Production of Jedi was plagued by a number of problems, best described by American Cinematographer magazine: “There were problems with the operation of the creatures as well as the robots. There were complications and delays caused by the fact that a set for the Ewok village was twenty feet above the stage floor. There were problems with the special effects device designed to enable Boba Fett to shoot a rope from his arm to ensnare Luke. There were even problems with the perforations in 100,000 feet of raw stock which did not meet ILM’s specifications for special effects photography.”

  These problems were nonetheless manageable. Special effects devices for Boba Fett were replaced with simple monofilament and a camera running in reverse. Rather than rely on a French plan, raw stock was obtained by an American manufacturer, and delays involving the Ewok village and Jabba’s followers were obtained through additional second unit work and adjustments in scheduling. Despite everything, things wrapped on schedule, with the production’s focus switching to special effects and the nine hundred shots required by ILM.

  Visual effects of Return of the Jedi were shown off in several scenes in particular, among them Luke’s battle with Jabba’s Rancor beast, the high-speed chase on speeder bikes involving our heroes and stormtroopers on the moon of Endor, the Empire’s AT-STs on Endor, and the Rebel Alliance’s assault on the Death Star II.

  RICHARD EDLUND

  (visual effects, Return of the Jedi)

  This show was more of a refinement of the things we’ve been doing than a great deal of new invention. Star Wars was the initial invention period where we put the whole system together in basic terms, utilizing new electronics, making motion control available to a large production where a lot of elements and a lot of material can be shot in a reliable way, day after day, to produce the complex battles and other effects. In Empire, it was phase two of equipment development and refining of techniques so that the shots outshone those in Star Wars to a large extent, because everyone had had more time to learn how to play the instrument, so to speak. The cameras and printers were built so that we could get great quality on the screen and achieve parity with the original photography, so that when we cut to an effects shot you don’t suddenly see something that’s grainy and makes you wonder what’s going to happen now—a problem with effects over the decades. The idea of using the larger format and being able to reduce and composite without generation loss so that we don’t have a drop in quality when we go to an optical was the basic reason for building the printer. The techniques of stop-motion also achieved a good state here. There’s really some great stuff in Empire, but the stop-motion in this picture has gone beyond that because now we had Dragonslayer under our collective belt, and it was some of the best that’s been done.

  Time really determined how we operated. Almost all of the elements you saw in Jedi are take-ones, because we had less time than we would like to have had. We were just finishing three big pictures: Dennis Muren had E.T., Ken Ralston had Star Trek II, and I was still shooting Poltergeist. The pictures backed up on one another and nobody had time for much of a breather between pictures. Though we were short on time, we were long on experience and we have an excellent group of camera people who know what they’re doing. When we’d see a shot in the dailies, we’d just make sure it didn’t have any scratches or digs or technical problems that meant it couldn’t be used, because we knew it had to be used to get the show done.

  RON MAGID

  (journalist, visual effects historian)

  Edlund believes that achieving conviction had a lot to do with the proper editing of effects. In Star Wars the visual photographic effects don’t exceed fourteen moments, and Empire only went up about six minutes from there.

  RICHARD EDLUND

  George has a way of putting them in at the right points so that the impression is that they’re always there. They’re not; they’re in the right places for just the right amount of time, because he has a gift for knowing how long to leave a shot on the screen before you start seeing the seams. Any visual effect, if left on the screen for a long period of time, will give itself away. What we go after is an impression, and often that impression can be achieved in less than a second. Jedi has at least a hundred more effects shots than Empire.

  * * *

  During production, one of the challenges facing the film was actually keeping plot points under wraps, not easy when it came to certain actors—most notably David Prowse, returning in the Darth Vader costume, who had a well-documented penchant for giving in to the lure of publicity.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  The actors who needed to know, knew well in advance of shooting what was going to happen. They had their scripts. Any actors who we felt were security risks were given other [fake] scripts. There was one particular actor who gave an interview to the English press about the movie’s plot, which extremely upset us. But we knew that actor was a security risk and had actually not given him the correct lines of dialogue. He fell com
pletely into the trap. And there he was, having lunch with the English press one day. The next morning, the paper came out, having printed all this totally misleading information. Howard Kazanjian called the actor into his office for a talk, explaining that there were certain secrets which must be kept in order for the story to remain “fresh.” We were very disappointed he did it. He was very apologetic and said that he was a very weak man. When the press phoned him, he found it very hard to turn them down.

  ANTHONY DANIELS

  (actor, “C-3PO”)

  I dozed off and woke up hearing Carrie say, “He’s my brother.” I thought I’d better keep still, because they would kill me. Although you get the script, there are always pages that they don’t want anyone to see because then there would be certain problems with the actors or people in the cast telling things to the press. This is stupid and something no professional should do. So, they worked on a “need-to-know” basis. I didn’t need to know that information. Generally, I had an idea of what was going on, but I didn’t think about it. I was kind of amused they were brother and sister, just as in years to come after that when George told me I was made by their father.

  ERIC TOWNSEND

  Filming began on Return of the Jedi on January 11, 1982, on nine stages at Elstree Studios in London. In order to throw fans and media off the track, the project was given the working title of Blue Harvest: Horror Beyond Imagination during production. The first scene shot was a later deleted sandstorm segment. As soon as Marquand yelled “action,” the problems with the malfunctioning R2-D2 started all over again. After three days, the scene was completed. What’s funny is that when actor Dermot Crowley arrived on set to play the role of General Crix Madine, the crew handed him a fake beard. Kenner had already begun production on action figures based on his character and the toy had a beard. So, Crowley had to wear a beard to match the toy.

  DALE POLLOCK

  Return of the Jedi feels almost like a merchandise-driven film. I mean, they had high hopes for the Ewoks TV series and they were really going to market the hell out of the Ewoks, because they figured it would bring along the younger Star Wars fans. It gives them a character they could relate to, because it looked like a teddy bear. On top of that, the film felt like the weakest film of the trilogy. It begins to feel repetitive, which is why I think Lucas jumped backward in time to do the prequels. He didn’t want to face where he had to go with the current trilogy. It was easier for him to go back.

  WARWICK DAVIS

  (actor, “Wicket,” Return of the Jedi)

  The Ewoks, if you look in the designs and how they were developed, were initially very strange, very primitive looking. Eventually, they ended up being very cuddly and very cute. I think that was a very deliberate decision by George to do that, because it really helped bring children into the movie. The adults and the fans already had something to look at.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  Toys are definitely on his mind with Return of the Jedi. I mean, Harrison Ford has that great moment where he’s telling Lucas that he needs to let Han die, and Lucas says, “There’s no money in Dead Han toys.” I don’t want to call it the lowest common denominator, and I’m speculating a little bit here, but I think he remembers where he really made his money on the first Star Wars was merchandising. Merchandising is what built Skywalker Ranch. Merchandising is what built Lucasfilm. I said at one point in the book, that the entire empire is built on three-and-three-quarter-inch action figures. So I think at that point he’s hyperaware of it to the detriment of the story. With the Ewoks, it’s conscious effort to cater to the toy industry, which is why there’s more ships coming out at that time and things like that. Another great story is the guy from Kenner talking about things that are toyetic and talking to Lucas about ideas. And then going to talk with Steven Spielberg about Close Encounters and Spielberg is showing them all the things that they’re doing in Close Encounters and the guy goes, “This isn’t really toyetic. It’s no Star Wars.”

  I remember there was a great cartoon in MAD magazine that said, “E.T. in the theater was cute. E.T. all over your home was not.” It’s like Spielberg didn’t quite have the knack for merchandising that Lucas did. Lucas, like Jim Henson, was incredibly protective and hands-on, almost to a fault, on merchandise. They wanted to see everything, to sign off on it, approve it and make sure they weren’t putting out junk. Lucas sort of maintained that through the original Star Wars, whereas Spielberg, I’m guessing, was more lenient, so bad decisions were made on things. Lucas never really did that. Lucas at one point said one of the reasons he merchandised is because he wanted the R2-D2 cookie jar. Lucas likes toys, he’s aware of the power of merchandising.

  MARK HAMILL

  I’m convinced that if George had signed for a three-picture deal, he might have saved the Death Star for the third picture. But he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to do all three, so he sort of blew it all out on the first one. How in the world were we going to top that? It’s not so much a matter of copying it in Return of the Jedi, it’s finding new ways to thrill people.

  RICHARD MARQUAND

  I think Return of the Jedi is an extremely unusual film. I don’t think there had ever been a movie quite like that one before. It’s big in scope, big in dimension, big in the extraordinary multiplicity of the characters. It’s just amazing; a huge, huge movie that’s like Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back rolled into one. It’s not a cartoon serial. For me, it’s more akin to an agnostic religious experience.

  RAY MORTON

  The script for Return of the Jedi disappoints on a number of fronts. For starters, it does a poor job of tying up Empire’s loose ends. In Episode V, much emphasis is put on the need for Luke to complete his Jedi training and on the fact that—because he has not completed his training—Luke is not yet a Jedi. However, when Luke first appears in the third film, he looks and acts like a full-fledged Jedi (e.g., using the Jedi mind trick on Bib Fortuna) and even identifies himself to Jabba as being one. This suggests he has completed his training. However, after Han is rescued, Luke returns to Dagobah to complete his training, which suggests he has not completed his training. But then Yoda—the one who was constantly telling Luke he needed to complete his training—tells him that he doesn’t need any more training after all. But then a few minutes later, Yoda scolds Luke for not completing his training. It’s all very confusing and it’s never clear exactly where on the road to becoming a Jedi Luke actually is.

  IAN MCDIARMID

  I’ve heard that fans consider Return of the Jedi to be the weakest of the three movies. At the time I was working, however, I couldn’t have told you that. I filmed my scenes in three weeks in total secrecy, as everyone else did. I knew that Palpatine was a very powerful person and I obviously knew a little bit of what was ultimately going to happen between Vader and Luke. But I didn’t know all of it. I didn’t know, for example, the tremendous revelation at the film’s end. I didn’t know that Sebastian Shaw would be in the film as the dying Darth Vader until I saw him at the studio while I was getting my makeup on. I knew Sebastian for years. We had worked together at the Royal Shakespeare Company and so on. He was a delightful man. I said, “Sebastian, what are you doing here?” And he said, “I don’t know, dear boy. I think it’s something to do with science fiction.” I thought that was a very good line and I considered using it myself when people asked me the plot of The Phantom Menace. Sebastian was in a state of blissful ignorance. Most of us knew at least a little bit about what we were doing.

  MARK HAMILL

  During Star Wars, I was in a white floppy rag doll outfit. Then for The Empire Strikes Back, I wore a militaristic-looking khaki-colored costume. In Jedi, I wear the black uniform of a trained Jedi. But the question is: What kind of Jedi? Is he a wizard, a religious figure, or just a glutton for punishment?

  RAY MORTON

  Much of this confusion is due to the fact that in Lucas’s early outlines and script drafts, Luke had returned to Dagobah and completed his
training in between Empire and Jedi, so when he entered at the top of Episode VI he already was fully trained. At this point, he was then told that the only thing left for him to do to become a Jedi was to kill Vader, although why this is necessary is never made clear (do all Jedi have to kill a Sith in order to be let into the club? Seems like a pretty dark entry bar). In the final draft, Luke has not completed his training but apparently Lucas did not want to drop all the cool stuff (and it is pretty cool) where Luke acts like a Jedi, so I guess we’re just supposed to assume that eager student Luke is just showing off with some of the tricks he learned before he quit his training. But then why does he still identify himself as a Jedi? Like I said, it’s confusing.