by Edward Gross
In a strange way, the seeds for the Special Editions were being planted shortly after Lucas had completed work on the original Star Wars trilogy. It was at that point that he established the Lucasfilm computer graphics division, though its intent was originally very different than creating virtually anything you could imagine.
GEORGE LUCAS
I put together the computer division in 1978 or ’79 to develop a nonlinear editing system, a laser printer, and a more efficient rendering technology. We were able to do all of that, which allowed us to actually begin using computers to do 3D animation, rather than just wireframes, which was the level of the technology then. We were trying to develop an efficient system for getting the images in and out of the digital domain, as well as technology to manipulate the images once we got them into the digital domain, and a postsystem that would allow us to edit everything together and tell the story. We were basically trying to digitize the entire process. I don’t know that I had a complete idea of the level at which things would shift. You take one step at a time. I knew that the editing process and the postprocess were very antiquated and cumbersome, and that doing it electronically was much easier.
DENNIS MUREN
(visual effects supervisor, Star Wars Special Editions)
The Star Wars stuff was state of the art then, but by the 1990s it was looking a little shaky. George said on Star Wars that we achieved 30 percent of what we really wanted to do and I’m not sure we even achieved 30 percent. Looking at it, the film had the same kind of funkiness that time has given our perception of King Kong.
GEORGE LUCAS
You know, if you go back and you check the interviews of when I made the movie, and everybody said, “Oh, this is so…,” I said, “Well, it didn’t turn out very well. It’s only about 40 percent of what I wanted it to be. I’m really disappointed in it.” In every interview, relentlessly, right through the thing.
DENNIS MUREN
I remember first hearing that they were going to rerelease the movies in anticipation of the new series of films. A few weeks later, I heard that George was going to add some scenes that he had always wanted to do, and fix some things up. I felt we could improve the matte edges on some shots that had been done at the last minute—particularly those involving explosions. But there were also a number of shots in the space battle where the movements just weren’t right. If we could smooth them out, the action would have more clarity, and viewers would also be able to follow the movie a little better. I suggested digitally redoing shots in which the models were moving incorrectly.
RICK MCCALLUM
(producer, Star Wars Special Editions)
On Young Indy, we wanted to set a template for a way to make features, and with the Special Editions we were applying that template to the existing Star Wars trilogy and the prequels. For the redo, we didn’t change anything more or less than what George wanted. There have been special editions of other films that directors have gone back to, to restore the cut the studio took away from them, but nobody’s ever gone back to reshoot and augment those things that they clearly saw, but couldn’t achieve at the time. It’s such a romantic vision.
BRIAN JAY JONES
(author, George Lucas: A Life)
From a fan perspective, I’ve never really been happy with the Special Editions. But then I’m going to walk that back a little bit, because I remember sitting in the theater watching the original Star Wars and loved it. But the problem with Lucas is he can never leave well enough alone. He has to go back and screw with it again and again and again. He just keeps doing that with these movies. So from a professional standpoint, it’s brilliant, because what Lucas is doing is he’s sending out his new digital technology on a test run in a movie that he knows isn’t going to lose any money.
JEANINE BASINGER
(film historian, founder and curator of the Cinema Archives of Wesleyan University)
People tend to want directors to make the same movie again and again. Like if Hitchcock tried something different, they were always mad at him. I always say, let them play and experiment and we may get something better. But here, it didn’t make things better. I want my movie experience, I’m not interested in the new director’s cut, except intellectually. I want to go to see my movie that I saw when I saw my movie. I once had an experience with Frank Capra when I was showing Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to my class and was projecting for myself in the booth. He came in during the scene where Jimmy Stewart’s finding the letters, one of the great scenes of American movie history, right? And he goes up to the window in the booth there and he starts talking to himself, muttering and stamping his feet and getting mad. I mean, I could see him getting mad and I was like, “Have I not got it in focus?” I asked him what it was, and he said, “I never should have cut that way, I should have done it this way…,” and he was already remaking the movie in his head. One of the great movies and a great scene, but now he’s seeing a different way to do it. But should you remake them? I think you should just let them be. I respect George Lucas; let him do what he wants with his own movie. But you know what? I’d rather have my movie.
DALE POLLOCK
(author, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas)
What artist goes back and continually alters their work? Who does this to their movies? And in his mind, he would keep doing that as long as he felt like it, because they were his work. This was really kind of his degree of selfish proprietor. It’s like, “This is one of my films. I paid for it. I earned the money for it. I could do what I want with it. And if I want to keep changing it, I’ll keep changing it.” What work of art has been finished, released, and then starts getting altered? No novelist does that with their book. No painter does that with their painting. Beethoven doesn’t say, “You know, I’m pulling that back and changing it.” And the more people were outraged, I think in a perverse way the more he enjoyed it.
PETER HOLMSTROM
“Art is never completed, just abandoned.” Plenty of novelists, painters, musicians, etc. go back and alter their work through the years, always in search of perfection. Frank Herbert’s Dune added a whole chapter when it was first published in novel form; the alterations to Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Chronicles of Narnia are well documented; A Room with a View added a whole nihilistic ending as the author aged; Da Vinci is said to have wandered the countryside and touched up his work up until his death. And how about the Bible? Filmmaking is different, because artists aren’t given complete control over their work. Investors control the art, not the artist. George Lucas didn’t have that problem. So I applaud him for creating his final cuts. And you know what? When you really dissect the motivations for those changes down—they come from a place of story. He creates an active ticking clock for Han Solo with the Jabba the Hutt scene, he populates Mos Eisley to justify the very populated cantina and create a firm start to act 2—literally, “entering the larger world.” He turns Cloud City into an actual city in the clouds as opposed to the underground bunker it was before, and fills out the world with the end celebration in Jedi.
GEORGE LUCAS
Special effects don’t make a movie. The story makes the movie. And all the special effects do is allow you to tell a particular story.
TOM KENNEDY
(visual effects producer, Star Wars Special Editions)
George had said, “As long as we’re going to rerelease Star Wars, I always wanted to redo the shots in Mos Eisley, because we had this one shoot in this little town and it just wasn’t big enough.” So we went back initially to redo Mos Eisley and then we decided to do one matte painting of the Sand Crawler and then to add Jabba’s scene with Han Solo—that was the scope of what we started with. We started out doing about two dozen shots.
GEORGE LUCAS
In the case of the Jabba the Hutt scene, it was a scene that worked and could’ve been in the movie, but at the same time, at that point in history, ILM was coping with so much work, and it was a brand-new company and w
e were way behind schedule. To add that sequence, which was a stop-motion sequence which we hadn’t done too much of at that time, just would’ve broken the back of the operation. We could never have finished the film.
RICK MCCALLUM
The Jabba the Hutt scene took over four months to do, with all the resources that we have available to us. And to take four, five, or six months at that time would have been suicide.
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While the Jabba the Hutt from Return of the Jedi was a giant slug-like puppet, the original Jabba that was filmed with Harrison Ford and then cut from Star Wars was a portly Scottish actor, Declan Mulholland, in a furry vest. Lucas realized the only way to add the grotesque extraterrestrial of Jedi into the deleted Star Wars shots was via digital technology, and to do so he turned to animator Steve “Spaz” Williams and CG supervisor Joe Letteri. Their first meeting with Lucas about the rebirth of Jabba led to some interesting alterations of the character as he appeared in Return of the Jedi.
JOE LETTERI
(CG supervisor, Star Wars Special Editions)
George wanted to put Jabba on a floating anti-gravity couch, because that’s how we saw him in Jedi. But there were two problems with that: one, in the original scene Harrison Ford was talking to this guy who was shorter than him, so his eyes are looking down. And, two, having Jabba just sort of floating around was not quite so interesting. So we thought, “Why not just put him on the ground?” A sea lion was the model we used, because Jabba had to throw his weight forward, bring his tail up and then push off with it in order to move. We wanted him to have this big, thrusting-his-weight-forward movement, like his tail was just solid muscle, so he’d feel really massive and really menacing. Steve Williams and I were partners on this. We tend to work like the director and director of photography. It fell on me to figure out what the inside of Jabba’s mouth and his tongue would look like, how much drool there should be on his chin—all that kind of stuff. I used the Return of the Jedi Jabba’s textures for reference. I adapted the “shaders” I designed for Jurassic Park’s T. rex for Jabba’s skin and surface textures. I wanted his eyes to be totally different. I used some new eye techniques I came up with for Casper to give him cat eyes. That varied from the original Jabba, but I wanted something a little more organic than those glass eyes the Jedi puppet had. George just said, “Go for it!” He liked the eyes.
* * *
Lucas made one last-minute addition to the sequence: As Jabba rejoins his henchmen after his conversation with Han Solo, a familiar bounty hunter (Boba Fett) follows the overlord out.
JOE LETTERI
One day, when we were midway into the shot, George said, “I woke up last night and thought, ‘Boba Fett should walk on right about now!’” So we dug up the Boba Fett costume, put it on one of our animators, and then set up a blue-screen shoot and put him in there. That seemed like a good time to introduce Boba Fett. George was definitely going back and reweaving the threads.
* * *
And then there’s the most controversial change of all. In the Mos Eisley cantina, Han sits at a table with the alien Greedo and, recognizing his life is in danger, shoots him from under the table. In the Special Edition, suddenly Greedo shoots first so that Han doesn’t seem like such a bad guy. Decades later, it seems that Lucas is the only one satisfied with that change that most everyone else found very “maclunkey.”
GEORGE LUCAS
It was always meant that Greedo fired first. And in the original film you don’t get that too well. And then there was a discussion about, well, it’s good that it’s left amorphous and everything. But basically in terms of Han’s character and everything, I don’t like the fact that when he was introduced, the first thing he did was just gun somebody down in cold blood. We had three different versions of that shot. In one, he fires very close to when Han fires. And one was three frames later. We sort of looked at it and tried to figure out which would be perceivable but wouldn’t, you know, look corny.
* * *
While Star Wars boasted the majority of the changes, a succession of smaller changes marked the subsequent installments, including swapping out the Clive Revill–voiced Emperor for Ian McDiarmid, who had portrayed the nefarious Palpatine in the flesh for Return of the Jedi.
IAN MCDIARMID
(actor, “Emperor Sheev Palpatine”)
George felt that it was just and proper. When he made Empire, we hadn’t met and he didn’t have a particular idea of who would play the Emperor or how the character would develop. And he had no notion that he would do the backstory—Episodes I, II, and III. So whoever played the Emperor in a mask and added to Revill’s voice wouldn’t seem authentic to the people who are going to watch the entire saga in the right order. It wouldn’t make any sense. Since I was the Emperor in the other films, it felt appropriate that I should be inserted in Empire, and that’s what George did.
* * *
In addition to the visual effects work, the Special Edition of A New Hope allowed John Williams to revisit some themes previously abandoned in the original film.
JOE KRAEMER
(composer, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher)
A couple of fascinating glimpses into “what might have been” can be found on the Special Edition soundtrack CDs from 1997. The first is a set of alternate takes of the “Main Title,” including one that would have an orchestral chord that starts in the black and builds to the cut to the title Star Wars—this chord was actually used in the opening credits of The Making of Star Wars TV special that aired after the film came out. The second is Williams’s first version of the music for the iconic scene where Luke looks at the twin sunset. The music in this original take is much darker, and although I firmly believe that George Lucas did not intend for Darth Vader to actually be Luke’s father until he was well into writing The Empire Strikes Back, this music would almost lead one to believe it had been in the cards all along!
A piece of music had been written for the first half of the trash-compactor sequence, where Luke is dragged underwater by the Dianoga, but it went unused in the final version of the movie. However, it was repurposed in the Special Edition of the film in 1997 for the extended footage of the Landspeeder ride into Mos Eisley.
For the restored scene of Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt, music from Return of the Jedi was edited and tracked into the soundtrack, allowing the film to use Jabba’s Theme, even though it hadn’t been composed at the time the film was originally released.
* * *
While finishing unfinished art was paramount in George Lucas’s mind, the Special Editions also allowed for some much needed R&D for the proposed new trilogy of films—ones that were always going to be more visually demanding than their predecessors.
JOHN KNOLL
(visual effects supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic)
I think probably more than half the reason for doing this in the first place was as a trial run for the prequels. If you look at the kinds of things George had us working on, they were experiments about, “What’s it going to be like doing a show with this many extras in it? What does a typical space battle shot cost? What does it cost to take a live-action scene and put two big CG creatures in the background?” They were very carefully tracking the actual production costs of doing that work, I think to accurately budget the Star Wars prequels.
GEORGE LUCAS
One of the reasons I did the Star Wars prequels was that the technology had gotten to the point where there was, again, a lot of thrill involved. I’ve loved movies and making films and telling stories all my life, but I’ve struggled with special effects and all of the photographic problems. To suddenly have those things solved and be able to change things with a computer is like being set free after having been tied down for [so many] years.
* * *
In retooling The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas exercised the right of executive privilege and chose not to consult director Irvin Kershner on the changes he had planned for the film.
&n
bsp; GEORGE LUCAS
He didn’t have any input, but I told him what was happening. Of the three films, Empire is the one that has the fewest changes. Some of the alterations were things that Kersh had suggested back when the film was made, when I had been forced to say, “Kersh, we’re out of money, we’re out of time, we’ve got to come home, I’m sorry.”
IRVIN KERSHNER
(director, The Empire Strikes Back)
I don’t like the idea of upgrading the effects, because I feel that they are already in a way primitive and they’re beautiful because of it. Look at Forbidden Planet: it’s a primitive film as science fiction, but the story is exciting and you look at it as an artifact. I think it’s wrong, but George always has his reasons and his ideas. He’s very, very bright and certainly a showman.
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