“We had extensive models built and we made all kinds of special finders to view them,” says Kershner. “I found myself on my knees three or four hours a day looking over the tops of tables into miniature sets. We made a huge book of every major sequence, shot by shot. This accurate previsualizing was the first difficulty.”
Reynold’s study of the “Initial Carbon Freezing set” (no. 40), December 1978.
A Reynold’s study of the “Initial Carbon Freezing set” (no. 40), December 1978, based on the McQuarrie design, led to an early maquette made in England (with Han Solo cutout).
Unknown, Kershner, set decorator Michael Ford, Reynolds (pointing), and Frank Bruton in the props department.
Bruton with the finished full-sized tauntaun.
Creating the life-sized tauntaun prop at Elstree Studios.
Creating the life-sized tauntaun prop at Elstree Studios.
Creating the life-sized tauntaun prop at Elstree Studios.
Creating the life-sized tauntaun prop at Elstree Studios.
Creating the life-sized tauntaun prop at Elstree Studios.
Reynold’s “Prelim carb freezing” redesign of the chamber (no. 38, December 1978).
Reynold’s “Prelim carb freezing” redesign of the chamber (no. 38, December 1978), led to McQuarrie’s painting.
Reynold’s “Darth’s Chamber” (no. 23).
Reynold’s “Insect Robot [for] Darth’s chamber” (no. 24, October 1978).
Reynold’s “Darth’s Chamber” (no. 23) and “Insect Robot [for] Darth’s chamber” (no. 24, October 1978), led to McQuarrie’s January 1979 musings: “These are thoughts inside Vader’s head.”
Concept sketch of Darth’s chamber, by McQuarrie.
Concept sketch and technical drawing of Darth’s chamber, by McQuarrie.
Reynold’s “Darth’s Chamber” (no. 22).
Mechanical concepts by Reynolds.
Mechanical concepts by Reynolds.
Preparatory sketch of Han as prisoner on Cloud City, by McQuarrie.
Final painting of Han as prisoner on Cloud City, by McQuarrie.
NASCENT CLAY
Stuart Freeborn, who created the masks for many of the first film’s aliens, including Chewbacca, now turned his attention to Yoda. “Things were getting very tight, with production due to start very soon,” he says. “George Lucas came to my workshop one morning and asked if I could have a go at creating a design for this little fellow. The catch was that he needed to see it that afternoon, as he was flying back to the States. I had a sculpture of my own head that I had been working on and thought about modifying that. I added ridges to the head, as George had described the character as very wise and I felt that might indicate thought.”
“In England, Stuart built the clay sculptures and practice models, just to see how it was going to look,” Kurtz says. “He did about four or five of those until he hit on what everyone liked in terms of facial characteristics. A lot of people say Yoda looks like Stuart Freeborn. If you see them side by side, there are some similarities.”
“When George came back that afternoon I had covered the sculpt under a large wet rag,” Freeborn continues. “He asked to see the piece, so I took the rag off and covered my eyes, convinced that he would hate it! He looked at it very carefully and, as he did with Chewbacca, said, ‘Yes! That’s it.’ I also gave the little fellow Einstein’s eyes to really drive home the sense of intelligence. I wanted to give him a little mustache, but it didn’t seem right somehow, so I compromised by creating the shape of a mustache on his bottom lip. It’s very subtle, but it’s there.”
“After a while, we had a sculpture,” says Kershner, “a piece of clay, and it looked pretty good.”
“Jim Henson’s group provided us with Wendy Midener,” says Kurtz, “who then helped Stuart in terms of developing the physical puppet from the sculpting designs that Stuart had made from the original drawings.”
“We had some meetings on storyboards in England and meetings with Stuart Freeborn,” says Frank Oz. “Eventually, Stuart and his staff, with Wendy Midener, Kathy Mullen, and I, we all worked on Yoda. I didn’t work on the puppet itself—Stuart took a cast of my hand and arm, and I just talked about my needs for acting with the character and they took care of the rest.”
“We started putting in the cables, hydraulics, electronics, springs,” says Kershner. “We had to send to India for the fabric. It was all handmade silk, because otherwise the textures looked all wrong.”
While the Yoda puppet was developed, his swamp was also further conceptualized. “I’m creating this bog area for the film now with heavy growth,” says McQuarrie. “It’s like a jungle or a thicket. I opted to do giant petrified trees, so what we’re seeing are the roots that have been exposed through the ages of whatever’s going on there. [laughs] I didn’t completely think it out, but I’ve got really fantastic trees. They tend to look like big insect legs, so I gave them a musculature and yet they are sinuous and tree-like, too.”
“I worked in Los Angeles on preproduction for a full year before going to London to begin work on the film,” says Kershner. “Yet it would have been nice to have had two years. There was no time to do it all, but somehow we’re getting it all done.”
Frank Oz, Kershner, and Jim Henson discuss the Yoda puppet.
Henson with the Yoda puppet.
Photo test of the early Yoda puppet.
Henson exhibits a new puppet design (a Skesis for what would become Dark Crystal), with colleagues Wendy Midener and Oz, to Kershner, Freeborn, Watts, and Reynolds.
Puppet fabricator (and puppeteer) Kathy Mullen shows how Yoda might be manipulated to Kershner, Freeborn, first assistant director David Tomblin, Reynolds, and Oz.
Audio element not supported.
Frank Oz (Yoda) talks about the creation of the Yoda puppet. (Interview by Arnold, 1979)
(1:00)
BUILDING A UFO
Production hired several freelance firms to build specific vehicles. “Ogle Design Limited are quite famous car designers that did the Reliant Scimitar and things like that,” says Bill Welch, construction manager. A local firm in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, Ogle did experimental work for car phones, toys, and “very secret” projects. They had in fact made “an absolutely super job” of Luke’s landspeeder for Star Wars. “With Empire, with the amount of work we had, we just couldn’t cope,” Welch explains. “So we contacted them to see if they would do the snowspeeder, which they did. They also made the gun turrets for us and then I got them involved in the rocket unit at the end of the pinnacle, the gantry control. Basically, that’s about all we’ve sent out at this time, other than the Falcon done in Wales.”
“We needed a full-sized Falcon,” says Kurtz. “We never had one in the first film. That one was a half-size prop built into a wall and supported by hidden wires and things, but we needed more activity around the Falcon this time. So Norman Reynolds designed a way to build a full-sized Falcon, which was about 65 feet in diameter and 80 feet long when you count the mandible.”
“The original Falcon got put out behind the studio, in various parts, and then it got rained and snowed on,” says Lorne Peterson. “It deteriorated, and eventually it was no longer usable. I think for this show, they probably realized that it could be used again and again, so that’s when they decided to do a really good bang-up job of it and actually make it out of metal and plywood, so they could store it in pie-shaped sections.”
Marcon Fabrications Ltd. had contacted Chapter II Productions and pointed out that its fabrication facility included hangar doors with 160-foot-wide and 60-odd feet of clearance to the eaves—big enough for the Falcon. Consequently, a year after work had begun, Norman Reynolds, Bill Welch, and Alan Arnold, “on a bitterly cold January morning,” according to the latter, “boarded a tiny Cherokee plane at the Elstree airfield to fly to Pembrokeshire to see the Falcon being constructed” by a firm of maritime engineers in Wales, 260 miles southwest of London. Upon arriving at Pembroke Docks,
they examined the 23-ton prop “where in the 1930s great flying boats were made. The building of the Falcon had brought a taste of the space age to this remote community, and there was much gossip in the pubs as to what exactly was being built in the hangar on the shoreline.”
“Yes, the local opinion is that Marcon is constructing a spaceship,” says a man identified only as Mr. Wilson in the archive tapes. “It’s variously described as starships to rocket ships to flying saucers. Oddly enough, the local population here has been exceedingly good about it.”
“They fabricated the steel into 16 sections, very much like a pie, which would be bolted together so that when the picture was over, we could take it apart and store it,” says Kurtz. “The five feet that touch the ground have built-in compressed-air hoverpad units so that we could move it even though it weighed 23 tons. We would move it around by pumping enough compressed air into it and pulling it with a forklift.”
“Each of the 16 segments is designed to be taken apart and transported from location to location,” says Mr. Wilson. “But prior to taking it apart, we will place on the steel frame a timber skin and make the basic structure that the people at Elstree can then adorn with the various technicalities they require.”
Arnold’s talk with Mr. Wilson ends with the latter estimating that it will take about three months for his firm to complete work on the Falcon and that UFOs are “generally about.”
“I suppose it’s possible that eventually spaceships really might be made here,” Arnold says.
“Yes, we look forward to that day, of course,” Wilson sums up.
Several R2-D2s, whose new materials made life much easier for the man inside: Kenny Baker.
Full-sized constructions in-progess for the Millennium Falcon and X-wings and snowspeeders.
UP IN FLAMES
Arnold made another visit to an outside company: the White Horse Toy Company, in Oxfordshire, which had started in the film business by creating a 35-foot-long crocodile for the James Bond film Live and Let Die (1973). Founder Tony Dyson, “who had built up a successful export business in rocking horses, was being assisted by Star Wars special effects and art department specialists in building improved R2-D2 robot units for the new picture. No fewer than five versions of R2-D2 were being made, including one that can be submerged in water.”
“There were certain areas of the first show that required some rethinking,” Brian Johnson says. “One of them was the actual design of the Artoo-Detoos. I changed how the things operated and built eight new ones. We molded the radio-controlled units in a double sandwich of epoxy and polyurethane foam in a core, much like a honeycomb structure, very strong but very light. I have one here that weighs 32 pounds complete.”
“Brian’s forte is in getting the organization together to produce all the physical effects that are done during principal photography: fog and explosions and rigs to cause weird things to happen,” says Edlund. “He is also in charge of Artoo-Detoo and getting it to respond properly to radio control signals.”
“The whole thing is much lighter, the springing slightly more flexible,” says Kenny Baker, who had his second “fitting” in January. “I’ve got slightly more movement in both feet, legs, forward and backward, so that I can cover more ground quickly. They’ll make the seat harness more to my body and less of an encumbrance. I can move the head around without grabbing hold of electric cables and electric motors, which are hot.”
“I did do the first robot, but we’re improving the robots now in fiberglass instead of aluminum,” says Tony Dyson. “The advantages obviously are that they are slicker, lighter, and I think Kenny Baker is the one that really saw how good they are. Andrew Kelly, who is making them into robots, obviously has advantages because of the weight and other factors.”
“I’m responsible for the finished article coming onto the stage and gelling with all the different elements, which they wouldn’t do unless one person was overseeing everything,” says robot supervisor Andrew Kelly. “I’m having the mechanisms made for the feet to match up with everything else. It’s a total job. Here they’re simply making the shell. It’s beautifully made, but they’re just making the shells and the head. All the mechanisms have to be made by outside contract firms who have got virtually no experience in films; therefore, they tend to make things that look very good, sound very good, work very well, but, on the day, they don’t. So it’s sound floor experience that you’ve got to have.”
“We took the radio-controlled robot and modified it to go from two to three legs, so we could actually drive it along the set,” Johnson says. “Then the third leg would kick out by radio control. Gary Kurtz came into our workshop in England and I showed him the whole movement, but he was still very skeptical. ‘I’ll bet it doesn’t go back from three legs to two,’ he said. But that worked, too. You had to be there to see the surprised look on his face.”
Kurtz’s expression surely changed to a frown not long afterward. Indeed, as Star Wars had been dogged by the film Lucky Lady (1975), whose production tribulations had a primarily negative impact on the first film, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) had a long-term crippling effect on Empire. Production had calculated that it would have to move 64 sets through Elstree’s nine stages, already a big job, but on one unlucky evening its number of available stages was reduced significantly—by either an electrical short or a still-burning cigarette.
“Then came the night of the fire,” Arnold writes. “Stanley Kubrick was filming The Shining on Stage 3 and, on the night of January 24, that stage burned down … The cluttered driveways of the studio complex prevented the local fire department from getting its trucks in, and by morning the stage was a smoldering ruin. Its total loss meant a complete rescheduling almost on the eve of production, and because Kubrick had to revamp his set on another stage, virtually two soundstages were denied to the Star Wars team. Time-wise, it is doubtful the picture will recover.”
Stage 3 had housed the innocuously sinister hotel lobby of Kubrick’s horror film, “so he just revamped another stage to make up the difference,” says Kershner.
“It was the day before we left on the final recce that we had the tragic occurrence of the burning of Stage 3, which really was a big blow because already we were facing certain problems because of Stanley Kubrick’s picture going over schedule,” says Watts. “We were already getting very worried about stage space and having enough time to get the sets built. We were also building the Star Wars Stage, which was behind schedule, because we were having the worst winter since 1963. So we had to reassess and reschedule the entire building program and, consequently, the shooting schedule of the picture, to work out a way whereby we could accommodate the sets with one less stage.”
“The thing that hurt us the most on this movie was the fact that one of the sound stages at Elstree burned down just before we were ready to shoot,” says Kurtz. “Our art department was going to have a very hard time keeping up with our shooting schedule.”
“We knew the day it happened that it was going to screw up our schedule,” says Lucas. “It was going to screw up everything. We also knew that Stanley would use that as a way of further delaying things so he could think about his film.”
“Because of losing Stage 3, we’re going to go to Leeds Studios to shoot a particular blizzard condition because we have insufficient space at EMI,” says Watts of a Han Solo scene. “Because it’s more easy to control, we’re going to shoot the blizzard on a stage.”
“At no fault of our own, because the big stage wasn’t ready when it should have been, we physically can only do so much because of the lack of stage space,” says Frank Bruton. “It has meant that construction will be sorely pressed to keep the units going.”
The remains of Stage 3, where Stanley Kubrick’s set for The Shining burned down on January 24, 1979.
Storyboard artist Ivor Beddoes in the art department at Elstree, where McQuarrie joined him.
McQuarrie sometimes pitched in on the storyboards.
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Storyboards by Beddoes used approved designs by McQuarrie and Reynolds to show the progession of the Luke vs. Darth Vader duel (originally, the reactor shaft had a noticeable updraft), early 1979
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The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 20
