The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  Reporter: Are you afraid you’ll always be connected to Star Wars?

  Hamill: I don’t really care. I mean, an actor wants to be connected with something in his short career. I’d like to do other things, but I haven’t found a great driving force to separate myself from the project. It’s fun.

  Fisher: And terrifying [laughter from the reporters].

  Reporter: Why doesn’t George Lucas direct this one?

  Kurtz: Well, George has retired, let’s put it that way.

  Reporter: Aren’t you afraid of bad weather in Finse? A snowstorm or …?

  Kurtz: Well, we want some bad weather. We have several scenes to shoot and we need a variety of weather conditions. Of course, if we have two solid weeks of whiteout, that wouldn’t be good.

  Reporter: I read that in the sequel that Princess Leia would choose between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. Will that happen this time?

  Kurtz: We’re thinking about it. A lot of the story elements are still—

  Fisher: I can’t decide [laughter].

  Reporter: Alec Guinness will not be in this?

  Kurtz: His character probably will. I’m not really ready to say yet what happens with his character. We’re still working on that aspect.

  Reporter: Has he been asked to appear in the film?

  Kurtz: Yes.

  Reporter: For the actors, what has the success of the first one meant to you? Have you had many other offers that you’ve had to postpone now that you’re doing the sequel?

  Fisher: I’ve had a lot of dating offers from 12-year-old boys. [laughter] Yeah, some offers, but there are a lot more actresses than there are properties for actresses, and a lot of the properties aren’t good.

  [The press conference is concluded in Norwegian.]

  “After the press conference, Fox executives took us on a tour of some of Oslo’s sights,” Arnold recalls. “Mark appeared to be finding the experience enthralling, although I detected a certain weariness in Carrie.”

  Going from Oslo to Finse in stages, Kershner, Mayhew, and Tomblin arrived on March 2, while Hamill, Fisher, Arnold, and others left for the glacier the following day. “At five, we assembled in the lobby, Mark sleepily protesting that the hotel had been unable even to provide coffee at that hour,” Arnold writes. “Also, it seemed, no one had been available to bring down the Hamills’ luggage, but eventually it joined the formidable pile already assembled in the lobby. Marilou seemed to have brought all that might be needed in the event of a premature delivery, including a basinette, medical supplies, and an enormous teddy bear.

  “Soon a bus, as big as a Greyhound, appeared, and we climbed in and rode to the station through a city still in the grip of a crisp northern night. On arrival, we discovered there were no porters. Kurtz spotted a handcart, which we piled high with our belongings, but there was too much for one load. The cart was awkward to push, its front wheels repeatedly jackknifing, putting it into reverse. Then we got to the wrong platform and had to turn about, getting to the Oslo–Bergen express with only five minutes to spare.”

  “There was one railway line which operated between Bergen and Oslo, and we were on the highest point of the line,” Johnson says.

  “As we drew close to Finse, the countryside became featureless and sullen until it was just undulating snow against a backdrop of mist,” Arnold says. “Throughout Europe, spring was overdue and we were going deeper into winter.”

  The sole occupants of a first-class carriage, the small group arrived after a six-hour ride. “We stayed at this solitary hotel,” Johnson says, “which is normally used as shelter for these maniac Laplanders who just ski on horizontal slopes for mile after mile, get lost, and then have to be rescued and brought to safety by search parties.”

  On Saturday, visibility was already bad as the entire production prepared for shooting on Monday. On Sunday, the weather started to “deteriorate” with snow and high winds, according to the production Progress Reports. “It’s just funny,” says Jim Bloom, who had been in Finse since mid-February. “Whenever movie companies arrive at a location, people always say, ‘Gee, it’s never been like this before.’ ”

  “The hotel conditions were Spartan to say the least,” Johnson adds. “The place featured typical Scandinavian heating inside, which is to say that it was like living in one huge sauna. You couldn’t open the windows for ventilation, either, because they were iced solid.”

  Lodged two to a room, the 70-people crew had set up a camera room, specially installed telephone lines, telex equipment, and radio links—but there was little they could do about the weather. They had two other vital installations, according to Arnold: a base halfway up the glacier at 3,000 feet (named Camp Sharman after Bruce Sharman, the production supervisor) and Camp Kurtz, on the summit. Both bases comprised four huts heated by their own generators. The encampments were built along the lines of arctic survival camps and equipped with toilets, medical supplies, and emergency food rations in lead-sealed packs the size of paperback books. “Every department is getting ready for tomorrow’s shoot despite weather reports from the nearby military base at Voss which forecast worsening conditions,” writes Arnold.

  “When we arrived on location,” Watts says, “the weather conditions were appalling.”

  “We could have done it at our studios in England, but the movie would have then started off looking artificial,” says Kershner. “We decided to go for reality. Unfortunately, it was Norway’s coldest winter in 100 years. That’s why you prepare for a film as if you were a prizefighter—I ran two miles a day for months before it, because I knew what to expect.”

  Kershner on the train to Finse.

  Production map of the Finse Location, including “shooting areas”—and crevasses (the walkers would attack on the “lake”).

  The isolated hotel in Finse.

  * * *

  STAR WARS: EPISODE V THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK BY LARRY KASDAN, FEBRUARY 20, 1979—FIFTH-DRAFT SUMMARY

  In the multicolored 157-page shooting script, the crawl has changed from “a million worlds have felt the oppressive hand of the Emperor” to “a thousand worlds.”

  Now Luke talks to Han before being attacked by the wampa. Instead of Rebel troops inspecting the dead tauntaun, a medical droid does that work. Ben no longer tells Luke in the snow that “You are the only hope.” When the walker is downed, there is no skirmish between Imperials from the fallen walker and Rebels emerging from the trenches; instead, an airspeeder blows up the Imperial machine. In the ice corridors, the droids move by a door with an X painted on it, behind which ice monsters are contained.

  THREEPIO

  See, your whistles upset [the Ice Monsters]. They’re being enticed into the trap by high-pitched sounds. No, I told you they can’t get out! Now will you hurry up? I don’t know why I bother …

  Threepio moves around a corner. Artoo stares at the door another moment, then proceeds to tell the Ice Monsters off in a burst of beeps and whistles. The THUMPING picks up as Artoo moves casually away.

  Luke on tauntuan by McQuarrie, 1979. With production in Norway, the artist in England concentrated on hero paintings, utilizing final designs by himself and others, which served to embody the feelings of certain key scenes.

  In his copy of the fifth draft, Lucas changed the name of Vader’s ship from Avenger to Executor.

  A scene of R2 alone on Dagobah warming “several of his utility arms in front of the thermal heater” has been cut, as is the scene where Vader talks with Pestage before speaking with the Emperor; a new shot reveals the back of Vader’s scarred head.

  Luke’s anger at the flying remotes has been replaced by a shorter scene of him running and jumping, while conversing with Yoda. A scene of Luke balancing upside down on his thumb is also cut. As Luke enters the tree, after traversing a shallow moat, he encounters another physical guardian:

  Luke reaches up to brush aside some hanging vines and they snap at him like lobster claws … then they move upwards. Luke looks up and sees they are
attached to a monstrous creature who stares down at him—Luke enters the tree.

  Later, while Luke and Yoda eat, a new shot has R2 rising up on his “toes” to peek into a window in Yoda’s house—but when Luke is again tested by “three glow-ball seekers,” one of them targets the droid, “who falls out of frame with a shriek and a clunk.”

  On Cloud City, a new scene has Chewbacca rescuing C-3PO’s parts from incineration by hogmen in a junk room. Lando accompanies Han and Leia across a plaza, but their dialogue has changed: Lando flirts with Leia and Han is jealous.

  * * *

  CALAMITOUS COLD

  REPORT NO. 1: MONDAY, MARCH 5, 1979; FINSE, NORWAY; EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH, ICE GORGE; SC. 23 [LUKE STAGGERS OUT OF GORGE], 31 [LUKE FALLS UNCONSCIOUS] NOTE: NOT ALL SCENES SHOT ARE LISTED.

  With a finishing date of June 22, 1979, principal photography began its 76-day schedule on Monday, March 5. Kershner had chosen to start with scenes in which Luke escapes from the wampa’s lair. On hand were Mark Hamill, Dennis Lawson (Wedge Antilles), Peter Mayhew, and Des Webb (snow creature), though the latter three were “CNU,” called-not-used. To transport people and props, production used: eight Snocats; two Trac-Masters; four snow scooters; one Ratrac; one passenger sledge that could carry 16 people; and 10 equipment sledges.

  Over the weekend, the weather had been awful. “No trains have reached Finse for two days,” Arnold writes. “They are being turned back to Oslo or to Bergen at stations along the line, unable to reach this halfway point because the snow tunnels leading to our plateau have collapsed. We are isolated in a wilderness of snow.”

  “Adding to the hilarity, we had two avalanches occur which sealed us off from the railway line, stranding us for a few days,” says Johnson.

  “George had told me, ‘Don’t expect things to work,’ ” Kershner says. “That was very good advice.”

  Snow filled the trench dug by the crew a few days before, so its scenes were put on hold. “We had a lot of expensive dressing and pipes which were now buried 10 feet down,” says Tomkins. “So we called on the help of a local gentleman who not only ran the local youth hostel, but who actually went out and found people if they were buried in avalanches. He came with something like a water-divining stick and he told us where to start digging. That was the first lesson learned: From that moment on, I was unable to prepare anything more than a few hours in advance of the unit.”

  “It wasn’t the easiest place to make a movie,” says Johnson. “Yet there we were, filming a fantasy when the realities of life were becoming all too apparent around us.”

  “I’ve filmed in similar conditions, but not on such a large scale,” says Suschitzky. “I had filmed in subzero temperatures before, but not with the sort of equipment we were carrying.”

  “I saw Kersh pawing with gloved hands at his freezing Lenin-style beard while talking intently to the producer,” Arnold notes. “Both are tall men and, as they leaned toward one another shouting into the wind, they resembled explorers on some arctic expedition. Around them, the stumbling forms of technicians, anonymous in their protective gear, moved in and out of the whiteness, looking curiously unreal.”

  “You know what the biggest problem was in working there?” Kershner asks. “Going to the bathroom! We had on seven layers of clothes—we were dying!”

  “Even reloading a camera became difficult—and dangerous,” says Johnson. “Acetate film becomes brittle in cold weather, and the edges are razor-sharp. Try loading frozen film into a camera during a howling blizzard with ice and snow particles trying to blast their way into the camera!”

  “We tried to set up a rotating glass plate in front of the lens, the same thing used by the Coast Guard when they’re in a storm, to photograph against the spray and snow,” says Kershner. “Except it didn’t work with snow. The lens would still ice up.”

  “Further complicating matters, the camera lenses had to be kept cold, so that ice and snow would not melt on them,” Johnson adds, “but the camera bodies had to be kept warm so the film would move smoothly through the sprockets and the batteries would retain their charge.”

  “The eyepiece would cloud over,” Kershner says. “The cameraman would look through it and then, about a third through the take, it just became white. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t tell whether it was in focus, whether he was following the action. And if you touch the camera without gloves on, your skin immediately glues to the metal; it freezes. You have to take a razor blade and slice away the skin to get it off.”

  “We couldn’t take the unit to the top of the glacier because we were in whiteout conditions and it was much too dangerous,” says Bloom. “You could not see where you were going. The track was lined with poles every ten feet apart, so the group would have to inch its way by tying ropes to people and tying those ropes to the front of the track vehicles; then they would move forward ten feet and find the next pole along the path and then the whole line would move forward ten feet.”

  “Trying to look at a script, hold a pencil, and look through a lens were feats in themselves in that snow, battered by a blizzard, wearing so much clothing,” Kershner says. “I found that my tape recorder wasn’t working because it stuck—it was too cold—so you began to do what primitive peoples do, which is you remember everything. I was amazed at how much you could remember when you had to. It’s all there in your mind.”

  “It was difficult for everyone in Norway just moving about,” says Hamill. “Running at full speed, in full gear, in knee-deep snow and so forth.”

  “We were lugging around equipment, too,” Johnson adds. “When you’re 5,000 feet up on a mountain with the air very thin, you find that, after a day of this, you are quite dead.”

  “The intensity of the work takes away self-concern and to get a shot, you work at it and you realize that you’ve stood in one place for about two hours,” says Kershner. “Two hours pass and you realize you just got the shot—and that’s when you feel cold for the first time. In fact, we found that you couldn’t go inside, because if you went in and out from the buildings, you got cold. The best thing was to just stay outside the whole day. I would go outside at 7:30 and I wouldn’t come back until about 5:30 or 6 o’clock for dinner.”

  “Our sole visitors are the intrepid women who arrive with sleds bearing canisters of greasy soup and messy meatball stew,” Arnold writes. “They ladle this onto paper plates while we stand in line, but, by the time the food is served, it is nearly frozen. Even Kersh, I noticed, ate this unappealing mush, which is better than nothing after hours in the cold.”

  A flare gives off faint light in the severe storms that dominated the weather during the shoot in Finse.

  A congregation of snow vehicles outside the hotel on location, March 1979.

  Kershner behind the camera. “If you weren’t absolutely in focus on the VistaVision, if it vibrated slightly, then your mattes wouldn’t work,” he says. “The camera was always tied down so it wouldn’t move because of the wind.”

  “We always joked about having ‘spaghetti flambé,’ ” says Tomkins, “because by the time it came on your plate, at minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit, ice-cold spaghetti isn’t much fun when you’ve been in the cold all day.”

  After the first day’s work, Hamill, Suschitzky, Arnold, and others sat down together:

  Arnold: What was it like?

  Suschitzky: It was diabolical.

  Hamill: You’ve been in nothing like this? You’ve shot in the snow before?

  Suschitzky: Yes, in Switzerland and Finland, but nothing like this. It’s just been on the news here, hasn’t it?

  Hamill: What?

  Suschitzky: It’s come over the Norwegian news how bad it is here, the weather conditions. I mean, if they say it’s bad here, it’s got to be. They live here, we don’t [laughs].

  Arnold: There are people lost in the mountains tonight, you know.

  Hamill: Skiers?

  Suschitzky: There are three guys lost in the blizzard …

  Arn
old: You have to fall about and perform in this snow.

  Hamill: But I had a wet suit on, too.

  Arnold: What were the feelings that you had?

  Hamill: It’s real eerie because you’re supposed to be lying down and freezing to death and trying to decide whether to go to sleep or get up and struggle a little bit more. You really get into it because you can see how—it’s so exhausting. Have you ever run on the beach, not on the wet part of the sand, but on the dry sand? How tired your legs get? Just walking in this stuff is murder.

  Suschitzky: And watching you was like a dream. It was like being in a dream, watching you run up that snow. It was like being in a nightmare, where you were running as hard as you could, and you were going practically backward.

  Hamill: I was!

  Suschitzky: It’s really exhausting.

  Hamill: Well, it’s that you’re praying for one take, that’s all.

  Arnold: You spoke of a burning sensation on the skin.

  Hamill: Stinging. It feels like when you put Merthiolate on a cut. You know, it’s like having Novocain or something like that. Somebody puts their hands on your face and then slowly you start feeling their hands. It’s spooky.

  Luke escapes from the ice cave.

  Due to the terrible weather conditions, production filmed several scenes only a few steps from the hotel, including the first in which Luke escapes from the ice cave; afterward, a nearly frozen Hamill was helped by crew (behind the middle ground-floor window was the camera room).