CALLING HARRISON FORD
In a decision that might sound like a case of cabin fever, but was actually a case of making lemonade from lemons, production had decided to send for Harrison Ford.
“We were snowed out with nothing that we could shoot, and we didn’t know what to do,” says Bloom. “So I remember going to the production group, to Robert Watts, Kershner, and Gary, and saying, ‘Let’s get Harrison in a week early. We’ll shoot some of his stuff while we can.’ And they went, ‘How?’ Well, we made all these phone calls and they put Harrison on a plane from London to Oslo.”
“Harrison was brought out on a couple of hours’ notice when we had this blizzard condition,” says Watts. “We thought we could shoot his sequence that, because of losing Stage 3, we were going to shoot at Leeds Studios. If we could get this sequence successfully in Norway, this would obviate us from having to go out to Leeds.”
“We called London and told Harrison to get packed and on the plane that afternoon,” says Kurtz. “But by the time he got to Oslo, we’d had three avalanches on the railroad line and we were cut off. No one could get in or out.”
Ford managed to take a train from Oslo as far as Geilo, a ski resort thirty miles east of Finse. “The filmmakers needed Ford for scenes in the morning,” Arnold writes, “so they radioed the train to unload the actor who by then, by two improbable taxi rides, had reached Ustaoset, just 23 miles from Finse. That was where the snowplow found him.”
“The only way that we could get the guy to drive the snowplow train was to send a bottle of vodka with our Australian location manager to the next town where the other train had stopped,” says Bloom.
“My snow scenes were supposed to be shot at the sound stage in the studio,” says Ford. “I had just arrived in England as they left for Norway, but, in no time at all, I found myself whisked away to join them with no preparation, wearing a costume built for conditions on the stage. Another one of those bizarre experiences in life.”
“I remember very vividly at like 11:30 or midnight, the snowplow coming back into Finse,” Bloom finishes the story. “The snowplow engine was grinding up the tracks and then Harrison, the snowplow driver, and this Australian location manager all rolled off the train completely drunk from having finished off this big bottle of vodka.”
“When Harrison saw me, he said, ‘Call my agent,’ ” Watts says. “He was kidding me, but he knew that what we were doing was not standard practice …”
Kershner, Kurtz, Johnson, Reynolds, mechanical effects supervisor Nick Allder, construction manager Bill Welch, Watts, and two unknowns (on right) confer inside the Finse hotel lobby—one of production’s decisions was to call for Harrison Ford (Han Solo) in London; he was later photographed driving one of the snow vehicles.
Ford driving one of the snow vehicles.
In Camp Kurtz, Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca); chief makeup artist Graham Freeborn (one down from Mayhew); props assistant Keith Vowles (right corner); continuity, Kay Rawlings (without hood, on right); and crew share a meal.
RIDE ’EM, TAUNTAUN
NO. 2, TUESDAY, MARCH 6: EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH, DUSK, SCS. 31, 32 [HAN ARRIVES ON TAUNTAUN, FINDS LUKE]; SECOND UNIT, SC. 8 [WAMPA ATTACKS LUKE]
“We have been shooting—in the banked-up snow behind the lodge—scenes of Luke Skywalker on an ill-fated reconnaissance mission across the plain of Hoth,” Arnold writes.
Looking a bit “dazed,” Ford was in costume and on call at 7:30 AM, despite his adventures the previous evening (after chatting with him, Arnold found the actor “urbane, self-assured, and charming”). But the Progress Report listed the day’s conditions as “snow hitting camera lenses, plus unsuitable sun conditions for matching purposes.”
“It was so cold that no equipment could be operated outside for more than three or four minutes. It all froze up,” Ford says. “I kept asking myself how I got into the whole mess. But I couldn’t have left even if I’d wanted to—there was no way out.”
“Mark was lying in the snow,” Kershner says, “in subzero weather, trying to emote when, within one minute, the chill factor was so great that his body began to shake involuntarily.”
“The tauntaun was rushed out to Norway,” says Johnson. “It was used briefly and not too successfully. There were various reasons for that; one was the appallingly low temperatures.”
The tauntaun was actually the two tauntauns: full body or head, neck, and back only, so that a technician could operate the head from within during close-ups. Tubes holding two different types of gases were fed to the tauntaun’s mouth, in order to make its breathing appear as steam in the extreme cold. Its head and eyes were attached to wires manipulated by additional technicians.
“The biggest problem with the tauntaun was the actual weight of the skin and the size of the head,” Tomkins says. “For any man to actually have that on his back for any length of time was really tiring, because you are in the prone and bent position by virtue of the design.”
Ford is filmed on the mechanical tauntaun in a storm on March 7.
Hamill on tauntaun.
PSYCHOLOGY
NO. 3, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 7: 10 [WAMPA DRAGS LUKE], 29 [HAN RIDES TAUNTAUN]
Another advantage of bringing out Ford was that the three principals were able to be with the crew on location—in very difficult conditions that created bonds among everyone: director, producer, stars, department heads, and technicians.
“The hours are long, the disciplines strict,” writes Arnold. “Under these circumstances, a camaraderie develops among crew and actors alike and barriers of status quickly disappear. ‘Watch it, Mark,’ I heard a young cockney carpenter say at breakfast this morning after Mark had quite nonchalantly helped himself to a second glass of orange juice, ‘or someone else will go short …’ Equality is the rule.”
“You have to be a leader out there, because everyone was feeling everyone out,” says Kershner. “It was a new crew, everyone was starting a new endeavor, and everyone had the natural apprehensiveness of beginning a large project. I’ve found, based on past experience, that the only way you do your best work is through what I call relaxed tension. You can’t let go of the tension, but you don’t want to feel tension. The tension must be there—it binds everything and everybody together—but the relaxation permits maximum energy to be maintained.”
“All you could think of was going back and having a hot bath or going into the sauna and then having a meal,” says Tomkins. “So the social life in the hotel was very good inasmuch as we became more of a tighter-knit unit. There was a lot of camaraderie because there was nobody else in the hotel, only the unit.”
“I’ve found that humor helps,” Kershner adds, “so I made everybody laugh at the cold. I had icicles dripping from my beard and I would make jokes of it. Because anyone who begins to complain sets off a chain reaction of complaining. How hard they worked, how much they cared, the attitude that permeated the group had to be set—and I was one of the people that was trying to set it. I feel that Gary was very good at setting it. He has tremendous endurance and he didn’t walk away from problems, and this was a very good thing for me because I knew that there was somebody else backing me up—very important.”
HOTEL NOWHERE
NOS. 4–5, THURSDAY–FRIDAY, MARCH 8–9: EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH, 5 [LUKE TAKES OFF GOGGLES], 7 [LUKE ON TAUNTAUN], 33 [HAN SAVES LUKE]
Carrie Fisher returned to London. The next day, the weather worsened, and Kershner filmed more tauntaun sequences with Ford and Hamill.
“At least the shape of the snowdrift changed every day,” says Tomkins. “Every night the wind and the snow kept changing it. We must have done four or five scenes, actually, right outside the hotel.”
“The first unit had to shoot a lot of the scenes not more than 20 or 30 feet away from the hotel,” says Bloom. “If the camera would’ve turned around, you’d have seen a big hotel behind you. But because of the weather, it looked like you were out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Some tra
ins are reaching Finse again,” Arnold writes. “One from Oslo this morning brought the first of a contingent of 35 mountain-rescue skiers, not to rescue us but to take part as extras in the battle scenes [which were to be filmed second-unit]. These young Norwegians will live here at the ski lodge occupying the rooms we vacate, and in return for their services the company is making a donation to the Norwegian Red Cross.”
“The cold for them was ordinary, not extraordinary,” says Kershner. “They understand cooperation. They worked very, very hard and there didn’t seem to be any resentment of foreigners coming onto their soil. In fact, there was none at all. They were kind of glad to have us there. This made for an interesting liaison with another people.”
Ford and Fisher pose with Hamill on the taun. The man-in-suit tauntaun was actually tried out on location in Finse, with hilarious if not film-worthy results.
Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) on location.
Fisher reposes on one of the Aktiv snow vehicles.
Costume continuity Polaroid of Han and Luke for scene 3.
A list of shots from the first few days of March was recorded on “Log Sheets,” which were kept thoughout principal photography.
An altered version of that scene was filmed in Finse with Des Webb (snow creature) in the wampa costume, whose hand was observed by Watts.
Watts observers the wampa’s hand.
Storyboards show a monster emerging from beneath the snow to attack Luke on his tauntaun, by Ivor Beddoes, summer 1978 (early on, conceptually, the monster could tunnel through snow).
Webb, in his enormous snow creature costume with gigantic boots on stilts, could walk no more than a few feet without taking what looked like a painful fall. Here he drags a Luke mannequin.
INVADER
NO. 6, SATURDAY, MARCH 10: EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH, ICE SLOPE, 210 [LUKE WITH PILOTS, X-WING], 51 [HAN AND CHEWIE AMBUSH PROBOT]
On Saturday morning, the weather cleared for only the second time, and production moved midway to Camp Sharman. “During that half day, we shot the only location we’d picked on the recce in January that we were able to shoot,” says Watts. “It was an ice slope and it was a matte shot for Luke—Mark Hamill—walking toward his X-wing fighter and seeing the Millennium Falcon fly out and over his head.”
With Ford on location, Kershner was also able to tackle several probe droid shots. “We engineered the guns firing in the probe robot, which is on tracks,” says Johnson. “The tracks were disguised in the snow and it appeared in long-shot, so there were always a couple of mounds of snow between us and the probe that appeared to float. The legs moved around, the hands worked on it, and lights flashed on and off. There were two movements of rotation: The body moved and the head moved on the body. We were using radio-controlled gear to actuate all the motors and the switches inside the robot.”
Once again, the weather deteriorated badly in the latter part of the day; painter Gordon Wright slipped, breaking two ribs, and was sent to Voss hospital for care.
“The Norwegians had given us the parameters, because there were 1,000-foot drops in the ice,” says Kershner. “I’ve seen men with snowshoes just disappear—with snowshoes—just drop away. Fortunately, no one was really badly hurt.”
“If someone gets lost in a snowstorm and they’re not versed in any form of survival, they are going to die,” says Johnson. “So we had to keep tabs on everyone as well as worrying about getting the right shot.”
“Only by following the sticks coming down would we ever find our way back to the hotel,” says Kershner. “Otherwise, we’d still be up there with the wild reindeer. Yes, there were these wonderful reindeer watching us in the distance.”
Reindeer weren’t the only ones interested in Empire, in fact. “We were shooting outside the hotel,” says Watts. “And suddenly there was a break in the clouds and out of this break came this army helicopter, which buzzed us two or three times. We didn’t quite know what it was there for, but we assumed it was something to do with a mountain rescue. After this thing did about its third pass, however, we noticed in the window what looked like one or two photographers with cameras with long lenses.”
“While covering some Anglo-Norwegian army exercises based at Voss, a photographer from The Sun persuaded an army helicopter pilot to take him to the area of our location,” Arnold writes. “It was a dangerous and illegal maneuver and implied that British taxpayers were paying for The Sun to come out there in British army equipment.”
“Yes, one could only assume that some arrangement had been made with the British army, which I found a little strange,” says Watts. “I called the army base in Voss, where the British army do a lot of their winter training, and I did eventually find, I think, the second in command of this particular squadron or whatever they call it. And I expressed my concern about a British army helicopter being used for this kind of activity, particularly in view of the fact that nobody’s allowed to land in Finse without a permit. I asked him to investigate.”
“The only other press representative to reach us so far has been a little old lady on skis who had trudged several miles to find us,” Arnold says. “She represented a local newspaper, and we were so impressed with her enterprise that Kurtz talked to her at length and introduced her to the principals.”
At the end of another weird day, Ford departed for London at 8 PM.
THE STOIC
NO. 7, SUNDAY, MARCH 11: 208 [LUKE WATCHES FALCON FLY OFF], 158 [LUKE PULLS SUPPLIES FROM CRASHED SNOWSPEEDER], 156 [LUKE EMERGES FROM SNOWSPEEDER]
After shooting Hoth battle scenes with the last actor standing, the unit wrapped at 5:10 PM and, on Monday, actors and crew took flight SK 513 back to the UK via Bergen—with the exception of Mark Hamill and Des Webb, who were to film with second unit and return on Tuesday. “It is still hoped that the weather will improve sufficiently for the second unit to establish him on the glacier,” the Progress Report reads.
“During almost the entire period of the first unit’s shooting, we had one break of clear weather for half a day,” says Watts. “The rest of it was all a compromise.”
“The camera crews were wonderful and everything ran pretty well, considering,” says Johnson, “but inevitably the weather forced us over schedule, since there were days at a time during which nothing could be photographed.”
“We were standing at the railway station at Finse,” adds Watts, “having had this appalling weather, and, literally as we got on the train, it seemed to me that the snow was stopping and the sun was coming out. [laughs] But that’s just the luck of the game.”
SETUPS: 52; SCS. COMP: 7; SCREEN TIME: 7M 39S.
On Friday, March 9, Kershner filmed Han warming Luke in the innards of a deceased tauntaun.
On Saturday, March 10, Mayhew and Ford took up positions to fire on the Imperial probe droid, which ran on tracks hidden in the snow (the camera being used is the VistaRama).
Peter Mayhew on location, without his Chewbacca costume head.
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
Printed daily of a probot moment that won’t make the final cut; probably filmed on location in Finse, Norway, March 1979.
(0:30)
On the last day of first unit Finse filming, Sunday, March 11, production hauled out the full-sized snowspeeder for shots in which Luke exits his crashed vehicle.
The same day, Hamill climbed a ridge to gaze at the departing Falcon, which would be added in postproduction by ILM.
Audio element not supported.
Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) discusses Luke’s character arc from film to film. (Interview by Arnold, 1979)
(0:49)
STUDIO CLOUDS
MARCH TO MAY 1979
CHAPTER FIVE
“When we got back to Elstree Studios, we’d all been through something together,” says Kershner. “So from that point of view, the location was a good way to start the picture
.”
“On Monday, March 12, Gary saw his family home from the airport and then came back to the studio to catch up on all his correspondence,” says his assistant, Bunny Alsup, “and to talk to all the department heads and so on.”
“Technically, we started in the studio one day late,” says Watts. “But we were still on schedule, because we’d achieved one day of location work with Harrison Ford that had been scheduled for a stage.”
Unfortunately, the studio itself was still far from ready for production’s full-speed return. “Because of the fire on Stage 3, it was very, very difficult having nowhere to work,” says construction supervisor Bill Welch. “So if I could find an area as big as an office anywhere, suddenly you’d find two carpenters in there trying to make something.”
“We couldn’t get the labor all the way down to Weybridge to try and build another set,” Kurtz says. “So Bill Welch and his construction people had to keep moving things about all the time.”
“Because of the very bad winter, the Star Wars Stage wasn’t ready on time,” Welch adds. “We started up there and although we had a roof over our heads, the stage had no doors on it at the time and half the walls were incomplete, so it was bitterly cold. We were putting out bits of old backing to keep the draft down and we had soup twice a day. Then we also had all sorts of labor problems.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 23
