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The following off-days, Kershner studied the film. “I find that the big problem is to maintain a rhythmic unity—that’s where you can often be fooled, so you have to concentrate constantly—weekends I use for that,” he says. “Every shot is technical, but more difficult than technique is the rhythm of the film. By doing as many cuts as we have to make, with the number of scenes, if they don’t flow together rhythmically, then you’ll feel dissatisfaction with it. So I ask myself, What was the last scene? What was the scene before that? What’s the scene I’m going to do afterward?
“So I will come in on Saturday and I’ll walk through the set. I go up to my office and I’ll just sit, go through the script, and think in terms of the story. On Sunday, I’ll think broadly again. I’ll allow my mind to go over the whole story to get the overview—and not lose it.”
Ford as Solo seen from an odd vantage point on the Rebel Command Center set.
Lucas is visited by Walter Murch (sound montagist on THX 1138 and American Graffiti) on the Command Center set.
Ford waits for the cameras to roll.
Fisher talks with Kershner.
Kershner directs an extra in a droid costume during prep for a scene on the rebel command center set.
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Hamill and Ford are asked what they think are the differences between the respective directing styles of Lucas and Kershner. (Interview on the set by behind-the-scenes director Michel Parbot)
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ENTER: DARTH VADER
NOS. 17–19, MONDAY–WEDNESDAY, MARCH 26–28: INT. COMMAND CENTER & ICE CORRIDOR: 14, 53 [HAN REPORTS PROBE DROID SELF-DESTRUCTED], 15 PT., 115 [SOUND THE EVACUATION], 178 [HAN RETURNS FOR LEIA], T205 [VADER ENTERS BASE]
After an uneventful Monday, Lucas boarded a flight home Tuesday evening and Bruce Boa completed his role as General Rieekan. That day, they’d filmed the Imperial attack on the ice base, “a busy day for special effects because the bombardment causes a cave-in,” Arnold writes.
“Boulders of ice fall, steam escapes from the shattered ventilation shafts, and there are a variety of explosions. This set, so carefully devised and so intricately constructed, is being slowly wrecked before the cameras.”
On Wednesday, after being on call the two previous days, David Prowse shot his first scene as Darth Vader, who enters the crumbling hideout. “I was interested in a way to introduce the characters so that it was effortless and yet dramatic,” says Kershner. “You can’t suddenly have a person step out of a door and say, ‘Here I am,’ like on the stage. I wanted the audience to be propelled into the story, so I designed a special shot to reveal each and every one of the characters.”
“The greatest bit was when they shot my big entrance,” Prowse says. “We are in this cave on the ice planet. They decided to put two stuntmen dressed as snowtroopers in front of me and six actors behind. So here we are in this tiny set waiting for the action to start. The effects men set off the charges in the wall and we got this enormous explosion. Of course, the cave walls are polystyrene and that went everywhere. The two stuntmen went running through the hole, but, because they couldn’t see through their masks, they tripped over the polystyrene blocks and fell. I started to make my dramatic entrance at about the same time, but I couldn’t move—one of the actors behind me had stepped onto my cape. I tried to get away and my cape came off and I fell on top of the two stuntmen.”
“If you’ve got to get all the emotions and dialogue right in a scene with a lot of effects, all those variables have to work,” says Fisher. “If one goes wrong, you go into take after take, so there is a lot of pressure. At one time, we did a huge scene where the whole ice thing is collapsing and I had to turn and say directly into camera, ‘Evacuate the rest of the ground patrol.’ This is the first take, and all these things were happening, and all I could say was, ‘… mumble, mumble …’ and then I walked off exactly as though I’d said it correctly.”
Circa March 28 1979, snowtroopers accompanied Darth Vader (Prowse) as he entered the Rebel base.
Kurtz watches as Ford rehearses with Kershner a scene in which Solo gives orders to a Rebel soldier (Ray Hassett was the deck officer; Norwich Duff played the second officer). In the foreground, a medical droid examines a dead tauntaun, killed by invading snow creatures (a plot point that would not make the final cut).
Sculptor Roy Rodgers works on the practical model of the medical droid, based on earlier approved concepts.
INSIDE THE MONSTER
NOS. 20–24, THURSDAY, MARCH 29–WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4: INT. MAIN ICE TUNNEL, 25 [HAN AND DEAD TAUNTAUN], 180 [C-3PO OUTSIDE WAMPA ROOM], 182 [HAN AND LEIA CUT OFF], 44 [R2 ENCOUNTERS WAMPA, WHICH IS FELLED BY A BAZOOKA BLAST]
March 29 and 30, the first unit stayed in the Main Ice Tunnel; the latter day, Jack Purvis, listed as “Chief Hogman,” participated in a dress rehearsal.
“As I’ve got the main part in the film and my partner hasn’t, it’s been a little bit dicey as regards our double act, the Mini Tones,” says Baker. “Jack and I try to keep the peace, as it were, and we’ve come to arrangements. We’re still the best of friends and we’ve worked things out money-wise, but it’s a bit of a touchy situation. Really, our forte is cabaret and our act in the club, but he’s in the picture. He’s a pig man, I think. And there are other parts and bits where he’ll eventually crop up.”
Also on Friday, a scene in which a wampa “thrusts its hideous claws through a cavern wall took a very long time to set up,” Arnold writes. “We knew that if it were not achieved in one take the whole thing would have to be mounted again for another try and consume costly time.”
“It’s very difficult to give the illusion and suggest more than you see, which is what we’re trying to do,” says Kershner. “Everybody is having lunch now, thinking about one thing: Is it going to work? Because we’re going to try it right after lunch. We have a confrontation between a tiny Artoo and a giant ice creature, who’s about 11 feet tall, and it’s proving difficult. We’re going to have one attempt. We’ve got four cameras on it, including VistaVision—and if we don’t get it the first time, it will be disastrous.”
The endeavor failed. “The major problem was the snow creature being 9 or 10 feet tall,” Johnson says. “The operative’s arms are only half the length of the snow creature’s, so, in effect, he’s trying to propel force from the elbows; he couldn’t actually push the wall himself. In the end, we pulled the bottom of the wall out, but you’re just at the mercy of how the wall breaks up.”
“The man inside the monster suit has been there three hours and is suffering from stomach cramps,” the Progress Report reads. Fortunately for Des Webb, a planned “bazooka hit fx on wampa” was delayed.
A more sinister note was sounded that day when a group from Bank of America visited the set, no doubt alarmed by rising costs and revised schedules. Last but not least, a postal strike meant that salary checks were handed out to crew and not sent to their respective banks.
On Monday, April 2, Weber and Titelman returned to the States; Fisher stayed home with a cold; Hamill suffered a wrist injury; and second unit conducted several lighting tests for Cloud City, on Stage 2. Another group visited the set, this time executives from the General Mills conglomerate and its British subsidiaries.
“The toys became more prominent,” says Alsup. “Now Kenner was pretty keen to get everything rolling way before the film was even made. And that interfered with Gary and Robert Watts, who were under the gun for getting this movie in on budget and on time—but they kept having to meet deadlines for the toys. Robert would say, ‘Are we making a movie or are we making toys?’ [laughs] It was just added pressure is all, which would affect certain crew members who were designing models and things.”
That evening, Kurtz hosted a dinner for Kershner and the four principals. According to Arnold, a Japanese restaurant wa
s chosen “because the quiet atmosphere and private rooms there encourage conversation. On a picture as difficult as this one, it is important that the professional relationships between the cast and the filmmakers be as casual.”
“Harrison and I would tend to go to Carrie’s house,” says Hamill. “I once had a Mexican food dinner and Carrie and Harrison came over. I make a mean guacamole.”
Tuesday, an entire day was spent on more wampa shots. On Wednesday, the Norway second unit wrapped and returned to England (see the sidebar on this page).
In what would become a deleted scene, a wampa breaks through a wall in the Rebel base.
In other shots that would not make the final cut, a snow creature attacks a Rebel (Alister Cameron, a sergeant in scene 44).
A snow creature attacks a snowtrooper.
In another deleted scene, a wampa is blasted by a Rebel bazooka, and then falls to reveal its innards.
Between shots, Des Webb in the snow creature costume gets air through a tube.
SETUPS: 156; SCS. COMP: 28/445; SCREEN TIME: 18M 55S/130M.
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MARCH ILM: HILARITY AND INNOVATION
On March 12, ILM had shipped the newly christened Empireflex camera to Norway, where production’s second unit would try to make use of it. On March 17, plans were submitted to Lucas that would expand the cramped Kerner facility. The next week, Miki Herman’s notes explain that they had a new camera—a “hispeed 4-perf Mitchell Mark II,” which Jim Beaumont was “making steady”—but “production cannot be continuously disrupted by construction … Need more room!”
On March 26, a new optical printer was “top priority” and, four days later, a general meeting was planned “for Kerner Co. employees to discuss building security and to introduce new employees.”
Further tests were also conducted with the tauntaun, walkers, artificial snow, and asteroid sequences. ILM’s workload increased when the plan to shoot an 18-foot-long mechanical foot crushing a snowspeeder in England was scrapped and that sequence assigned to the effects facility—which meant that building their new optical printer became all the more essential.
“I had to stick my neck out a long way, because the printer was a prototype and was going to cost a half million dollars or more,” says Edlund, who worked with George Randle on procuring the cameras and movements. “The electronics equipment was Jerry Jeffress’s forte. It is a beam-splitter printer with four projector heads. With four heads, you can put together a shot in one pass.”
“In fact, some of us tried to stop this project, mainly optical supervisor Bruce Nicholson and myself,” says Muren, who was dubious of the printer’s utility and feasibility.
“We were shooting on a snow planet, which was basically light-gray ships against a white background, so it was like the nightmare of nightmares for a compositing artist,” Edlund adds. “But I had this five-volume set of optical ideas, about 1,000 pages of applied optics, and I noticed there was a system called telecentric optics that were used in tank periscopes in the Second World War. And I thought, This is the principle that will make it possible for us to do peerless mattes for Empire.”
The question was: Would the new optical printer be ready in time—and if it was, would it work?
Walker animatics by John Van Vliet.
Early animatics of the walkers included a very spry machine that jumped.
A “taun bluescreen test” conducted on March 27, 1979.
Tippett and an early walker test.
A mock-up of the proposed new optical printer. “With the three lenses, the lamphouse, the first projector, the relay lens, the telecentric relay lens, the next projector, the beam-splitter cube for the other pair of projectors, and then the camera with an anamorphic lens, it was really one hell of an optical project,” says Edlund. “Luckily, I’d met David Grafton, who was a lens designer for Xerox. He was great because he not only could design lenses with a sense of optical glass, but he also knew how to make a lens that wouldn’t be so overdesigned that the tolerances would be too great.”
* * *
* * *
SECOND SNOW UNIT
REPORT NOS. 8–29: MONDAY, MARCH 12–TUESDAY, APRIL 3, 1979. FINSE, NORWAY; EXT. PLAIN OF HOTH [BATTLE FIELD AND TRENCHES, ETC.]
After Hamill departed from Finse, second unit continued to shoot Battle of Hoth scenes at Camp Sharman, with “explosions, guns firing,” about 43 extras, and two stuntmen: Colin Skeaping and Bob Anderson. The Empireflex camera arrived that week, and, under the direction of Peter MacDonald, much work was completed over 21 days in extraordinary circumstances.
“One of the roles I had was to be responsible for the special effects shooting of the whole Norwegian second unit,” says Jim Bloom, “when they were off doing all the battle scenes.”
In addition to inserts and work with stuntmen doubling for Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, the primary task of the second unit was blowing things up. “Plastic cables go stiff in extreme cold or snap when taut,” says special effects technician Allan Bryce. “They become as brittle as glass. So we’ve had to devise new types of cable for our explosive firings. Batteries lose their efficiency, too; their electrolyte freezes. That’s a big problem for us. We get a lot of advice from NATO, some of whose personnel have had a lot of experience at 40 degrees below.”
“We had to do a lot of explosions, blowing up gun towers, and so on,” says Johnson. “And stunt work which under the best of conditions is difficult. But here, 6,000 feet up the side of a glacier in what turned out to be Norway’s worst weather in 150 years, even the simplest tasks became extremely difficult.”
On Friday, March 16, the “dish-gun” explosion was filmed. Later on, a key piece of destruction was planned. “We discovered that every day, between 12 and 1 o’clock, you’d get this patch of sunlight moving across the top of the glacier,” says Bloom. “So we went out and we set up four or five cameras just to capture this one big explosion. But there’s an old story in the movie business called, ‘Ready when you are, C. B.,’ which has to do with the parting of the Red Sea in the Cecil B. DeMille film; they do the whole complicated setup and shot, and afterward the cameraman just says, ‘Ready when you are, C. B.’ The joke is he missed it completely.”
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Second unit assistant director Bill Westley tries to explain to Norwegian extras, despite the language barrier, how to act during a shot, with limited success, on location in Finse, Norway, late March/early April 1979.
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“There was one interesting incident, which at the time was absolute hell for me, but now I can look back and it’s a good after-dinner story,” says art director Alan Tomkins. “We were shooting the space probe coming down and hitting the mountainside, and we had to have an explosion where it hit. So we had three or even four cameras stationed about half a mile away on telephoto lenses. I went up there with the special effects man to lay the charges and he put eight sticks of dynamite into the hole, which had to be three meters deep. I then went back to the bottom, where we waited and waited for the weather to be right. There was quite a tension.”
“We’d anticipated a lot more explosives needed than we would normally use because the snow damps the explosive force,” Johnson says. “The thing we hadn’t really taken into account was just how cold it was going to get.”
“We got the whole unit up there,” Bloom continues. “The English special effects man was all ready with the big explosion and he had a walkie-talkie and everything was timed so at the right moment in the sequence we would cue him for explosion. And at 11:30, we say, ‘Here comes the sun!’ So I said, “Roll the cameras.’ ‘Rolling!’ ‘Action!’ And I finally said, ‘Explosion!’ And … nothing.”
“The big moment arrives at about 11:30, and my eyes are now glued to the spot where eight sticks of dynamite are going to explode,” says Tomkins. “Absolutely nothing. Ju
st the wind blowing gently. And Peter MacDonald is getting on the radio, very irate, saying, ‘What the hell is going on up there?’ No reply. Well now, the whole of the unit is relying on me to keep the thing running. I knew we had to get this little bit of sun, so I started to run. But the air up there is quite thin. I had only been going up the hill two or three minutes when they came on the radio again, ‘Have you got there yet?’ But I’m completely breathless and I can’t actually speak.”
“The sun left, the fog came in, and we missed the shot,” Bloom says. “And we finally got the guy on the radio and we asked, ‘What happened?’ And he went, ‘Ready!’ He’s ready for the explosion. It was such a classic DeMille moment. But we blew it up anyway.”
“Eventually, I make it to the top and I crawl, exhausted, over the top of the mountain to see the special effects man behind the rock with the plunger,” Tomkins concludes. “And he says, ‘Why haven’t they shot?’ So I signal, ‘Your radio! Your radio!!’ Because when he’d bent down to press the plunger, he’d knocked the battery box off his radio, but I didn’t have enough breath to explain it all. So he put it right, got on the radio, and said, ‘I’m ready when you are.’ Well, you can imagine, they’d been ready for like 15 minutes! So the airways were blue for a long time …”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 26
