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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  After that debacle, the retreat from the trenches was shot on Saturday, and several extras suffered from minor cases of frostbite. On Monday, second unit filmed the Rebel base entrance in heavy winds and snow.

  “We shot quite a few scenes on the blue glacier [Hardangerjøkulen],” says Tomkins. “On one occasion we took these big gun emplacements and the blue ice became the exterior entrance to the ice cave, where the X-fighters and snowspeeders were going to be housed. We went back the next day to finish the sequence only to find five igloos. Some local students had camped out on one of the coldest nights of the year, when temperatures were down to 30 below Fahrenheit, and they’d actually built their own igloos alongside our guns.”

  During this time, the helicopter crew, having flown from England in stages, was using the Wesscam to make aerial plates, one of which was designed for the opening of the film. “This shot,” Goodman says, “involved climbing to 15,000 feet altitude and falling in ‘auto rotation,’ with no power from the engine going to the rotors of the helicopter. In such a state, the machine can fall at 2,500 feet a minute or approximately 30 mph, and when this is multiplied by 4 and combined with a forward effective speed of 400 mph as the camera levels out over the snow, at between 3 and 6 feet, the result can be quite effective.”

  Often their footage was captured at speeds of 100 mph only four feet above the ground, so they had to be sure the terrain was completely flat before filming. If they stopped for any reason, they would never shut off the turbine due to the extreme cold, “for fear that it may not start again.”

  On March 22, the weather turned bad once more. “They were lucky with the weather and had a very good week or eight days,” Watts says. “They managed to achieve most or all of the trench battle. But unfortunately, it clouded in again, so they’ve been picking up whatever they can and praying for good weather to be able to complete what they have to do on the location.”

  “On one occasion, we’d had a very miserable day without shooting, so the construction crew and the electricians, just to let off steam, decided to have an impromptu fancy dress party,” says Tomkins. “They all came down to dinner wearing their long johns and goggles, and we had some very good singsongs after the meal. It took the edge off everyone being so down after two days of bad weather, you know. The next day was fine. We went out and we caught up.”

  As weather conditions varied, production filmed a double for Han Solo ambushing the probe droid along with additional battle inserts. More injuries and frostbite occurred, and one crew member was sent to Oslo on “compassionate leave.” Equipment also suffered with burned-out clutches, bursting camera boxes, and so on.

  “We did a lot of the sequences’ close-ups, mostly of the troops running and things,” Tomkins says. “We also did Luke running and firing his catapult, which goes up to the underside of the walker, where he’s pulled up, which we did with a helicopter.”

  On Sunday, April 1, Colin Skeaping doubled in another shot of Luke falling into the snow from the belly of the walker. On Wednesday, MacDonald, Bloom, and company departed Finse by the 3:18 PM train to Bergen, leaving for London the next day. On the last day, there had been a huge avalanche—which the local people explained as a sign that spring had arrived.

  “We were supposed to be there for three weeks,” Bloom says. “We were there for eight.”

  “I can remember when we finally left, we presented the hotel with gifts,” says Tomkins. “We had a collection and we managed to save enough money to give the ladies that brought the food out to us gold lockets, which we inscribed on the back, Star Wars. We presented all the staff of the hotel with a present and they were very delighted; the next evening, they reciprocated and gave everyone a little pewter cup with the words, Thank you, Star Wars.”

  Second unit made use of storyboards by Beddoes for many of its shots, such as Rebels in the trenches.

  After several stops along the way, the helicopter and crew finally arrived in Finse, Norway (the Wesscam camera is encased in the ball attached to the exterior). Here they airlift stuntman Colin Skeaping dressed as Luke, who is being pulled up to the belly of a walker. Filmed on the lake outside the hotel, this tough shot took a few hours to complete.

  The helicopter crew poses on the glacier in Finse, Norway.

  An Ivor Beddoes storyboard.

  Second unit made use of mannequins dressed as Rebel troopers for some shots with explosives.

  This big explosion, which would later be used for the probe’s crash-landing on Hoth, took several hours to set up.

  A rare panoramic photo of second unit and its long trench.

  Dressed in pilot gear, stuntman Colin Skeaping performs a long fall to the snow that would be used for the moment in which Luke detaches himself from beneath the Imperial walker (again, filmed on the lake outside the hotel, as was the Rebel retreat).

  Rebels retreat from the trenches, filmed on Saturday, March 31, 1979.

  * * *

  TALKING TRASH

  NOS. 25–30, THURSDAY–THURSDAY, APRIL 5–12: STAGE 2—INT. CLOUD CITY (CORRIDORS AND ANTE-ROOM), 352 [LANDO AND OTHERS ON LANDING PLATFORM], 354 [HAN AND LANDO CATCH UP], 355 [C-3PO DESTROYED], 361 [CORRIDOR ON WAY TO “LUNCH”], 380 [LUKE SEES FETT], 381 [LEIA TRIES TO WARN LUKE]; LIVING QUARTERS, 360 [LEIA SUSPICIOUS]

  By Thursday, April 5, Sid Ganis had returned to Los Angeles and production was five days over. While first unit started on several Cloud City sets, including the scene where C-3PO is blasted apart by stormtroopers, second unit continued in the ice corridors. On April 10, production was 6.5 days over and Jeremy Bulloch had his first day on camera in scene 380, transporting Han Solo in carbonite and shooting at Luke Skywalker. “I remember the director saying to me before we started, ‘This character has to be a very cool customer. Imagine you’re walking down the street in a Western town. He’s quick, but stealthy.’ ”

  Fett’s costume was sometimes a hindrance to this coolness, however, as was the constantly changing program. Thinking he had time before a scene was to be shot, the actor drank a couple of glasses of lager—when he was ordered back on set. “The two pints had worked their way to my bladder, but I couldn’t get out of my costume,” Bulloch says. “You can’t suddenly say in the middle of shooting a scene, ‘Excuse me, could I relieve myself?’ It would’ve taken me 20 minutes to take the costume off and 20 minutes to put it on again. But everyone knew I was desperate to go and they all made remarks.”

  Carrie Fisher’s physical ailments also persisted and she was excused early due to illness, missing several days after being diagnosed with influenza and bronchitis. Harrison Ford also felt unwell and saw a doctor, but didn’t miss any days. According to Arnold, Fisher, perhaps seeking a quieter environment, moved “to a home leased to her by Eric Idle of Monty Python celebrity.” But the real problem was that Fisher, as she would later write, was continuing a pattern of taking “hallucinogens and painkillers. Mind expanders and painkillers. (Though over time and protracted use they became mind relievers and pain expanders—a place where everything hurt and nothing made sense.)”

  On Thursday, April 12, a special crew filmed 41 of Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings for the teaser trailer of Empire (50 feet was exposed for each illustration, using a 1:1.85 format). And spring had finally arrived. After shooting for more than a month, with a few days to relax over the Easter holiday weekend, cast and crew were able to reflect upon their director.

  “He has a rather fluid style,” says Hirsch, who was already cutting together scenes. “Not that he moves the camera all that much; he moves the camera at a certain moment through a scene and his staging of the action is fluid. Kersh doesn’t cover a scene in a simplistic way. He doesn’t shoot a master and then go in for close-ups. He will shoot mini masters that overlap at certain key points. It’s a subtle thing. He really knows what he’s doing.”

  “I stage differently from George; I use the camera differently,” says Kershner. “I use the actors in a different way. I certainly love his work but min
e is just different. The photography is totally different, the lighting, the movement.”

  “Irv is a director who seems to be very interested in the telling of the story,” McQuarrie says. “He didn’t have time to get involved the way George does in the nature of all the aspects of the film: the angles, compositions, shots, the color, the texture. George, perhaps, is more of an artist, where Kersh sees things from another point of view, a dramatic one concerning the motivation of the characters. Not that Kersh didn’t get involved. He did his primary job—and, believe me, it’s a full-time project just getting the scenes organized, rehearsed, set up, and shot.”

  “I was constantly insecure about whether the tone was right—tone is everything, an indefinable thing, like quality,” Kershner says. “True discipline is from within. Every artist, every painter, every novelist, anyone who does anything must do it for himself, must have his own discipline. That is really what tempers the character. That’s what makes it possible to do something beautiful and to become something beautiful. That, ultimately, is what the film I’m making is about.”

  “I think that I give myself to him,” says Billy Dee Williams. “I like to watch him, because his mind is constantly working. This is a vehicle that’s new to him, too, and I think that certainly he’s got to proceed in a way where he’s comfortable about what he’s doing. And the only way he can be comfortable is to cater to certain idiosyncratic approaches until he finally gets what he wants. But I think he gets it. There’s no question about it. I mean, the man has a tremendous amount of energy and imagination; he’s a very creative man.”

  On the Cloud City corridor set, Kershner talks with Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian).

  Kershner hugs Fisher, April 1979.

  Celebrating his birthday on April 29 are Kershner and producer Gary Kurtz, focus puller Kelvin Pike, Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), and editor Paul Hirsch.

  Billy Dee Williams, Fisher, Mayhew, and Ford between takes of the scene in which their characters head toward the dining room, April 1979.

  Fisher and Mayhew.

  David Tomblin and Fisher.

  Fisher and Kurtz.

  Fisher touches up her makeup.

  A fallen stormtrooper.

  “I make believe I’m friends with the actors, then I bully them,” the director says. “But then I become hooked and I do become friends. I have to create an atmosphere of love. I want to feel close to the actors and I want them to feel close to me. I want them to be able to reveal their innermost secrets through their faces, their bodies, their voices. I want them to trust me, so that when they’ve finished a take and they’re totally insecure, which all actors should be if they’re not censoring themselves, they will look at me openhearted and say, ‘Was it any good?’ If they can, then they’ve done their best. If they do the take and say, ‘That’s great,’ then they are either tired, lost, or conning themselves and me.”

  “I’m open to suggestion,” Fisher says. “It would be stupid to be otherwise. Leia is not a real character. She is more of a caricature and is somewhat one-dimensional. It’s not really possible to write out a list of Princess Leia’s likes and dislikes. I do know her favorite color, though—it’s white. She wears white all the time. But that doesn’t help me much. In this film, though, Leia develops more. Kersh directs us as actors more than George did. But in Star Wars, George didn’t really have to. There weren’t as many scenes that called for character portrayal.”

  “Kersh would regularly say he liked what I did,” Daniels says. “He would regularly say, ‘You’re not in this scene, but I think you should be in this scene.’ Which was tremendously flattering; he made me feel really wanted. The difficulty was, of course, there was a reason I wasn’t required in the scene. So, sometimes, I didn’t have a real reason to be around. I think that’s a shame, because it slightly dilutes the efficacy of the character.”

  “I treated the robots as if they were human,” Kershner says. “If I was working with Artoo, I talked to Artoo and not to the people working him, whether it was the electronics people or the actor inside. I would talk to Threepio as if it was really Threepio. I’d try to talk with Chewbacca only when the actor was fully costumed. Then I was staring at the Wookiee and not just an actor inside a Chewbacca suit. That helped tremendously.”

  “Kersh, I think, finds it easy to communicate with the actors,” Daniels adds. “He is very excitable.”

  “I never told anyone I was doing this because they would have thought I was out of my head,” Kershner adds. “But I finally started talking to my garbage cans at home. I’d be going to toss out some trash and I’d tell it, ‘Open up.’ The gadgetry becomes terribly real after a time.”

  “Kersh has made it his own film,” Hamill says. “As a director, he’s quite a bit different from George outwardly, and a different personality. I think George chose him because he likes his movies.”

  “These are a set of characters that sprang out of George’s mind,” Kershner says, “which are based on characters that he absorbed from the culture—comics, books, films—they’ve all been filtered through his mind. But what I’m taking, really, is raw material. He mined it and I’m decorating it and making, I hope, little jewels. The gold is there. I needed the gold in order to make the fine jewelry.”

  “Kersh wanted to discuss it much more and there was much more to discuss,” says Fisher. “Unlike a play, you don’t have an audience, so you don’t know what works and what doesn’t—so that’s where both Kersh and George, for me, were the best ever, because they are one body.”

  “I never knew that my character only had two dimensions until critics told me,” Ford says. “I don’t play the third dimension, because it wasn’t the author’s or the director’s choice to do that. But it’s there. It has to be there. I don’t have to play it because it’s me. It’s part of me, so the simpler I keep myself, the more it shows. This is a simple kind of enterprise and as such, the motives of the people involved are generally pretty straightforward. I enjoy playing this character. That’s it for me. I cannot conceive of a negative aspect to doing this film.”

  “The thing that you learn in directing,” Kershner says, “is that when you’re on the floor, no matter how complex the shooting is—and the shooting is pretty complex here—you have to remain absolutely sensitive to every nuance of the behavior of the people around you. Because, ultimately, if you don’t keep in mind the overall humanity, then the machine takes over and suddenly all you have are technically fine shots, technically good performances. The story’s being told, but something’s lacking, something mysterious, indefinable.

  “So I am constantly talking with the actors. There’s an enormous amount of feedback that you get from actors. I set the scene according to what I know the actors can do and should do and have been doing up till then. I’m using their temperaments; I’m using their qualities. To make them work against their quality would create conflict.”

  During that long weekend, Fisher went to the countryside, staying at an old inn in the village of Slaughter in the Cotswolds, according to Arnold. “Kersh went on a sentimental journey into East Anglia, the flatlands of Suffolk and Norfolk where there are still American air bases. He was stationed at one of them while in England in the U.S. Air Force over twenty years ago. But Harrison was unlucky. Bedridden with the flu, he also suffered from the incessant ringing of a security alarm right outside his window. ‘If I’d had a laser gun I would have shot at it,’ he told me.”

  “When I get home I’m faced with the practical problem of what and how to eat,” Ford adds. “That occupies the period of time between returning from work and falling asleep. [laughs] And in the morning I get up and go to work. I don’t really have a social life. I am a social type, but I just haven’t got the energy for it.”

  IMMORAL LIZARD

  NOS. 31–40, TUESDAY, APRIL 17–MONDAY, APRIL 30: STAGE 2—INT. CLOUD CITY: SCS. 360, 380, 381, 382 [LUKE, FETT, LEIA SHOOTOUT], 385 [CHEWIE STRANGLES LANDO], S386 [GROUP FINDS R2]; S
TAGE 1—INT./EXT. ICE GORGE, 21, 22 [LUKE UPSIDE DOWN]; STAGE 5—INT. VADER’S STAR DESTROYER (MAIN CONTROL DECK), 55 [VADER ORDERS THEM TO THE HOTH SYSTEM], 280 [IN THE ASTEROID FIELD], S432 [VADER REALIZES LUKE IS GONE]; 334 [DEATH OF CAPTAIN NEEDA]; VADER’S CHAMBER, 59 [OUT OF HYPERSPACE TOO CLOSE]; IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER NO. 2, 316 [BOUNTY HUNTERS], 330 [FALCON “ATTACKS”], 331 [FALCON DISAPPEARS]

  Worldwide interest in Empire had become intense, Arnold says, with media inquiries averaging around 130 per week: “They come from all over the world, Alaska to Brazil, from a Norwegian provincial daily to an Australian woman’s magazine, from Warsaw to South Africa.”

  Production resumed work on the Cloud City interiors, scene 360, in which Leia and Han flirt and argue in their living quarters. Their dialogue had been revised on March 22, but Kershner and the actors made further revisions before shooting. Ford’s two young sons, on vacation, watched their dad perform.

  By Thursday, April 19, production was 10.5 days over and beginning to unravel. Brian Johnson departed for ILM to monitor its work, and an advance-shooting schedule was reissued with reshuffled scenes. “I have a full pyrotechnics team headed up by Nicky Allder, who’s very experienced,” Johnson says. “So I’m now free to go back to California and carry on with the model work, which is running a little behind schedule at the moment, so we need to speed them up.”