SETUPS: 1,264; SCS. COMP: 230/468; SCREEN TIME: 109M 29S/130M.
Diamond (left), Tomblin (hand on rail), Kershner, Anderson, and Hamill on the gantry.
Luke screams as Vader cuts off his hand. (Although a shot would be inserted at the end of the film showing droid parts in Luke’s forearm—as consistent with the script—Vader cuts off only his hand.).
The Log Sheet lists the shots, number of takes, and dialogue for second unit gantry work on August 24, 1979.
When Vader (Prowse) revealed his secret to Luke, Hamill was hanging onto a pinnacle above mattresses placed on cardboard boxes about 30 feet off the ground.
Vader extends his hand to Luke, who chooses to plunge into the void rather than join him.
In a moment that would not make the final cut, Vader watches as Luke is levitated above his head by the reactor’s winds.
“When we were filming on the gantry, a huge wind machine was making so much noise,” says Prowse. “I couldn’t hear a word. All my dialogue was with gestures, so as soon as I stopped, then Mark would speak. I could see his lips moving; as soon as he stopped, I’d come back with my next line.”
Hamill hangs below the walker’s belly, as Fred Evans adjusts a piece of machinery.
Preparation for Mayhew and the hog men in the furnace room (props would sometimes be recycled: for example, the assassin droid, whose only other scene is on the deck of Vader’s ship, makes a cameo behind Chewbacca. Evans is in foreground).
The filming of Mayhew and the hog men in the furnace room.
Lucas directed this new scene of Luke and the medical droid.
Kurtz and Reynolds watch as second unit films a wampa pickup at Elstree.
Des Webb operates the enormous snow creature feet.
Mayhew with Fisher.
Mayhew in a publicity shot with R2-D2.
Mayhew with fellow tall-person David Prowse.
YODA LIVES
AUGUST TO SEPTEMBER 1979
CHAPTER EIGHT
PHOTO FINISH
REPORT NO. 108: MONDAY, AUGUST 6: STAGE 9—INT. YODA’S HOUSE, 292 [LUKE BECOMES PUPIL]
Frank Oz began to puppeteer Yoda on Monday, August 6. Two reptile handlers were also on hand as Kershner and company moved to Yoda’s house interior on Stage 9, where they’d stay until Wednesday. “Very difficult—the bog planet may be the most difficult sequences of the whole film,” the director says. “It’s like a long-distance run. You have to sprint at the end. If you can’t sprint, then you lose the race.”
“I had to run on a treadmill in front of a bluescreen once,” Hamill says. “That’s where I got my nickname Mark Hamster. The worst part about it was you couldn’t look at your feet, so I took one misstep once and went flying off the boxes. I’ve also been hanging from a wire and now I have iguanas and anacondas everywhere. I’m not real crazy about snakes. It’s an endurance test! It’s like they’re trying to break me down—but I won’t let them.”
“Getting Yoda to the stage was a near thing,” says Nick Dudman, apprentice creature maker. “I very much became aware of the pressure to get it right. Stuart’s Yoda was literally down to the wire, with myself; Stuart; his wife, Kay, and son, Graham; Bob Keen; and the team being up all night, frantically trying to get it together. Trouble being, we didn’t know what we were doing because nobody had ever done it before. It was a real race against time and quite scary when we first took our finished work to the set.”
“We’ve been testing things out for the past couple of weeks and the head only went together completely over the last weekend,” Kurtz says. “It’s worse than working with a new actor for the first time, because you have technical support for Yoda. We’re still adjusting things every day.”
“We finally got the Yoda thing together, got it on the set, and I had no idea what to do with it,” Kershner says. “I hated Yoda. He scared me.”
“That was a real leap, because if that puppet didn’t work, the whole film was going to fail,” Lucas says. “If it’s a Muppet, if it’s Kermit running around, the whole movie will collapse under the weight of it.”
“I would separate Yoda from the other Muppets, because it’s a different style of character,” says Oz. “I work Yoda with my hand in him, and my thumb would be his mouth and my middle finger is up on his brow; my index finger, my fourth finger, is the upper palette and the small finger really does nothing. And then somebody will work the ears, somebody will work the eyes, and somebody else will help me maybe do a hand; and that is Kathy Mullen, Wendy Midener, and a fellow here called David Barclay, who at times helps us also.”
“Ben Kenobi’s outfit now seems to have turned into this costume of the Jedi Knights, really,” says Mollo. “Yoda wears a variant of the same thing.”
“We found this raw silk from India and it was just perfect,” says Kershner. “It hung nicely and it looked homemade. We had a piece left over, so I had a jacket made out of it for myself.”
“As Frank started working with some of the quirks and how the character worked, it very definitely came to life,” says Kurtz. “It was a collaborative thing: Frank, Wendy, and Kathy were the principal operators. David Barclay is the fourth person to help operate Yoda on occasion, during times when four people were necessary to operate all of its various aspects.” (Rachel Hunt was the hand double and chaperone for Yoda.)
“The biography I wrote of Yoda for myself is several pages,” Oz says. “I had a lot of specifics about what he liked to eat and how old he was. But what hit me most was that I think he came from a more formal time when I’m sure he had many friends. The guy’s probably 800 years old and somehow he wound up on Dagobah, on this planet all by himself, because of all the troubles around the universe. This was no longer his time. He came from a gentler world.”
“I can remember this little voice called over to me, ‘Norman, Norman,’ ” Norman Reynolds says. “And I actually blushed because it seemed so real, this weird, weird little thing.”
Adding to the already great technical pressures, Yoda’s first appearance was the longest dialogue scene in the picture. “At the moment, I’m using any old voice,” says Oz. “It doesn’t really matter, because I have a dozen things to think about when I’m doing him and I don’t want to concentrate on the voice. So what’s being heard now is not the voice he’s going to have. I have a voice for him and I’ll dub it in later—and whether they use my voice or some other voice they want to dub is up to them. Whatever makes the character best.”
“My big problem today is I’m supposed to get angry and try to stand up, and bump my head on the ceiling of Yoda’s house,” says Hamill of a last-minute idea. “We must have done it 14 times. If you feel this lump on my head, you’ll know I always hit my mark. You get annoyed, you curse under your breath, but you just do it. [The stage bell rings for another take.] Ugh—I’m going to go bump my head again.”
“There were plenty of difficult sets, but this one was really physically awkward,” says Suschitzky. “It was the house belonging to a Muppet; and, as he was quite small, they built the house to suit him and not to suit a human being. The set had three sides and virtually nowhere to conceal the lights. It had a fire going. I found it very difficult and painful to light, and I had to crawl on my hands and knees into it, as one would in a mine at the coalface.”
“I’d have Yoda take three steps instead of one, because he was looking too mechanical,” says Kershner. “He had to look real. So I’d work out the staging differently: For instance, I had him come around in front of the fireplace to say his lines as he was walking. That way, the audience would be looking at the fire as much as at him and it’d look more real.”
“What Yoda’s cooking up there, I don’t know,” says Hamill. “It’s like a mixture of pea soup, vegetable soup, pickles, olives, red pepper, just something that looks good for camera and tastes like a gastronomic nightmare, thank you.”
“You concentrate so much when you work that you forget everything around you,” says Oz. “It was very
physical, very exhausting work—like playing golf for the first time. You have a dozen things to think about at the same time, yet you want to be natural.”
“It would take three hours of rehearsal to do one line,” Kershner explains. “I’d have my television set and my headphones on, and I’d say, ‘Yoda stand up.’ Yoda would stand up. ‘You’re too straight. Hump down a little. Too much. Now look up at Mark.’ But Yoda’s eyes were focused on something close, so we’d have to refocus them. Then I’d say, ‘Your left eye is more focused than your right eye.’ So the little eyelid would lift up. ‘Now start your line, take a step, and sigh. Okay, try it again.’ Finally, after hours and hours of work, it started to happen.”
The seriousness of the scene did have a moment of unplanned lightness. “It was a joke I had asked Frank to do when I first met him,” says Hamill. “But I wasn’t really expecting it when it happened. It came on Yoda’s line, ‘Adventure, excitement. A Jedi craves not these things. Follow your feelings.’ So Luke tells Yoda, ‘I have followed my feelings …’ Anyway, Frank had a black velvet bag over his arm—and Miss Piggy just popped up in her lavender gown and jewelry, clashing with the set’s drabness. [Imitating voice of Miss Piggy:] ‘Feelings? You want feelings? Get behind this couch and I’ll show you feelings, punk. What is this hole? I’ve been booked into dumps before, but never like this. Get me my agent on the phone!’ ”
“I could joke about everything else, but not Yoda,” Kershner says. “I had to keep him a living thing with feelings and imagination.”
“All the crew were falling down laughing, but I noticed Gary and Kersh weren’t,” Hamill says. “It was so difficult getting scenes with Yoda that they hated to see even a couple of minutes lost. I would never have pulled a thing like that, but Frank did.”
“It was frustrating,” Kershner says. “We’d finish a scene and wouldn’t know if it worked. So you wait and sweat, and look at the rushes the next day and say, ‘That doesn’t work but that works. Maybe if I can cut away from that?’ ”
“Right up until the moment where he was on film and talking, it looked like it was going to be a disaster,” says Lucas. “It was really when he got on the set and we shot the first scene that things started to change. We didn’t know until we saw rushes from the first day and said, ‘Hey, that really works.’ But you still don’t know whether you’re kidding yourself, whether it’s actually working. But people would come in, the studio and other people, and they would all say, ‘Oh, that’s really amazing.’ ”
The Yoda team: Graham, Kay, and Stuart Freeborn, Barbara Ritchie, and three other crew; behind Stuart is Bob Keen and Mike Lockey.
Kershner and Freeborn confirm that Yoda’s final features do resemble those of his sculptor’s.
Lucas gets to know Yoda.
Kershner prepares to film the interior of Yoda’s house, on Stage 9, August 6, 1979.
Luke hears the voice of Ben Kenobi.
The Yoda puppet and Hamill.
SNAKES AND HUNTERS
REPORT NOS. 109–113: TUESDAY, AUGUST 7–SATURDAY, AUGUST 11: STAGE 9—INT. YODA’S HOUSE, 292; STAGE 8—EXT. EXHAUST PIPE AND WEATHER VANE, S407 [LUKE FALLS OUT OF CHUTE ONTO VANE]; STAR WARS STAGE—EXT. BOG CLEARING, 283 [LUKE MEETS YODA]
On the second day of the scene, “Muppet technician” Wendy Midener had to be treated for a rash. Between setups during which the mechanics of Yoda were constantly worked out, second unit filmed Hamill on the weather vane.
“We had the continuation on the unipod, which is meant to take place below Cloud City,” Diamond says. “This, once again, was exceptionally dangerous, because it meant that the artist was hanging over a space about 30 or 40 feet up. Unless we took precautions, he could have fallen and injured himself very badly or indeed he could have been killed.”
“Mark was literally killing himself at times,” Kershner says. “He was hanging far over the floor of the stage, attached to a tiny safety wire in case he fell off, which would have broken had he fallen—and he knew it.”
On Wednesday, they worked toward the end of the dialogue in Yoda’s house. “There was a take where a snake was on Yoda’s table,” says Hamill. “I’m pretty good with that particular king snake; I’ve been petting him a lot, but it started to go off the table. It went toward Frank Oz’s head and then made a turn—and started going up my leg during the take, but I didn’t cut it. I say, ‘I won’t fail you, I’m not afraid,’ and Yoda says, ‘You will be, you will be.’ That’s the last line of the scene, so they say, ‘Cut!’—and I say, ‘I’m already afraid! I am afraid! I’ve got a snake on my leg!’ ”
“They’re not dangerous,” animal handler Mike Culling assures Hamill. “They make excellent pets.”
“I don’t keep pets there,” Hamill points out.
“We’ve got a 10-foot African boa constrictor and some South American king snakes, which are about 2 foot 6,” says Culling, whose livestock supply company was called Animal Actors. “In the house itself, there are some lizards, which are about a foot long, and an iguana, which is about five feet long. The boa is called Basel and we’ve got Peter the Python. We’ve gone through something like a hundred creatures, ranging from spiders, scorpions, giant toads, rats, bats, about 25 varieties of lizard. You name it and Kersh has had a look at it to see if it’s going to fit in that set.”
Audio element not supported.
Hamill in conversation with Alan Arnold, recorded circa August 7, 1979, tells a story about an unscripted snake crawling up his leg during a scene with Yoda in the latter’s hovel.
(0:49)
Later that day, Arnold again asked Kurtz about Alec Guinness, but there was still no word. That evening, Welch once more ordered a night shift to hurry up on construction of the bog planet. The next day, production was finally back on the Star Wars Stage—but again, Kershner and company were filming on only a partially complete set.
“The bog was the most difficult set to both design and construct,” says Reynolds. “We started by making up a skeleton of the tree from tubular steel and literally building the plaster to trunk and roots, and so forth. We used these great vines, things that are known locally as old-man’s beard. We had prop people out scouring the various woods and forests around the studio in an area something like 20-odd miles, and we had lorry load after lorry load of these vines shipped into the studio. They actually helped to make the thing that much more believable.”
“The swamp wasn’t finished when we actually started shooting,” Kurtz says. “We had to start in the back corner with some of the smaller scenes and work our way out to the tank part where the lake was. That was probably our worst single problem with the bog, coupled with the fog and the environment, trying to keep the lighting consistent throughout the daylight and night scenes.”
“The bog planet was built to be like shooting on an actual location,” Watts says. “The ground was real earth, real mud, real water. We did not float the trees except one, therefore you shot around and worked within them as if you were in a real jungle. It was extremely muddy and we used a lot of smoke for fog and mist, which, although it doesn’t in fact damage your health, is not very pleasant to work in.”
“We had a real river running, with real animals and everything,” says Kurtz. “We had a lot of snakes—and some of them got away and started inhabiting the set. Birds flew through the doors of the sound stage and, because of the grass and dirt that was brought in, we had bugs and spiders and things. It became a real place.”
“I always wonder when I walk onto these sets what new playground they have for me,” says Hamill. “Because even though it is difficult for me and aggravating at times, when the moment actually comes when they’re filming, there’s that moment when you’re really there in your mind, believing it—that’s the most fun, when it all becomes real to you. I can’t get over that. They give you the outfit, guns, and hardware—it’s like being a kid again.”
“Our stage was so large that we actually generated massive temperature inversion
s,” says Kershner. “We’d get ready for a scene by shooting oil into the air for fog effects, but it would just hang in the air because of the inversion; it was horizontal to the floor, so we’d have to wait until it dispersed and started to look like actual mist.”
“The smoke drove me crazy,” Hamill says. “They’d yell, ‘More smoke—get it in the background!’ Frank was able to wear a mask to protect himself from the vapors of the mineral oil that was being sprayed. So did Kersh. But I couldn’t, since I was being photographed.”
“We’ve got some pythons in the swamp,” Culling says. “They’re about 22 feet long and weigh about 200 pounds. And we’ve got an anaconda, which is about 24 feet long.”
Hamill and Oz’s first scene was Luke’s encounter with the strange creature after crash-landing his X-wing in the swamp. “Prior to each setup, Kersh stalks the undergrowth like a peripatetic hunter seeking a secure encampment, with Kurtz at his side pressing for a decision,” Arnold writes. “For there is understandably an air of urgency on the set now as the movie struggles to reach completion. This tall, sparse man moves like a pliant giant through the jungle undergrowth, which is surrounded by that unique miasma of cables and equipment that seems inevitably to place a movie set on the edge of chaos.”
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (Enhanced Edition) Page 40
