The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  With Guinness cast, the other roles would have to work around him, as an ensemble. Though nothing else was definite, Christopher Walken was an option for Han Solo, with Charley Martin Smith a Luke Starkiller possibility, along with Will Seltzer and Mark Hamill, who was still in the running despite his own misgivings. “I think if George had chosen Walken, the princess would have been Jodie Foster,” Ford says. However, Foster wasn’t yet eighteen years old, which was also true for Terri Nunn. Their status as minors would’ve been a big drawback to the compressed schedule, as they could have worked only a limited number of hours per day.

  A CONVERSATION

  On January 10 George Lucas debriefed Gary Kurtz on the changes to the film represented by the fourth draft. During their conversation, Lucas mentions new scenes or reworkings of scenes that never made it to the film or any of the drafts, while Kurtz’s preoccupations are largely logistical.

  George Lucas:…We go back to the planet Tatooine and we have Luke and his friends, and he sees Biggs and they go outside. We cut back to a confrontation between Vader and the princess, then we cut back to Luke and Biggs at the Anchorhead power station. The scene is now inside, but we’ll probably move it to the outside, or half and half.

  Gary Kurtz: The discussion is now later in the film?

  Lucas: Yeah. Then Artoo and Threepio are wandering around in the desert. They have an argument, and they split up. Then we go to the power station; we have Luke and Han Solo in that scene, which is the one that may be changed … Luke is going to have a scene where he works with the robots to find out where they’re going; all that is a little bit different. He says he’ll help them; he’ll take them to Ben Kenobi, but that’s the only place he’s going to take them.

  Kurtz: They don’t think they could make it on their own?

  Lucas: Well, they’re not having very much success; they’d probably get picked up by Jawas again, so he takes them.

  Kurtz: In the crossing-the-desert process [front projection] scene, they’re watched by the Tusken Raiders; they make camp and they’re attacked by the Raiders?

  Lucas: Right. Now, in this attack they don’t put him up on the windmill, they just drag him into the clearing and start looting the car; then Ben comes and scares them off. Then Ben takes Luke back to his house, and Luke and Ben get into various discussions about the robots, they see the message, and Ben talks Luke into taking him to Mos Eisley [. . .] So they go, they see Mos Eisley, and they drive through and ask some Jawas for directions, and…

  Kurtz: You’re eliminating the crystal chamber scene, where Darth Vader talks to the Sith knights?

  Lucas: The crystal chamber is cut. It might be replaced by another scene with Vader. I’m not sure. I know the crystal chamber part is out, but there might be a scene with Darth Vader in the prison with Leia and a torture robot.

  Kurtz: I’m just worried about which scenes are shot with which actors…

  Lucas: Well, I may be moving this scene earlier.

  Kurtz: Let’s see, they go into Mos Eisley…

  Lucas: Right. In the cantina, they have the fight with the rodents, and they meet Chewbacca and Han Solo, who’s sitting at one of the tables. Now, here is the tricky part: After the cantina scene, we’ve faded out or dissolved or cut, and it’s morning. We cut to Luke or Han—doesn’t make any difference because they’re going to be intercut later—say we cut to

  Luke first. Luke and a man walking down the alley. Cut to them outside of a speeder lot selling the speeder—

  Kurtz: Seen from across the street.

  Lucas: —seen from across the street in a long shot. Intercut with that is Han and Chewbacca getting the spaceship ready in the docking bay. And some Imperial troops come in. They want to search the ship … I think I’ll switch that. Luke and the group arrive at the spaceship. They all get on board and Han starts making ready for the trip, then the Imperial troops arrive. They get into a gunfight with the troops. Really Han does, nobody else does, and they take off just in the nick of time.

  Kurtz: It’s going to be harder to make that alley scene and the used-speeder dealer work during the daytime than it is at dusk.

  George: Well, I can do it in early morning.

  Kurtz: Okay, so they sound the alarm. Then we cut inside the pirate ship?

  Lucas: Right. Then we go into a kind of warp drive, and they go faster than the speed of light, and there is that scene where they are playing the game and Luke is learning the Force—

  Kurtz: Now is that going to be during the time warp?

  Lucas: Yes […] And they get drawn in to the Death Star. Then you intercut that with Darth Vader finding out that they’ve arrived, that they’re there, they’ve caught ’em.

  Kurtz: He knows at that time that they’re the right ones?

  Lucas: Yes. Cut and the troops board the pirate ship in the docking bay, except no one’s aboard. So they go out to get some scanners. Cut and it’s empty. Bottom panels get kicked out of the floorboards, and our group emerges. They start trying to figure a way of taking off and go into the main living area of the spaceship—and Darth Vader’s there. But Ben has mysteriously disappeared. Instantly, in cutting, all of a sudden he’s not in the group anymore. Darth Vader says, ‘Nice try,’ and he marches them off the ship, which is the first time you realize that Ben isn’t there anymore. Darth Vader puts them down in a cell. Everybody goes in the cell except Artoo, and they start taking Artoo down the hallway—except when they get down to the end of the hallway, Ben attacks the troops. I haven’t quite figured out if Vader’s still there … No, Vader won’t be with this group. The troops march little Artoo down the hallway—and get wiped out by Ben in a very slick way. Then you cut into the prison cell, and all the guys are there, and Ben opens the door and they all escape. They run down the hallway and go into the princess’s cell.

  Kurtz: How does Ben find out that she’s there?

  Lucas: He has a way of knowing these things, because he has the Force of Others. It might get mentioned earlier. Maybe he just senses her presence. Afterward, they all go down into the underground dungeon and fight with the Dia Noga. The robots are now in that sequence.

  Kurtz: Artoo goes along under the water…

  Lucas:… with the light on, the little periscope—

  In England, Ivor Beddoes took over storyboarding for principal photography, while Joe Johnston continued in the States doing them for the VFX, concentrating on Ben Kenobi battling Darth Vader and a group of stormtroopers.

  Kurtz: Periscope?

  Lucas: The little antenna, something that pokes out of the water. We’ll have a skin diver play that part.

  Kurtz: Let’s back up. When they get put in the cell, what are they wearing?

  Lucas: Just their regular clothes.

  Kurtz: They don’t get changed into prison garb or anything?

  Lucas: No. I thought about that. I decided we won’t do it. They don’t stay in there long enough.

  Kurtz: So Ben shows up and helps them escape, but there’s no big fight in the control room of the prison?

  Lucas: No. Except for the fight with Ben.

  Kurtz: Do we see how Ben gets in there?

  Lucas: No, we don’t see how he gets in.

  Kurtz: So they get out of the garbage room and they’re across from the starship…

  Lucas:… and they see the starship. This is all very complex. It’s going to have to be worked out in detail; I don’t know whether I can just sit here and tell it. Ben will split off because Vader will have shown up in one of the hallways, and they will have this confrontation just like they did before. Before they fought over the Kiber Crystal, but now the Kiber Crystal’s gone.

  Kurtz: What about Ben being wounded, and all that stuff aboard the pirate ship after the end of the fight?

  Lucas: Ben is going to be wounded, but not as bad, so there’s no big scene afterward. [At one point Kenobi was budgeted for a hospital “smock.”]

  Kurtz: All right, so you have an exterior shot and the pirate sta
rship arrives and you see the fourth moon of Yavin, and the two lifepods jettison away. This is all in miniature…

  Lucas: No, you don’t see the lifepods jettison away. You’re in orbit, and she says, ‘The Death Star is behind us, so nothing’s going to be here too long.’ They’re in orbit, and you just cut down to the jungle. You have these shots across the steaming jungle. You cut to the shot of the temple, that one in the drawing, and the troops run out and greet them. They’re in a little car and come riding up…

  Kurtz: A couple of long shots…

  Lucas: Yeah, it moves right along. You cut inside—

  Kurtz: Now, the discussion of where the vulnerable part of the Death Star is—that’s in a little side room, in one of the war rooms?

  Lucas: In that briefing room, which is connected to the war room; it’s all one big room. Half of it is briefing room and half of it is war room.

  Kurtz: So then they have the big fight, then Luke comes back and lands, and we have the scene where everybody runs up and greets him, and then we go to the throne room scene. That happens the same way as before.

  Lucas: Yes. Two points: the Crystal Chamber is now out, and the docking bay control room is now out. I’ve got to tell John Dykstra about that.

  Kurtz: Before Vader and the TIE ships take off, is there anything of them in preparation?

  George: Yeah. He can be in a hallway. I think I’m going to have a big control room on the Death Star, because I want to try to develop something where they’re approaching the green fourth moon. Truth of the matter, I have much more script than I need…

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  Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz discuss the story as the former nears completion of a shooting script. (Recorded on January 20, 1976)

  (1:39)

  GETTING DOWN TO SETS

  The main work at EMI was always building the sets, and Lucas and Barry recommenced their intense consultations that had been interrupted by Fox’s six-week delay. “For three or four weeks George and I were both sitting on the same stool in front of the drawing board,” Barry says. “George has quite a good grasp of it all; he’s a mechanically minded person and he understands the blueprints. The most important thing about a set is how it works: What can you see from the doorway? So we talked about that for quite some time, both of us drawing at the same time, and George saying, ‘I don’t need that. I will need that corridor.’ It’s up to the art department to try and find out what it is he wants, and then make suggestions which he’ll accept or otherwise, but he has an idea in his mind about all these things.”

  “Barry brought a lot of knowledge about building sets,” Lucas says. “How you maneuver things around, use forced perspective, or build a false wall. He did a lot of the set designs, because I had never worked on a set before. I learned a lot from John.”

  One of the ongoing challenges was coordinating production in England with the special effects in Van Nuys. “They sent me very good photographs of the model—the exterior of the pirate starship—as they were building it,” Barry says. “At that time we were building our exterior, too. With the X-and the Y-fighters, they just made two extra models when they cast them. Now the two companies building the full-sized ones have the models in their place, and they’re working from them.”

  Mollo’s costume sketches for Darth Vader include an insignia and a lightsaber with a broadsword handle.

  Construction of the full-sized X-wing.

  Reference photos of interesting junk, some of which became interesting props through the intermediary of John Barry’s art department.

  Han Solo’s blaster.

  Using set dresser Roger Christian’s technique of repurposing found objects into realistic-looking guns, prop makers fabricated what is perhaps a mock-up for a background gun.

  A variation on Christian’s “Sterling Stormtrooper’s Gun,” it has the same T-strip for the barrel, but a different gun site and a small electronic greeblie.

  The reverse side of Christian’s “Sterling Stormtrooper’s Gun,” which clearly shows the metal electronic box he added using superglue, as well as a short ammunition magazine he found and added.

  A prop maker’s variation on Christian’s Mauser-inspired Han Solo blaster, which uses the same base but different greeblies.

  “I made this one for the Tusken Raiders,” Christian would say. “I added the large round barrel silencer to give it a different look, and then attached a rubber line to the holster so it looked like a power pack for the gun.”

  “It would be a lot easier if ILM were on the next-door stage,” Watts notes, “so we could just dash in and out, and there wasn’t an eight-hour time shift, and a shipping situation, and a communication problem. So the director could actually pop over there and say, ‘Yeah, that looks great,’ or whatever. This is the first time I’ve worked on a picture where the two powers of the show, as it were, are on different sides of the Atlantic: live action here and models on the other side. It’ll be interesting to see the end result …”

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  Set dresser Roger Christian explains how he designed Han Solo’s blaster, the prototype weapon for all those that followed. (Interview by J. W. Rinzler, 2012)

  (1:24)

  One of the side effects of working with ILM was to inspire Barry to go into the junk business. “ILM was basically using the same premise that had been used on 2001,” he says. “They used model kit parts to make their models look interesting. But I had to build full-scale seventy-feet-across versions of these things—but then it dawned on me that, of course, the actual kit parts represent real things, like crank shafts, so I could go back to the originals. So one of the first things we did on the picture was to buy thousands of pounds’ worth of junk from drain companies and the like—we have a buyer who’s a very eccentric and amusing man—and we invested £10,000 in a big machine that had previously been making dinghies and boats. The comlink is in fact part of a faucet. The handle of the lightsaber is a very old photographic flash unit, though we never just picked them up and used them. They were repainted, sign writing was put on, and sometimes they were cast again in plastic. Luke’s binoculars are an old Ronoflex.

  “I took George to all the fun places,” Barry adds. “We went to one of the big weapon-hire companies that had endless rows of arms and armor. We found the gaffi sticks there; we just picked them off the wall, and took something off and whacked them a bit. George and the dresser, Roger Christian, and I got together a lot on those things. Rather than have your slick streamlined ray guns, we took actual World War II machine guns and cannibalized one into another. George likes what he calls the ‘visceral’ quality that real weapons have, so there are really quite large chunks of real weapons with additional things fixed onto them. It’s just so much nicer than anything you can make from scratch; it stops them from having that homemade look.”

  One of the first special effects tests at EMI concerned R2-D2, which became the model for several other robots in the film.

  A blueprint for R2, dated January 20, 1976, drawn by P. Childs; a note indicates that the “top section of leg” has been modified.

  VOYAGE TO THE UNKNOWN

  Following the first special effects tests on January 14 with “laser swords, R2-D2 model, and illuminated control boards,” a second test took place on January 23 with “laser swords and Jawa ‘eyes.’ ” Between the two, Lucas sat down on January 20 with Kurtz and director of photography Gil Taylor, who at this point was quite new to the production and clearly coming to grips with many of its technical challenges.

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  On January 14, 1976, screen tests are filmed for “Artoo’s head.” (No audio)

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  LASER SWORD

  George Lucas: As it stands now, we’ve got three scenes with the light sword. The first scene shows what it is: Luke just turns it on.
The next one is a very quick scene in the cantina—it’ll just be a flash. In both those cases, it’s just one sword. The last is the final battle between Ben and the warlord. That’s going to be a tricky one where they actually fight, but at least now it’s down to a very controlled setup.

  Gil Taylor: Are the laser sword and the laser gun one and the same thing?

  John Stears

  Lucas: No. Laser guns are going to be essentially real guns that fire a blank that makes a big flame. We’ll make it into a nice laser-gun sound later; then we will optically, in cases where it is necessary, animate the blasts, so you’ll see the bolts ricochet around. But you’ll never actually have to deal with it photographically.

  Stears’ early concepts for the laser sword.

  Production’s reference photos of early prototypes.

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