The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition)

by Rinzler, J. W.

  In the sandstorm Leia tells Luke that she loves Han. When Solo sees the Falcon, he gives the ship a pat and says, “You’re looking good, old girl. I never thought I’d live to see you again.”

  When the Emperor arrives, he has a gnarled old cane. His dialogue with Vader has also been refined:

  EMPEROR

  You have done well, Lord Vader. And now I sense you wish to continue your search for young Skywalker.

  DARTH VADER

  Yes, my Master.

  EMPEROR

  Patience, my friend. In time he will seek you out and when he does you must bring him before me. He has grown strong, only together can we turn him to the dark side of the Force … Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

  Concept art of a speeder bike (with skull on “hood”) and Imperial biker by Johnston, summer 1981.

  Meanwhile, at Elstree, the art department was busy enlarging Johnston’s speeder bike model to full-size (consulting together are: set dresser Michael Ford; camera department trainee Steve Hardie on bike; construction supervisor Bill Welch, leaning, with cigarette; propmaker Bill Hargreaves is in the background).

  Imperial biker costume concept by Rodis-Jamero, February 1981.

  Filming the videomatic of the speeder bike chase are Ken Ralston, camera operator Don Dow, Johnston, and Muren, circa fall 1981. They are using a miniature set constructed on a four-by-eight foot sheet of plywood, with a green carpet over it, populated with trees made from two-foot-high cardboard tubes painted brown (left over from E.T.). On the bikes are toy action figures.

  “There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”

  An excerpt from the telematics (or videomatics) of the rocket bike chase, with temp sound and voices by sound designer Ben Burtt, shot at ILM, fall 1981. (0:38)

  In the scene on Dagobah, Yoda welcomes death: “Twilight is upon me and soon night must fall. That is the way of things … the way of the Force.” Lucas extensively rewrote the diminutive Master’s scene with Luke. When Yoda says that it is unfortunate that Luke has learned about his father, the young Jedi responds, “Unfortunate that I know the truth?” And Yoda counters, “Unfortunate that you rushed to face him … that incomplete your training was … that not ready for the burden were you. Obi-Wan would have told you long ago, had I let him … Now a great weakness you carry. Fear for you I do. Fear for you, yes.” Yoda dies on screen.

  Lucas also revised Luke’s scene with Ben. When the latter tells him he has a twin sister, he adds that “she will find it no easier to destroy her father.” And when Luke says that he cannot face his father again, Ben ends the scene by saying, “The Emperor has won … Yoda and I will be with you always.”

  Following that, Lucas added a new scene between the Emperor and Vader in the throne room, where the former tells him to send the fleet to the far side of Endor and not to worry about reports of the rebels massing. The scene effectively serves to reinforce the idea that the Emperor knows exactly what’s going on and that the heroes are in peril.

  In the rebel briefing room, Ackbar is now a salmon-colored Calamari (Marquand’s choice having taken effect). When Han learns Lando is a general, the latter explains, “Remember I commanded the Nabis fleet at the battle of Tamab and won … and … I volunteered.”

  After Leia meets the Ewoks, the script returns to Vader and the Emperor. Lucas adds to Kasdan’s dialogue:

  VADER

  My son is with them.

  EMPEROR

  (very cool)

  Are you sure?

  VADER

  I felt him, my Master.

  Concept art of Vader’s arrival on the Death Star, by Johnston, circa fall 1981, continues the idea, also explored by McQuarrie, of an open-air trench (an overlay had notes by Johnston, indicating which parts of this shot would be a matte painting).

  EMPEROR

  Strange, that I have not. I wonder if your feelings on this matter are clear, Lord Vader.

  Vader knows what is being asked.

  VADER

  They are clear, my Master.

  EMPEROR

  Then you must go to the Sanctuary Moon and wait for him.

  VADER

  (skeptical)

  He will come to me?

  EMPEROR

  Of his own free will. I have foreseen it. His compassion for you will be his undoing. He will come to you and you will then bring him before me.

  When Luke is brought before Vader, Lucas has tightened up parts and intensified their complicated, conflicting feelings:

  LUKE

  Come with me, father.

  VADER

  Ben once thought as you do … […] You do not know the power of the dark side. I must obey my Master.

  LUKE

  I will not turn and you will be forced to destroy me.

  VADER

  If that is your destiny.

  LUKE

  Search your feelings, father. You can’t do this! I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate.

  Vader will not relent and Luke remarks, “My father is truly dead.” Now when Han first sees the bunker, Chewie growls and he replies: “You’re right, Chewie, with just those guards, this should be easier than breaking a bantha.” During Luke’s first exchange with the Emperor, Lucas tweaked several lines and added:

  LUKE

  Your overconfidence is your weakness.

  EMPEROR

  Your faith in your friends is your weakness …

  After Luke defeats Vader, the Emperor tells him to finish him and take his father’s place—but Luke now responds: “Never! Never will I turn to the dark side. You have failed, your highness. I am a Jedi as my father was before me, and as his father was before him.”

  * * *

  THE CASE OF THE MISSING SCRIPT

  Although Marquand was in the United States, Kazanjian presided over a UK production meeting on November 3, with Watts and the HODs. By this time, John Philip Peecher had joined the crew, hired by Lucasfilm to write a chronicle of the making of the film. “Most of the heads are shaking,” Peecher notes. “The problem is still the script—or lack of it.” Kazanjian closed the meeting with a promise that he would bring a bound screenplay back from the United States in 10 days.

  A few days afterward, an expeditionary force flew to the two locations, perhaps on the same day. Their main objective (after Kazanjian met with Lucas about the state of a shooting script) was to take one final look at the sites in Yuma and Crescent City. It was not a good trip. There had already been second thoughts about Yuma, when the costs of building there had climbed—Watts and Reynolds had even flown to Tunisia for one last look on October 30—and the expense was only going to increase.

  “We all flew down and we all got in our dune buggies,” says Marquand. “We all drove over to where we thought that place had been. But it wasn’t there anymore. We said, ‘It was here, wasn’t it? No, I think it was there.’ I said, ‘You know, I think we’re doing the wrong thing, guys. These dunes are moving.’ And we all looked very dumbfounded until, I think it was Norman who said, ‘We’re going to have to build a big amphitheater if you want to shoot it here.’ ‘Right,’ everybody said. ‘That’s what we’re going to do.’ ”

  “The Sarlacc pit was a mess from the very beginning,” Lucas would say. “It was not planned out well. It should have been shot in England. We could have built that set on the back lot and done it right there at the studio. The only reason we did it out there in the middle of nowhere was because we thought we were going to use the sand dunes, and originally I thought we were going to dig the pit into the sand, but then we couldn’t. Once we started building it up and doing it just for the horizon … But at that point we weren’t adept at bluescreen.”

  “Production was fun—and anguish,” Greber would say. “George and I had a couple of heated arguments about why we had to spend so much money to build a ship out in the desert that was going to b
e on camera for like [10] minutes. It was a lot of money.”

  Yuma’s budget soared, and things didn’t go well in Crescent City, either. “One of the most depressing days for me on Jedi was a trip that was arranged to view the site of the bunker,” says Reynolds. “That particular day it snowed, in addition to the 200 inches of rain that had fallen during the previous two months; consequently the site was what I can only describe as a quagmire. We all slid about, literally up to our knees in the wretched stuff.”

  “I asked, ‘Have you got enough money to clear an acre of all this underbrush?’ ” says Marquand. “But there was a big economic slump up there, so they were glad of the work. They got a lot of local people who cleared a huge area and I flew back up and looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, site of the bunker is going to be good.’ I was then able to start saying, ‘Let’s build a road and do all that stuff.’ ”

  Kazanjian had learned, in another piece of disappointing news, that the revised second draft was being typed up, but that the story would need one more revision before being considered a shooting script. Lucas would discuss this with Kasdan. On November 13, Kazanjian circulated a memo stating that “The name of the second sequel in the Star Wars saga is now officially Revenge of the Jedi.” To stem rising costs, Lucas then met with Marquand in the Monster Shop “to cut a bit down on beasts.”

  During the recce of November 6, 1981, a shadow study was made. “George was very worried about the light,” says Marquand. “He and Alan Hume had a long meeting about where exactly the barge should be in relation to the majority of the light of day. We wanted the Sarlacc pit not to be covered by shade all day long while we were shooting. So there was all of that to work out, because once that barge was there it was going to be there forevermore.”

  Once the decision was made to build a pit up from the desert floor, a large-scale miniature was constructed at ILM and the complicated logistics of filming were discussed by Reynolds, Marquand, James Schoppe (beard and sunglasses), Lucas, and Kazanjian (Jabba’s barge is in the foreground).

  GATEWAY TO EVIL

  Pat Carr drove into Central London to inspect accommodations for the Lucas family, who were due to arrive in early January. Good room service was a must, Peecher reported, because of the long and erratic hours that Lucas would have to keep at the studio.

  Peecher also took note of the activity on the sound stages and in the workshops. Property supervisor Brian “Toby” Lofthouse was working on a new set of C-3PO suits. On Stage 2, the Ewok village was progressing, with fake redwood trees cut from polystyrene and aged. On Stage 8, Jabba the Hutt’s throne room was taking shape, while sand was being dumped by the ton onto the floor of Stage 6, the Star Wars Stage, outside of Jabba’s palace gate. Stage 5 was dominated by woodwork for the rebel briefing room. Bill Welch supervised all of the construction and carpentry, having done the previous two films as well as Raiders, and could be seen bicycling from stage to stage to save time.

  Marquand, Kazanjian, Watts, Reynolds, and other HODs returned to Elstree to examine the sets and tend to a thousand questions, from blueprints and set maquettes to supplies, camera tests, and more Ewok fittings (Kazanjian was not able to fulfill his promise of returning with a script in hand). “You look at the maquette and you know your actors are going to go down this corridor and you’re going to shoot down this way and shoot back to make it look like another corridor,” says Kazanjian. “George would sit there and say, ‘We don’t need this corridor’—and save us $70,000. Usually he made every set smaller and smaller and smaller. But when you see the movie, you’ll see that they are all still gigantic.”

  “I had this concept of the rebel briefing room as being a rather beaten up meeting place, sort of like Britain’s last stand in 1940 before the Americans joined the war,” Marquand says. “Norman thought this was terrific, too. But when we showed it to George, he said, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got it completely wrong. That isn’t what I intended at all. Your concept of how the rebels win is not the way they win. They win because they’ve got the best equipment. They’ve gotten themselves all together.’ ”

  Marquand was impressed with the door to Jabba’s palace. Near the 45-foot-high entryway also lay five tons of undercarriage to support the full-sized Imperial shuttle, which would occupy the hangar being constructed around the door; once the gate scene was shot, it would be demolished and the Death Star hangar completed.

  In Freeborn’s shop, Jabba’s foam latex skin was being prepared in special ovens, one of which had been converted from a gigantic old safe. His workmen wore masks, helmets, breathing apparatus, and voluminous white suits, handling with great care the poisonous chemicals needed. (Freeborn was in “constant touch” with big industrial firms, always interested in the latest materials.) The big question was: Would Jabba be ready in time?

  After the crime lord was cooked, art department personnel would stop by to measure his proportions to make sure he would fit into the sets being constructed. “Jabba was enormous, one of the most difficult ones,” says Freeborn. “It took me four tons of clay. I had the carpenters construct a frame and then modeled the clay over the wooden structure. [Jabba was sculpted by John Coppinger under the direction of Freeborn.] It then took me quite a while to work out his movements. We tried to make him so evil.”

  Concept art of a bizarre droid carrying a kind of brain-sack, by Johnston (no. 057, early 1981).

  Propmaker Bill Hargreaves (right) and an assistant work on the life-sized version of same at Elstree.

  Hargreaves and assistant focus on the life-sized droid mannequins for the boiler room scene in Jabba’s palace.

  EWOKS IN THE SNOW

  One issue that had preoccupied Marquand, Hume, ILM, and the producers was the choice of film stock and camera. A decision was finally made to use a new fast-exposure Kodak film, 5793, 400 ASA. Kazanjian had lobbied for a faster film stock and ILM had tested it to see if the film would stand up to the facility’s stringent quality standards for mattes and optical shots. The camera chosen was a BL3, with a set of lenses developed by Englishman Joe Dunton. Lucasfilm had been testing anamorphic lenses for some time and determined that the Dunton lenses were best. Although there were only three sets of these prototype lenses in existence, two were procured for Jedi. The final camera package consisted of two Arri BL3s, one Arri III, and two Arri IICs.

  One last test at this time actually killed two birds with one stone: The film stock and camera were used to shoot a trio of Ewoks in costume to see how they photographed. Marquand, Hume, his crew, three Ewoks—Andrew Herd, Ronnie Phillips, and Brian Wheeler—about 20 “very interested technicians, and a brace of rather blasé forest rangers who long ago had learned to tolerate film people and their funny ways,” according to Peecher, went out in the freezing cold to Black Park, not far from Pinewood Studios.

  “We took them out into the woods and let them run around to see if they were going to hold up or not,” Hume says. “It was the first day of snow in England. We should have been warned because, my God, did we have a snowy winter. But the lenses looked great, the color worked perfectly, and the stock looked glorious, which gave ILM a lot of relief. Because we would be the first off to use it, it was making us nervous, but we ran the risk.”

  The Ewoks were shot on a long lens running through the undergrowth, running, turning, dancing, sitting, and standing up, to see if there were any costume problems, “which there were,” says Marquand. “We realized immediately that you couldn’t expect a human being to wear those costumes. Their eyes misted up instantly. So Stuart and his gang got down to solving that problem, which was to pinch little holes all the way around to let the heat out. We also realized that we had to give them more articulation.”

  “Stuart and I had spent hours trying to get these things to blink,” says Kenny Baker. “George said they don’t really come to life until they blink, so I was the guinea pig for that.” Although they tried using hidden wires linked to the eyebrows, controlled by the hands, no cost-effective technique w
as ever found for blinking.

  “George had asked me what else we could do to enhance them,” wardrobe mistress Janet Tebrooke would say. “So, thinking about the Ewoks’ environment, I walked ‘round Burnham Beeches forest and picked up things I felt would be useful, such as feathers, old bones, sticks, acorns, bits of dead birds, including a bird skull. I took my findings back to the studio and attached them to the costumes.”

  “George came along and looked at the test and there was a certain thing that he really, really didn’t like at all,” says Marquand. “It was one of the ways that the Ewoks ran. It was too uniform.”