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

by Rinzler, J. W.

  “I had to go into one of the little offices where they were casting at the time to read the script,” Tippett would say. “You were locked in a room and had two hours. But I’m a really slow reader, because I have to visualize everything, so I was really nervous, trying to read the stuff and have it make sense. But Harrison Ford was in the next room. They were talking to him. The walls were thin and the sound was muffled. There was this tension going on and it was actually far more interesting than the script, so I don’t think I got to the end of it before they kicked me out.”

  “It wasn’t until Harrison came to London that George and I showed him the script,” Marquand says. “Harrison said, ‘Well, I understand, you know, you love Luke, that’s okay.’ ”

  “Harrison used to say, ‘Give me as few lines as possible; I don’t want any lines,’ ” Lucas would say. “He was never the one to say, ‘I want my part to be bigger.’ ”

  Anthony Daniels was pleased with his role as written. “We’d had a lot of discussions before shooting about the script and about how Threepio would feel about certain aspects of the story and how he would feel about Luke or Han and what would be his thought processes.”

  “I’d almost found Threepio a drag in Empire,” says Marquand. “I felt very awful that he’d been given dialogue to do because nobody could think of any way of filling in that space. He also represents the sort of character that I don’t get on with very well, the sort of character that always aggravates me. You can have a few laughs at his expense, but at certain moments I think it went a little too far. It turned out that George agreed with me, which was nice because I wasn’t sure whether he would.”

  In fact, Daniels had missed the premiere of Empire due to a scare that he might lose a leg because of blood poisoning. Between films, Daniels had performed in a couple of plays—The Streets of London and J. B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner—and made a few anti-smoking commercials.

  Even earlier than his discussions with Marquand, Daniels had lunched with Lucas while the latter was in England for Raiders. The former had felt that his character had served as comic relief and not much more in Empire, never fulfilling its purpose. “George is of course intelligent enough to realize that selfish actors become specialists in their own roles and can contribute greatly,” says Daniels. “So I yanked George aside one day and said, ‘Listen, give me something to do in this next movie.’ We had a long discussion about Threepio’s function. I said that I visualized Threepio as someone who might lead an army, but only because he was trailing at the back when they all turned around.”

  The sets that Lucas walked with his director and producers the day of his arrival were either nearly finished or well on their way, thanks to Reynolds’s art department and Welch’s numerous construction workers. On the village set a rehearsal had 41 background Ewoks, six principal Ewoks, and Kenny Baker as Wicket.

  “For Jedi, they said there was another part for me,” says Baker. “I play an Ewok. Nice little character, but it’s a very uncomfortable costume. We let the other little people playing Ewoks know what they were letting themselves in for: it was going to be hot, hard work.”

  The Ewok set had in fact gotten “way out of hand” and gone over budget by more than $100,000. “Production designed little stairways and a lot of extra labor was used on cutting the logs,” says Kazanjian. “It had to look like it was built by Ewoks.”

  Only a few days before shooting, Jabba’s throne room was altered as Salacious Crumb’s part was expanded from his single appearance on the barge. “We cut a hole in Jabba’s throne to put a man under there,” says Kazanjian. “That was added way late. What happened really, was the puppeteer underneath, including Phil Tippett at times, would be playing with Crumb or they would peck at somebody’s ear or do something novel—and we couldn’t help but fall in love with him and enlarge the part.”

  “I fell in love with Salacious and everybody in the shop had fallen in love with Salacious,” says Lucas. “So I expanded his part. Instead of this non-descript background character, I made him Jabba’s sidekick, who comments on what Jabba is saying. We couldn’t really have him repeat everything Jabba said, because it would be too confusing, but he comments by laughing at what Jabba says and by watching.”

  “I got a lot of rehearsal time with Jabba,” says Marquand. “He’s an actor like any other. You have to yell at him, you have to cajole him; every now and again he decides he’s not going to work. Mike Edmonds, the person inside of his tail, is a wonderful actor—he also plays one of the Ewoks, actually, the soothsayer.”

  Three days before shooting, Ford, Fisher, and Hamill had hairstyle sessions with Pat McDermott and Lucas. “I still think my hair should’ve been shorter, not as floppy,” says Hamill. “More like a samurai in a Kurosawa film.”

  “With Carrie we found the hair did not look as good as in the pictures and what all the other tests had shown,” says Kazanjian. “George stepped forward and started making changes. There was like a brass hair clip and it just didn’t look right, so that was thrown out and a new wig brought in, and Pat, who is marvelous, changed it.”

  With hair and costumes approved, the first round of sets built, a script in hand, monsters delivered from the United States, creatures completed in the UK, and all personnel in place, cast and crew were ready for action. Radios were delivered to the production offices, and the PA system at EMI was rigged per the assistant directors’ requirements. To get everyone in the spirit of the venture, to rev them up, Star Wars and Empire were screened in the studio’s theater.

  “George said to me, ‘There’s not a lot that’s new in this one—this film is a culmination of everything that’s gone before,’ ” says Hamill. “But I think that’s what’s going to make this one a great, great experience for everyone—it’s had the best and most elaborate setup in the history of film.”

  A map of Elstree Studios during the time of Empire, but also used during the Jedi shoot. The simulated burnt ring around Stage 3 refers to the fact that it burned down while Stanley Kubrick was filming The Shining (1980), just before shooting began on Episode V.

  THE FRICTION OF MULTIPLE LENSES

  JANUARY TO FEBRUARY 1982

  CHAPTER SIX

  At the last possible moment, Marquand and Watts chose which scene to shoot first. “You get to a point where you have nowhere to go—it’s a non-decision,” says Watts. “I looked at the schedule and I saw the sandstorm. I saw a couple of little sets that had been okayed and I saw the big sets of the Ewok village and Jabba’s palace—difficult, weeklong shoots—all staring us in the face. Well, a sandstorm is a sandstorm: an unpleasant way to start the very first day, but if you can shoot it in one day, it means you can strike the set and get another set up pretty quickly.”

  Moreover, because the bog planet set, a difficult build, would also be taking its place on Stage 2, the sooner they could strike the sandstorm set, the better. Their choice would also signal to the actors and crew that Marquand was diving right in, opting for a difficult day rather than a simple one.

  “We’ve got our crew, we’ve got our actors, we’ve now got some studio heavies and things are starting to really take over,” Marquand says. “I’ve gotten shooting angles down for the first four sets on paper, so that first Monday, I know already where I’m going to start shooting. The crews know all of that. It’s the only way you can get through. You just have to commit yourself and hope to Christ you’re right. Because you cannot wander on the set at 8:15 of any morning and say, ‘Well, what shall we do?’ ”

  Marquand had lined up his shots so that he could shoot the heroes arriving in the sandstorm from one direction, shoot the departure of the X-wing, which would be lifted to the ceiling of the stage by cables, and then have room to turn around and shoot the Falcon. “There was a lot of planning of that kind, of exactly where things are going to be,” he adds. “You don’t want to waste money.”

  Before dawn, on Monday, January 11, principal photography began in the UK, commemorated by
a press release noting, “Once more the Star Wars team has taken all nine sound stages at EMI Elstree.” Several cars were dispatched, as they would be every morning, to collect the artists. Billy Dee Williams, Hamill, and Ford were staying at the Athenaeum hotel and were on their way to the studio by 7:15 AM. Fisher had an earlier pickup at 6:30 AM.

  That dawn was not without drama. Fisher avoided death when she realized that her heating system was blowing back toxic gas fumes, while Hamill’s vehicle had been stolen overnight, so the actor hitched a last-minute ride with Ford.

  “My feelings at that time were, I can hardly wait until the first day of shooting,” says Kazanjian. “Then we’re in motion and there’s no way you can have any delays. There’s no more stalling. The train is going down the track and there is no way you can stop it—absolutely no way. You have the same crew day in and day out. But when we started shooting, we were already about $1.5 million over budget.”

  Kazanjian received a telex from Gary Kurtz: “May the Force be with you.” Spielberg and his producers, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, also telexed Lucas, Kazanjian, Watts, and Bloom: “It’s about time somebody made Blue Harvest. Break a leg.”

  Shooting the sandstorm scene are Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Harrison Ford (Han Solo), and Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), on Monday, January 11, 1982—the first day of principal photography at Elstree Studios.

  The Millennium Falcon under construction at Elstree Studios for the sandstorm scene.

  REPORT NO. 1: MONDAY, JANUARY 11, 1982; EMI ELSTREE STUDIOS; STAGE 2—EXT. TATOOINE SANDSTORM, SC. 44 [HEROES ARRIVE AT FALCON]

  By 8 AM, actors were in makeup for an 8:30 AM call on set. “For the first half-hour of Day One, there were a lot of handshakes and greetings as three years of accumulated gossip was exchanged,” Peecher writes. Second assistant director Roy Button monitored their progress, keeping first AD David Tomblin apprised. Meanwhile, Ewok extras were limbering up under the direction of choreographer Gillian Gregory for a rehearsal on Stage 3.

  “I had a meeting with David Tomblin, whom I didn’t know at all,” says Marquand. “I had been told by the production office that he was a good man. Sometimes I think you should suspect the production office when they say that so and so is a very good assistant, but I chose David purely because I understood from the main actors that they liked him very much.”

  Tomblin’s last picture had been Gandhi (1982), during which he’d had to control 250,000 extras, so the relatively small crowd scenes of Jedi would be child’s play for him. On set, a trolley doled out breakfast snacks at 10 AM for 80 crew. The full-sized Millennium Falcon, originally constructed for Empire and then stored for three years, was making its last appearance. Subsequent shots would substitute matte paintings or models for Han’s ship, cheaper options than moving or constructing sets around the vehicle.

  Cameras rolled at either 10:12 AM, as reported in the Progress Report, or 10:18 AM, as reported by Peecher: “David Tomblin calls, ‘Turn over,’ on his radio and loud speaker. Director Marquand roars, ‘Action!’ All systems go? Not exactly. R2-D2 veers off course and careens into a rock. The first camera team doesn’t hear the ‘action’ command over the noise of the wind machines and is still waiting to start. And, finally, the sand blow is so successful it obscures almost everything anyway.”

  “We’d rehearsed without the big fans going—and these big fans completely fill the air with dirt and make an incredible noise, so what we’d rehearsed was completely useless!” says Daniels.

  “We spent a huge amount of money over a three month period reconditioning, refitting, putting new heads on the Artoo units, new electronics, new batteries, more modern equipment to have these things running, supposedly, like they should be,” Kazanjian says. “First day, first shot, Artoo wouldn’t even budge. Took its head off, checked it out, and wasted ten to twenty minutes. Pulled the whole unit out. Brought in another one. Set it up—and it did the same thing. The third one did it. Drilled a hole in the front and put a wire on it so we could just pull it.”

  The major change to the R2 units was the utilization of a chain-linked drive mechanism rather than a toothed-belt drive mechanism, which had been prone to slipping and had been unreliable on Empire. According to the special effects crew, it would be much more reliable, though producer and director didn’t think so that first day.

  The sand was a mixture mostly of vermiculite, an industrial-use polyester-type grain, with a very light talcum powder, “which is terrible,” Marquand says. “I hope to God it’s not carcinogenic, because it certainly gets everywhere. It was some awful broken-cork substance that goes right into your lungs. Sand doesn’t look like sand on film so they use cork. We all wore white paper coveralls and colossal goggles, so nobody knew who anybody else was. We spent the whole morning tapping each other on the shoulders saying, ‘Who are you? Forget it! You’re not who I want—where’s my cameraman?’ We eventually wrote our names on our backs.”

  “It was really torturous shooting the sandstorm scene,” says Hamill. “They threw Fuller’s earth in front of big fans and it got into my eyes and nose. It was awful!”

  “When I’m in costume, I have tunnel vision and tend to lose track of where I am,” Daniels adds. “So on the first take I got completely lost in this howling gale and went off in the completely wrong direction. Apparently, it looked hilarious. In this nightmare situation I suddenly saw a man with a clapperboard and I thought, Am I going mad? What is he doing here in the middle of the scene? While I was considering this, I walked into a rock and fell flat on my face.”

  After the first successful take, “there is a smattering of applause and orange juice is served all around,” writes Peecher. “Jedi is off and rolling.” More good news arrived with Sid Ganis, who informed Lucas that Raiders was still taking in around $1 million a day at the box office. Lunch was from 1:45 to 2:45 PM.

  “The hard part started when I had to get close on the actors,” says Marquand. “Funny enough that was when Artoo behaved, which I wasn’t expecting. I was determined not to go over that first day because—all the world is watching. If we go over, I’ve lost. The battle had begun.”

  Hamill was the last to be released—the only actor to perform the first day of all three pictures—along with the rest of the unit at 6:30. Marquand and crew had recorded 1 minute and 20 seconds of screen time and 17 setups, successfully wrapping the scene except for a few pickups to be shot the next day. The scheduled finish date for the UK shoot was April 1, for a total of 92 shooting days.

  While actors and crew headed home, Marquand and key staff adjourned to Stage 6, where Carter as Bib Fortuna was exhibited for the first time in full makeup and costume in the palace corridor. Tippett was on hand, as was his lieutenant, Stuart Ziff, who telexed ILM to say, “No overtime to report. Please ask Cindy (the night security guard) if my cat still alive. If not, put it in the freezer.”

  A few weeks afterward, stagehands made a bonfire on the back lot from the remains of the Falcon.

  Costume reference Polaroids for scene 44 of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian).

  Lucas and Marquand on Stage 2 discussing the sandstorm scene (first assistant director David Tomblin is between them in background; Peter Mayhew, as Chewbacca, is on far left).

  Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) with arms around Fisher and Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), filming the sandstorm scene.

  REPORT NOS. 2–3: TUESDAY–WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12–13, 1982; STAGE 6—EXT. JABBA’S PALACE GATE & MAIN HALLWAY, SCS. 6 [C-3PO TALKS TO MECHANICAL EYE], 7 [DROIDS MEET BIB FORTUNA]; 15 [LUKE MEETS BIB]; 2ND UNIT: STAGE 2—EXT. TATOOINE SANDSTORM, SC. 44

  Production spent two days on Stage 6, the Star Wars Stage, where the gate to Jabba’s palace had been constructed to a certain height between the walls of what would be the even more immense Death Star hangar. The missing portion of Jabba’s door would be filled in by a matte painting, which necessitated the first use of the VistaVision camera—an eccentric piece of equi
pment used for optical effects shots. “I had never before worked with a VistaVision camera and I hope I may never work with one again,” says Marquand. “Setting it up took half an hour, just looking through the lens and saying, ‘Yeah, I think that’s it …’ ”

  (That particular VistaVision camera was a Technirama model, which ILM also used for effects matte photography in the United States. It had originally been built in the 1930s as a three-strip Technicolor camera. On Spartacus (1960), Stanley Kubrick had used the exact same camera. The operators on the earlier Star Wars films had therefore referred to it as “the dinosaur.”)

  During the downtime, Marquand made several decisions for later scenes: Leia would cause chaos on Jabba’s barge by smashing her foot into his personal console—then steel shutters would clamp shut and a monster or guard would shoot at her, but hit the Red Ball Jett organ, which would explode; Luke would wear his cloak for nearly the whole of the palace interior scenes, up until his fight with the rancor; Hermi Odle would no longer sit on C-3PO; and the droid’s eye would be “put back” on the deck of Jabba’s barge instead of having R2 fix it in the shelter of the Falcon during the sandstorm (most likely a shot that had been scrapped the day before).

  As the Emperor, Alan Webb was to have contact lenses fitted that day with an optician, Mrs. Ann Silk, but he had to cancel due to a stye on his eye.

  Costume reference Polaroids for scenes 6 and 7 (right, with Mike Carter as Bib).