Diamond had therefore worked with Hamill and Anderson for a good four weeks of preparation, combining four martial arts with samurai, saber, foil, epée, and broadsword, drawing from his experience in more than 275 feature films. He had begun by plotting out all the footwork, as the style would come from the positioning of the feet, like ballet. “Mark’s progressed and he’s a very good swordsman now,” says Diamond. “But I have to think about how it’s going to look photographically. And of course an actor’s interpretation of character has to come into it. Errol Flynn couldn’t fence, but he knew photographically what looked good on the screen. Mark has now got a Flynn-quality about him.”
“There was a shot in which my lightsaber had to jump into my hand,” says Hamill. “To accomplish that action, we shot it backward: I had to enter the shot as though I was exiting it with my final mood intact. Then I had to make an abrupt move into calmness, put my hand up, and throw my sword away. It was very difficult to coordinate. I had to go over to a corner, close my eyes, and think for a moment, because it didn’t come naturally. It was very much like mime.”
As scripted, the duel ends when Luke cuts off his father’s hand, a symbolic castration as well as revenge for what his father had done to him in the previous film. “This thing with dismemberment I’ve been dead set against from the very beginning,” Hamill adds. “What really galled me was the ice monster—I mean, I’m a Jedi. I could have just grazed him.”
In the film’s most important moment, Luke sees that his rage is making him more machine than man, that he is perilously close to losing his humanity and compassion, that he has to make a choice. “During the final confrontation, when Luke has Vader on the ground, the red lights of the elevator were design elements but were also there specifically,” Lucas would say. “The color goes symbolically into the blood of the father and son, and a move toward hell—because this is where Luke is either going to go to hell or not.”
“I think every person has a desire to please their parents and Luke couldn’t do that,” Hamill would say. “In the end Luke couldn’t go to the dark side.”
FOREST MEDITATION
Mike Quinn, David Barclay, and David Greenaway signed contracts on Wednesday as Yoda puppeteers, to assist Frank Oz. The team began rehearsals the next day at 6 PM and would continue every day until their scheduled scene, including weekends. On Thursday, Marquand suffered from conjunctivitis, and, on Friday, in the US, Paul Huston, Dave Carson, Michael Pangrazio, and Dennis Muren—toward the end of their work on E.T. (they would soon film the mothership landing to rescue the wayward alien)—made a recce to Crescent City to see how that location might work into various effects shots, primarily the rocket bike chase.
The question was whether they could accomplish certain shots with a miniature forest and bikes. Muren had asked Dave Carson to make a mock-up forest back in December, after which they’d realized that the actual miniature would tie up one camera for four months. “It looked horrendously difficult,” says Muren. “The model forest would have to be built big enough and flexible enough for a camera to slip through, yet still fit on our stage. It was going to be a humongous set to get even a four second cut: The set would’ve been about 80 feet long and the backing about a hundred feet wide. And then once we got into it, it could have been one of those things where we’d still be shooting on it months later and still be tweaking up the lighting and trying to make it right. Duplicating a forest’s random patterns was also going to be a big project and hugely expensive.”
“I was kind of the model shop point-person for trees and everything, so that’s why I went on that trip,” Huston would say. “We were just walking around and looking at things and taking reference pictures. Dennis was saying, ‘Look at how that tree fell’—he’s always trying to bring that unexpected bit of reality into things—and then asking, ‘Is there some way we could just shoot this forest? Because it’s so great.’ So we were talking about it, ‘Boy, it would be great if you could just shoot this, you wouldn’t need to change it. It’s all here.’ ”
“We were looking at the forest and everything was there,” Muren adds. “The only thing we couldn’t do was move forward through the forest at 120 mph for those shots looking directly in front and directly behind the bikes. We could do side views from a car.”
They thought about hanging the camera onto a cable running through the actual forest, but it wouldn’t be able to move around the trees. They thought about going through on a motorcycle or even in a rocket suit. Afterward Muren contacted Nelson Tyler, who had designed and piloted the jetpack suit seen in 1965’s Thunderball. Tyler was confident he could do the shots, but it was finally deemed too expensive and too dangerous.
Muren had brought along his Bolex camera and, as an experiment, had walked along a pathway shooting 16mm at eight frames per second, primarily for reference. But when the film was processed and screened, it would give him an idea …
Paul Huston, Dennis Muren, Dave Carson, and Michael Pangrazio in a redwood forest near Crescent City, trying to figure out how to shoot the speeder bike chase.
In a scene that would be cut, Vader escorts his prisoner/son/Luke off the shuttle in the Death Star hangar.
Hamill and Lucas.
Hamill is filmed during Luke’s moment of choice: Will he commit patricide or become a true Jedi and show compassion for his father (Simon Hume stands beside Hamill; assistant camera loader Tony Jackson, in white T-shirt, uses his tape measure; Marquand is on far right of image; Alec Mills operates the camera; holding the script pages is script supervisor Pamela Mann-Francis; in the foreground is Frank Elliott, bearded; Alan Hume adjusts the light).
Richard Dawking, Reynolds, and Watts on the Dagobah set, Stage 1 (in this lighting, the painted forest cyclorama can clearly be seen).
“There is video content at this location that is not currently supported for your eReading device. The caption for this content is displayed below.”
A black-and-white dupe of a daily showing the death of a female X-wing pilot (Vivienne Chandler), as filmed and directed by the second unit. (0:26)
REPORT NOS. 41–44: MONDAY–THURSDAY, MARCH 8–11; STAGE 1—INT. YODA’S HOUSE, SCS. 50 [LUKE AND YODA], 51 [OBI-WAN AND LUKE]; SECOND UNIT: STAGE 9—INT. X-WING COCKPIT, SCS. 99, 102, 120, 126, 129; INT. A-WING, Y-WING COCKPITS, SCS. 102, 120, 126; BLACK VELVET (EWOK VILLAGE), SC. 132
Marquand and the main unit moved to Stage 1 and into Yoda’s house for some cramped filming on Thursday. However, another creature was, again, almost a no-show. “Stuart literally didn’t finish the two Yoda puppets until the morning of shooting,” says Kazanjian. “It literally drove us crazy and the end result was problems on the screen. I think if you put the two films together, you’d see that Jedi Yoda is a little bit more green in color. That was not done on purpose. It was a last minute thing where Stuart made Yoda a little too green and then we aged him down. And, actually, all the controls weren’t ready either. That was the last straw.”
“We had problems with his eyes,” says Marquand. “Suddenly they would stick on one side or the other. But because Yoda is a very old man and on his death bed, you feel, well, his eyes can go slightly off center.”
The two operational Yodas had been started in clay, cast, and then foam rubber was poured into a bowl, painted, and hair-punched. Oz and his crew had practiced with a standin. “We’d all got together and rehearsed with Frank for several days,” Mike Quinn would say. “We were on the same page and knew the performance inside out. We were camera ready.”
The February 15 revisions to Yoda’s dialogue had him warn Luke of “anger, fear, and aggression, the dark side are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny … The Force is strong in your family. Pass on what you … have … learned … (with great effort) there is … another … Sky …”
“Frank Oz is a hero of mine, extraordinary,” says Marquand, who was still suffering from a sore throat the following
Monday. “But Yoda’s house was awful, tiny. We were crouched under this desk for two days, with a camera crew and Mark and this little green thing. Yet Frank worked out some great moves. Yoda gets up and sits at the edge of his bed; he gets into bed and pulls the blankets over him. It’s magic, but, boy, it took some doing, take after take after take to get these actions. So we broke down the actions into about seven or eight blocks, beyond which Frank could not go, either because of a major rearrangement of puppeteers’ hands or because his arms were literally dead and he just had to stop.”
“I worship the ground that Frank and all the Muppeteers work and walk upon,” Hamill would say. “Yoda was real for me, absolutely real.”
“The ends of the takes were hilarious though, when Yoda is lying in bed,” Marquand adds. “We would get to the point where I’d say, ‘Cut!’—and you’d see Yoda just disappear through his bed, ZOOOP! It was very funny indeed.”
“I’ve been blessed that George gave me the opportunity to do Yoda and to work with him,” Frank Oz would say. “George and Lucasfilm, they’re like a second family, a professional family […] And it’s just a joy to bring that character to life. I know that character inside out.”
Although Yoda’s scene was important and complex, Lucas was not on hand, preferring instead to direct second unit with the X-wing pilots. “George wanted to be there most of the time and he was there most of the time, but it was very hard to see into Yoda’s house, so George was off doing the X-wings and also Wedge,” says Kazanjian. “Only George knew where these X-wings were going to go through tunnels or where there would be light reflecting, or zipping by or if there was going to be an explosion. He was the only one who knew what was in his mind.”
Luke and Yoda, in the latter’s death scene. Freeborn had crafted his second Yoda around a cast of Oz’s hand—starting his work at Oz’s fingertips, which would touch Yoda’s lips, then creating an area in which his hand could move, and progressing outward, building another area for the animatronic parts, a thin but rigid skull, and a separate foam rubber casting for the skin. Yoda’s ears were sculpted separately.
Frank Oz (Yoda) in a continuity Polaroid, poking his head up.
Continuity Polaroid of Yoda’s “kitchen.”
The Jedi Yoda had a slightly different look. A decision was made that Yoda’s upper lip should more closely match Einstein’s moustache, though the Jedi Yoda was made from the same mold as the Empire Yoda. New foam latex skins were made for the head, and Freeborn re-developed the head mechanism in an attempt to correct certain Empire problems. The new puppet also featured upgraded limbs, with real joints. The cross-eyed issue may have developed when Freeborn and his team were working on the eye mechanism so that Yoda’s eyelids could shut completely, as required for his death scene.
RETURN OF THE ORIGINAL JEDI
Three days over schedule, main unit greeted the great Alec Guinness on Wednesday. It was his 1st day, and Hamill’s 33rd. During breaks, Guinness could repair to a mobile home that production had rented from King’s Car Hire. Lucas had also accommodated his first Jedi by revising the script one last time, adding dialogue such as, “The other he spoke of is your twin sister. She will find it no easier than you to destroy Darth Vader.” Luke realizes that his twin sister is Leia, but Ben warns him to bury his feelings or “they could be made to serve the Emperor.”
“Alec Guinness had asked for some script changes so he could say lines in his Ben Kenobi style,” says Marquand. “So George and he had worked together. George went to his house on a Saturday and they spent the day together and talked about the part. I was at the studio. It’s very nice to have that sort of arrangement where George can go do that and I can carry on. And in fact, what he and George worked out was very, very good indeed.”
Guinness was supposed to have performed the day before, but had stayed home due to illness and was only a fraction better his first day. “He arrived on the day, on time, with flu,” Marquand continues. “He was not well. I was really worried, but he said, ‘No, no, no. We’ll do it.’ But I could hear it in the back of his head and he didn’t know his lines very well because he had been sick. He was a little confused and I was sort of embarrassed for him, really, because he is this famous actor. I had never met him before, but we have a lot of mutual friends, so I was able to have a link very quickly to him. I decided that the best thing to do was to film Mark first, which, normally in deference to a great actor, you wouldn’t do. It was hard on Mark, though, because he was dealing now with an actor whom he admires enormously, who didn’t know his lines.”
“It’s a joy to reach the point with Sir Alec/Ben Kenobi where I can now express my admiration for him through my actions,” says Hamill. “Not so much in trying to copy his acting style—which, of course, I never could—but in the growth in Luke’s character: Now he is reflecting the strength I saw in Sir Alec’s performance as a Jedi Knight in the original Star Wars, that amazing economy of both movement and gesture. I’m a strong believer that, in a film like Jedi, where there is a huge menagerie of organisms involved—animal, vegetable, and mineral—you can’t just grab the attention of the audience. You have to command it.”
“Alec has developed a very interesting characteristic, which I can see as a director watching an actor work, of not doing anything,” Marquand says. “It’s a very interesting theory which I know some actors play with: of being not there. Just totally nothing, which I find very strange, but it works beautifully for Ben Kenobi.”
Guinness described his stint in Jedi as “flitting across the screen” for his share of the “gold from outer space.” That Saturday, however, it had apparently taken all of Lucas’s diplomacy to bring him back just one more time—plus the promise of a discreet screen credit. “I don’t mind doing it if it only takes one morning to film, but a big credit would be unfair,” Guinness says. “I’m gone in a cough and a spit. Suppose I have a fan somewhere who has paid money to see me?”
“He did feel better the second day,” Kazanjian says. “But his voice probably will have to be duped anyway. We’ll probably change a few lines of dialogue and also Richard feels the voice is a little hoarse.”
That Thursday, Guinness wrapped his role on set as Ben Kenobi for the last time, after two days worked. His last shot was a second-unit one, supervised by Lucas, against black velvet for his Ewok celebration appearance with a Yoda puppeteered by an assistant or Oz, who also completed his role as Yoda with second unit after three days worked.
Guinness confided to a friend: “It was a dreary boring job, but I liked the director and had nothing to do with any other actors—thank God—except Mark Hamill, who is pleasant.”
Back in the States, a photo of the location set in Yuma being constructed appeared in the Los Angeles Times, further compromising production’s cover story. Accompanying text stated that, although Lucasfilm was claiming to shoot Blue Harvest, “knowledgeable sources insist that the set is really for the third chapter in […] the Star Wars saga […] now filming in England.”
Another looming problem was the rancor suit, which was used in a videomatic sequence shot on March 2 and 11, with background cave walls made out of wrapping paper. The elaborate prototype rancor costume had been constructed by Tony McVey, Eben Stromquist, and Randy Dutra, “but once we got it down to the stage to shoot George’s videomatics, we realized how difficult and costly it was going to be to build a finished suit that someone could fit inside,” says Tippett.
“We had three people operating the thing, and if the background was dark enough and we filmed at a high-speed, we got something that sort of worked,” says Muren. “But there were still many problems associated with trying to create a correct sense of mass and weight for a monster that was supposed to be about 18 feet tall.”
The original Jedi, Alec Guinness (Obi-Wan “Ben” Kenobi), and Lucas on set, Wednesday, March 10, 1982.
Guinness, Hamill, and Marquand, discussing the scene in which Obi-Wan reveals that Leia is Luke’s sister.
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bsp; REPORT NOS. 45–47: FRIDAY–TUESDAY, MARCH 12–16; STAGE 4—INT. DEATH STAR, EMPEROR’S ROOM, SCS. 118, 122 [VADER KILLS EMPEROR]; SECOND UNIT: STAGE 2—EXT. DAGOBAH, SC. 49 [R2 ALL ALONE]; STAGE 9—OVER SHOULDER X-AND Y-WING POVS; STAGE 1—YODA’S HOUSE, COVERAGE; STAGE 2—YODA’S HOUSE, PICKUP ON SC. 50
Marquand still had a bad sore throat and saw Dr. Gayner on Friday, while second unit shot an insert of R2 and a chinchilla on the Dagobah set. “We went back in later with George and did some extra shots establishing Dagobah and his home,” says Kazanjian. “George shot some more coverage, trying to correct Yoda’s eyes without Mark there.”
Main unit filmed the end of the three-way showdown in the Death Star, with the Emperor unleashing lightning bolts that would be seen only later in postproduction after they’d been animated. “Mark has a great sense of humor,” McDiarmid would say. “Like some American actors, he likes English comedy and he was a great fan of Tommy Cooper, who used to perform magic tricks, badly. He would always get them wrong, hilariously, and would do the same kind of gestures, hopelessly, that the Emperor does, seriously, with his fingers. So when I was trying to kill Luke with my electric light thing, occasionally a glint would come into Mark’s eyes and he would do the hand gestures back—we were both thinking of Tommy Cooper—and that used to make us laugh a lot. But of course we had to get very serious at certain moments.”
The Making of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (Enhanced Edition) Page 35
