Filming on Star Wars began at 6:30 a.m. on Monday, March 22, 1976. It was a catastrophe almost from the start. “Things started going wrong,” said Kurtz with typical understatement.15 Wind and heavy rains—the first rainfall in the Tunisian desert in nearly a decade—damaged sets and props, and rapidly fading light made it nearly impossible for Lucas to film Hamill, as Luke Skywalker, quietly contemplating his dreams against a blazing desert sunset. (It would take three days before Lucas could get the now-iconic shot on film.) Remote-control robots malfunctioned, and Anthony Daniels, in his ill-fitting C-3PO costume, could barely see and hear, and couldn’t take more than a few steps without falling over. “I was very, very tired and very cross,” said Daniels.16
And then there was Lucas’s own self-imposed misery involving the script and his hand-wringing over the decision to kill off Ben Kenobi. Guinness may have been annoyed with Lucas’s indecision, but for the most part, Sir Alec eagerly, even enthusiastically, supported Lucas’s vision for the film. On his first day of filming, he took great relish in rolling in the dirt to give his own wardrobe the same “used universe” look as the rest of the film. Lucas admitted he was in awe of the Englishman. “He’s huge and I’m so small,” said Lucas. “I didn’t know where to put myself.”17
By the end of the two-week Tunisian shoot, Lucas was “desperately unhappy.” But with work wrapped on location, production would now move to Elstree, and what Lucas expected would be a much more stable and controllable studio environment.
“I was hoping things would go better,” Lucas said later. “But they didn’t.”18
Things were very much under control at Elstree—but unfortunately, Lucas wasn’t the one controlling them. British unions kept all activity to a heavily regulated and routinized schedule: an 8:30 a.m. start, tea at 10, lunch for an hour starting at 1:15 p.m., with another tea break at 4. And the crew would stop promptly at 5:30 p.m., whether the work was finished or not. The 5:30 quitting time was particularly galling to Lucas, who had never had much patience with unions anyway, and was used to working late into the evening to get just the right shot or finish a particularly long scene. Lucas would corral Kurtz to help him plead with the union representatives for additional time, almost always without success. “The crew got upset with both of us,” said Lucas. “I ended up having to be nice to everybody, which is hard when you don’t like a lot of people.”19
The British crew members were also baffled by what kind of movie, exactly, these Americans were making, derisively referring to Chewbacca as “the dog,” snickering as grown men and women fired weapons that made no noise, and watching in amusement as Lucas fumed over yet another stalled R2 unit. “The British crew thought we were all out of our minds,” recalled Harrison Ford. “They just thought that it was ludicrous and stupid.”20 As Lucas put it, “I was just this crazy American who was doing this really dopey movie.”21
Lucas had only himself to blame for some of the friction; his quiet, somewhat terse style grated on the British. “All film crews are a matter of chemistry,” said Kurtz diplomatically. “George is not a particularly social person. He doesn’t go out of his way to socialize. It takes him a while to know somebody, to get intimate enough to share his problems with them. It’s easier for him to work with people he knows.”22 For Lucas, though, people were precisely the problem. “Directing is very difficult because you’re making a thousand decisions—there are no hard and fast answers—and you’re dealing with people, sometimes very difficult people, emotional people,” he sighed. “I just didn’t enjoy it.”23
When filming began at Elstree on April 7, not only were the script and the sets still under construction, but also, apart from his decision to kill Ben Kenobi, Lucas had only recently settled on the last name “Skywalker” for his hero. It was a decision he fussed over—the “Starkiller” surname had been in his script for more than three years—but with the 1969 Charles Manson murders not yet a distant memory, Lucas worried that the name made Luke sound too much like a serial killer. The name of the film, too, was up in the air. While the crew would use clapper boards and notebooks emblazoned with a logo reading The Star Wars, Lucas had all but settled on dropping the definite article, preferring simply Star Wars.
Even as cameras rolled, Barry and his crew were still putting the finishing touches on nearly a hundred sets spread across the eight soundstages. One of the most impressive was over on Stage 3, where the full-sized Millennium Falcon sat, based on a detailed model sent over from ILM. Barry’s construction crew quickly discovered, however, that scaled up, the entire ship wouldn’t fit onto the soundstage, so only half was built against one wall; the rest would be added as a matte painting later, as needed. The ship was so enormous, in fact, that Lucas decided it was better just to leave it in place and build the needed sets around it, including the Docking Bay 94 hangar where Han Solo would confront Jabba the Hutt—a sequence Lucas would tinker with, shelve, then revive nearly twenty years later with the help of new filmmaking technology.
Everywhere he looked, all Lucas could see were the problems. Robots continued to malfunction and run into walls. Even after adjustment, Anthony Daniels’s C-3PO costume still fit him poorly, leaving most of his upper body’s weight resting so heavily on his hands that his thumbs went completely numb for the entire shoot. There was so little money that nearly all of the scenes on the Death Star were filmed on the same set, dressed several different ways—and John Barry squabbled with Lucas’s director of photography over the best way to light them.
For perhaps the first time, however, Lucas enjoyed working with his actors—even if his actors couldn’t always tell. Typically, Lucas gave little or no feedback after takes, leaving the actors grasping for guidance. If he liked a take, he would simply mutter: “Cut. Print it. Perfect.” If he didn’t, he would offer one of only two bits of direction: “Faster, more intense,” or “Same thing, only better.” It got to be something of a joke with the actors, who would look expectantly at Lucas after every take, waiting for his response with mock excitement. “George has such a clear vision in his head of what it is that he wants, actually trying to get that out of an actor is a bit of an inconvenience,” said Harrison Ford. “That’s not George’s favorite part of a job.”24 As Mark Hamill put it, “I have a sneaking suspicion that if there were a way to make movies without actors, George would do it.”25
And yet Lucas did like his actors. He was particularly fond of Hamill, who was exactly his kind of nerd: short, with a geek’s gung-ho fondness for comic books and toys. In fact, it didn’t take Hamill long to realize that Lucas had infused more than a little of himself in the character of Luke. “I’m really playing him in the movie,” said Hamill, who had watched Lucas closely as he acted out the scene in which Luke finds the runaway Artoo.26 “I was thinking, He’s doing it so small, so I’ll do it just like him,” said Hamill, “and he’ll see how wrong he is.”27 But Lucas loved it, and Hamill would come to integrate a few of Lucas’s quirks—smaller gestures, quieter dialogue—into his character. Lucas would take to warmly calling Hamill “The Kid,” a slight variation on the stinky kid nickname Coppola had bestowed on Lucas.
Fisher, by contrast, reminded him of his own younger sister, tough and silly at the same time. Fisher had a wicked sense of humor and a foul mouth—fueled at times by a drug habit she managed to keep mostly hidden—and she had no trouble at all playing a tough-talking princess. And yet Lucas didn’t want her looking too aggressively feminine, using gaffer’s tape to hold down her breasts. “No breasts bounce in space, no jiggling in the Empire,” Fisher snickered, adding: “Gary Kurtz had to tell me that. George didn’t have the nerve.”28 Still, despite her swagger, Fisher was insecure about playing Leia; she never felt she was pretty enough, disliked her earmuff hairstyle, couldn’t decide what accent she should be using, and fretted about dropping her prop gun during her swing over a chasm with Hamill—but also worried that if she expressed any displeasure or discomfort, she would be fired and replaced by Jodie Foster or
any of the countless other actresses Lucas had rejected for the role.
Ford, however, had no such inhibitions. Displaying a the-hell-with-it attitude—and looking like he was having more fun than anyone else—Ford gave Han Solo just the right balance of smarm and charm. More than the other actors, Ford wasn’t shy about voicing his displeasure with Lucas’s jargon-heavy script and clunky dialogue. “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it,” he would tell Lucas brazenly—and Ford would go through his lines each day, slightly tweaking his dialogue, and warning Lucas when he intended to ad-lib in a particular take. “Stop me if I’m really bad,” he would tell Lucas—but he was rarely stopped.29 None of them were, really. Lucas even kept in Hamill’s ad-lib in which he winkingly gave Chewbacca’s cell block number as 1138, a coy nod to Lucas’s other science fiction film. “In terms of changing their lines,” said Lucas, “well, that’s a matter of letting them have their way.”30
The chemistry—the “magic,” as Lucas had called it—among his cast continued off-screen as well, and Lucas was relieved that, for the most part, his actors were hassle-free. “I only want people who are good, talented, and easy to work with,” Lucas once remarked, “because life is too short for crazy actors.”31 According to Hamill, the cast regularly went out of their way to try to make Lucas laugh, “because he really looked like he was ready to burst into tears, and you’d try to cheer him up.”32 Ultimately, they all came to trust in Lucas and his instincts as a director, even if they didn’t always understand what was going on. “At times during Star Wars I was perhaps a bit puzzled,” said Guinness, “but I never lost faith in the project. There were people around who doubted the sanity of the venture and who were critical of George and Gary [Kurtz]. ‘Lucas doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ they’d say, or ‘Call this filmmaking?’ But I had confidence in them.”33
Still, even Guinness had his moments of rolling his eyes at what he called Lucas’s “ropey” dialogue, as did Anthony Daniels and Mark Hamill, who bonded over their mutual snickering at their lines. When Hamill teased Daniels that Threepio’s dialogue was worse than Luke’s, Daniels pointed out that he, at least, was “behind a mask. None of my friends know I am in this movie, so it’s fine.”34 Three-foot-eight Kenny Baker, anonymously ensconced inside R2-D2’s aluminum shell when the script called for the little droid to shuffle or rock, also “wondered what the movie was about. None of us knew.”35 And yet he, too, would do his best to please Lucas, smiling broadly inside his R2 unit to convey R2’s emotions, even though no one could see him. “You have to do something to get the feel of the thing,” explained Baker with a shrug.36
Even Lucas’s villains were relatively easygoing. Dave Prowse would walk forcefully around the sets between takes in his full Vader costume, doing his best to stay in character, but took it all in good stride when he learned that his castmates had dubbed him “Darth Farmer,” in playful reference to the West Country English accent in which he delivered his fearsome lines, to be dubbed later by James Earl Jones. Meanwhile, Peter Cushing, playing the cold Grand Moff Tarkin, was such a warmhearted gentleman that Carrie Fisher found it difficult to rail angrily at him about his “foul stench.” “The man smelled like linen and lavender,” she said.37
On April 13, over on Elstree’s Stage 6, Lucas would finally film the cantina sequence he’d been envisioning since the treatment for The Journal of the Whills, including the moment when someone loses an arm to a lightsaber. Unfortunately, it didn’t live up to his expectations—and probably never would. Prior to filming, makeup artist and mask maker Stuart Freeborn became seriously ill and had to be hospitalized, leaving most of the cantina monsters unfinished. “The ones we did have were background monsters, which weren’t meant to be key monsters,” said Lucas. While he would shoot additional footage with some new monsters almost a year later, he would always be disappointed with the relatively unexpressive cantina creatures, most of whom could barely move their hands. Even the normally enthusiastic Hamill was unimpressed. “It was really imaginatively described, and then you go in there, and it looks like The Nutcracker Suite,” said Hamill. “You know, a frog guy, a mouse girl.… [I]t was really disappointing.”38
But what disappointed Lucas more than anything else was the feeling that he was losing control of his own movie. Partly it was due to the size of the crew needed for a $10 million film. This wasn’t American Graffiti, a $700,000 film shot over twenty-eight days on the streets of Petaluma with a crew of fewer than twenty; Star Wars required a crew of over nine hundred. “The larger the picture, the less time you have to deal with detail,” said Kurtz. “On a small picture, you can do everything yourself.”39 That was the way Lucas would have preferred it; with such a large crew, he had no chance of controlling everything. Instead, he had to follow a chain of command, a process he found excruciating. Once a decision was made, “I would tell a department head, and he would tell another assistant department head, he’d tell some guy, and by the time it came down the line, it was not there,” complained Lucas. “I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before.”40 Ultimately, “I tried to be in complete control, to do everything myself, but it almost killed me,” he said. “It was too difficult, and I was miserable because I agonized over things not turning out my way.”41
That was particularly true of the film’s editing—always Lucas’s favorite part of the process, and the hardest task for him to turn over to another. As he had done with American Graffiti, Lucas was shipping off footage to be edited nearly as quickly as he was shooting it, this time sending each day’s work to British editor John Jympson. Although Jympson was a veteran of more than twenty films, Lucas had hired him only grudgingly; Lucas’s first choice, Richard Chew—who had edited for Coppola and Miloš Forman—was scuttled by Fox executives, who strongly recommended Lucas hire an editor based locally in London. Still, Jympson seemed like a good choice; one of the many films he had edited was A Hard Day’s Night, and Lucas hoped he would bring that same quick-cut cinéma vérité style to Star Wars. It didn’t happen. “I wasn’t happy with it,” said Lucas. “I tried to get the editor to cut it my way and he didn’t really want to.”42
In Lucas’s opinion, Jympson was making each scene too long and using too many wide shots. Lucas insisted that he wanted Star Wars to look like a documentary—an odd description to apply to a science fiction film, but an apt one, as Star Wars would not look like any other science fiction film. His “used universe” sensibility already gave the film a realism and an intimacy missing in most science fiction films, but Lucas wanted what John Barry described as “a newsreel sort of feeling.” As was his habit, Lucas had set up multiple cameras for each take, strolling the sets at night to figure out the best camera angles, and then filming every scene with three or four cameras rolling. And rather than beginning a new scene with a wide shot to let viewers see one of Barry’s gigantic detailed sets, Lucas kept the camera in tight, letting the actors wander into the frame—“like it was shot on location,” explained Barry.43 “The film has to make us believe it really existed,” explained Lucas, “that we’ve really gone to another galaxy to shoot. The success of the imaginary, it’s to make something totally fabricated seem real… that everything be credible and totally fantastic at the same time.”44
But Jympson hadn’t captured any of that feeling in his edit, forcing Lucas to send lackluster footage back to Los Angeles for Alan Ladd and Fox executives to review. Worse, ILM still had no completed special effects shots, even as the effects budget kept pushing higher and higher. “My head was in the shit,” groaned Dykstra, who did his best to plead his case.45 “We were designing and building optical printers, cameras, and miniatures; as a result, the process didn’t produce a lot of film at first,” Dykstra explained later. “I can understand [Lucas] being nervous about it; he was helming the show—and the studio was nervous.”46
It was no wonder, then, that Ladd decided to fly to London in early May to see exactly what was going on. �
�I had been getting very negative feedback from London about the picture,” Ladd remembered. “And the picture was escalating in cost, so I thought I’d go see for myself.”47 Ladd watched a few days of filming, walked the sets, then huddled with Kurtz and Lucas, hoping for reassurance. Lucas admitted Jympson’s footage looked terrible. “I just wish you had never seen this stuff,” he told Ladd.48 “This is not what I want,” Lucas assured him, “and this is not what it’s going to look like.” Ladd went back to the studio and promised the board that things were fine—but “my real reaction,” said Ladd, “was utter and complete panic.”49
He wasn’t alone. As filming continued through May, Lucas—who had managed to stay relatively stable for eight weeks—finally buckled and fell ill, developing a hacking cough and a foot infection so painful he didn’t even want to get out of bed. Partly it was the pace. “We worked like stink, twenty hours every day,” said production supervisor Robert Watts.50 As Carrie Fisher remembered, “It was like combat shooting… because we had no time, because there was no budget.”51 Mostly, though, the problem was that no matter how hard Lucas tried, nothing seemed to go right. “I cared about every single detail,” said Lucas.52 “It’s very hard for me to get into another system where everybody does things for me, and I say, ‘Fine.’ If I ever continue to do these kinds of movies, I’ve got to learn to do that.”53 Not surprisingly, when it came time to film the scene in the trash compactor—another sequence Lucas had included in his script since practically day one—his vision had been compromised by the chain of command. The fearsome tentacled monster he had envisioned in his script had been stripped down to resemble nothing so much as “a big wide brown turd.”54
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