Stranded on the desert planet Tatooine after rescuing young Queen Amidala from the impending invasion of Naboo, Jedi apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn discover nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker, a young slave unusually strong in the Force. Anakin wins a thrilling Podrace and with it his freedom as he leaves his home to be trained as a Jedi. The heroes return to Naboo where Anakin and the Queen face massive invasion forces while the two Jedi contend with a deadly foe named Darth Maul. Only then do they realize the invasion is merely the first step in a sinister scheme by the re-emergent forces of darkness known as the Sith.
Watch The Empire Strikes Back theatrical trailer, which debuted in fall 1979 and gave audiences their first look at the sequel to Star Wars. In addition to a sampling of scenes taken from the entire movie, the trailer surprisingly features footage that was cut from the final film, including a kiss between Luke and Leia, C-3PO removing a warning sticket from a door in the Rebel base on Hoth, and more. Most interesting, however, is the voiceover — provided by none other than Harrison Ford himself.
From Ad Art to Episode II – An Interview with Marc Gabbana
January 15, 2001 – When concept illustrator Marc Gabbana signed on for Episode II, he knew that a lot of people would potentially see his artwork. Little did he realize that his tight black and white marker illustrations would be the first piece of Episode II concept art to be seen by the public when it appeared on The Official Star Wars Website’s Episode II section.
“It’s so funny,” says Gabbana. “I followed some of the discussions on the net of people trying to figure out what it was. The big news that day was that Hayden Christensen was cast. People were talking about that. Then someone said, ‘Enough about that… what are those things on the Episode II web page?’ The speculation around anything Star Wars related is phenomenal.”
Even Gabbana had to look closely to identify some of the cryptic images incorporated into the page design. “When I saw the site for the first time, I had to do a double-take. I didn’t recognize it at first, because I had done those drawings months before. It was one of the early concepts, too.”
Though Gabbana remains tight-lipped about what exactly is shown in the website illustration, he did find the numerous theories about it amusing. “One guy wrote online that it’s probably some piece of throw-away art that they’re just giving us to throw us off. Another guy was the funniest. He said, ‘no, I know what it is.’ A friend of his friend’s dad whose son was in Vietnam with another friend now works at ILM or something, and they told him what it is. It’s amusing. These guys talk with absolute authority.”
Gabbana came in on the tail end of Episode I’s production, providing storyboard and production art. “I didn’t have much to do as far as concepts go, because everything was already designed. But on Episode II, I got in from the inception, and my responsibilities are far greater. I got to design many more things, which is good.”
Gabbana, whose background includes a lot of advertising art, finds concept illustration liberating. “It teaches you to be a lot more spontaneous, and if an idea sparks another, you just do another drawing. Production paintings are really the icing on the cake after all the design had been done. Star Wars designs have always been so strong and so distinct, that you don’t need to go through generations and generations of ideas before you hit it the final one.”
“Marc is a great talent, because he excels in the same way that Jay Shuster and Ed Natividad do,” says Design Director Doug Chiang. “He’s naturally a really wonderful artist, and he can draw all manner of shapes and environments. The underlying strength of the Art Department is that they all have a natural ability to draw, and an instinct for their subject matter, be it creatures or mechanical shapes or environments. It’s something you can’t really teach in some ways. You have to see it in your portfolio.”
Gabbana describes a strong level of trust between himself and Chiang, as well as the rest of the Art Department. This is quite important since, unlike most of the department, Gabbana does not work out of Skywalker Ranch. Instead, he works in a studio out of his house in his native Canada and telecommutes to the Lucasfilm headquarters.
“I’m in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit,” says Gabbana. “It wouldn’t make sense for me to move out there. I’ve got my girlfriend here. I’ve got my life here.”
With courier services and e-mail, Gabbana kept in constant touch with Chiang and his fellow illustrators at the Ranch. “It’s very collaborative. I would send some drawings to Doug and then he would make certain revisions verbally. I would just send him a new batch, and go off on a tangent that I perhaps would not have thought of,” he says.
“I think Doug appreciates it too because I’m not influenced by what the other artists are doing in house,” adds Gabbana. “That’s kind of a mixed blessing too, because sometimes I want to see what’s going on. Doug e-mails me the relevant images for given scenes, but I’m not able to see what Jay or Ed are doing day-to-day. But that’s okay; I think this way I’m able to send fresh ideas, and not have it influenced by anybody in house.”
Before his illustration career took off, Gabbana studied architecture, a field his father wanted him to follow. “After a year I decided it wasn’t quite for me, so I transferred,” he says. He notes, with irony, that the training still applies. “I’m now a Star Wars architect. I’m very happy with that.”
Gabbana next studied illustration at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. “That’s where everybody went,” he says with a smile — both Natividad and Chiang studied there as well. After graduation in 1990, he stayed in Windsor to launch a career in advertising. “I did freelance work for a bunch of companies in the States and always kept up my own portfolio. The movie industry was something I’ve always wanted to do.”
In 1995, Gabbana met Doug Chiang at ILM, and showed him his portfolio. “Later, I heard of an opening on Episode I, so I just called him up and got hired direct on the spot,” says the artist.
“Everyone who works in the Art Department has it: a spark that went off when they were kids, ” says Gabbana. “That’s what happened to me when I was 11, in 1977, when Star Wars came out. What impressed me the most was Ralph McQuarrie’s work. The fact that you could make these fancy fantasy paintings, and someone pays you for it. I thought, Wow… this could be a job?”
A fateful freelance assignment brought Gabbana in touch with his inspiration. “Ralph McQuarrie was doing some freelance work for Galoob Toys, and so was I at the time. The Galoob art director got me in contact with him and introduced me to him. We struck up a friendship. It was great.”
Of his work and designs, Gabbana is eagerly awaiting the return of Coruscant on the big screen in 2002. “I did a lot of those big scenes. Hopefully I’ll be able to design some of the matte paintings. Even though I won’t personally be doing the finished matte painting myself, at least I’d like to get a chance to do some really tight color comps.”
October 19, 2000 — Episode II is now firmly in the post-production stage, as the digital footage shot in Australia, Tunisia, Spain and England is being edited together to form a rough cut of the film. During this process, Supervising Sound Editor Matthew Wood is hard at work gathering what will become the unique sounds heard in the new Star Wars movie.
“I’m actually going out and recording new sound effects,” explains Wood. “I’m taking the recording gear we used on the set and I’m going out into the field and recording various interesting sounds to apply to the film.”
Wood started this task while in Australia with the main production. “I was over in Australia for a couple a months. I was recording various sounds out there, after reading the script. Right now, I’m building up a library of organic, interesting, unique sounds. I’ve got a fairly big library that I’ve been accumulating over the past ten years that I can always dip into, but I want to try to go with a lot more new fresh sounds in this film.”
The local fauna of Australia provided Wood with an important ingredient in his sound recipe. “There was a trip that I took down to Melbourne while I was there,” he recounts. “I went to Phillip Island, and there were a bunch of penguins that migrate to this one spot down on the very south-eastern part of Australia. I was able to go out there and record. A lot of these penguins have really interesting sounding calls – they have three or four different calls. They just come up to shore around six o’clock at night, and they burrow in their nests. There’re hundreds of them. I was able to get rather distinct calls, because they call out to each other.”
The vociferous penguins are currently slated to lend their voices to a new alien species in Episode II.
The Rise of Skywalker is a touchy subject for many. The conclusion to the Skywalker Saga has been one of the biggest disappointments for fans in pop culture in quite some time. Many audiences across the entire world were underwhelmed, and that feeling came across in the various online conversations, which were going at full speed upon release.
In a different timeline, however, fans got another version of the film, one directed by Jurassic World‘s Colin Trevorrow. While all the details aren’t fully known, bits and pieces of storylines that could’ve been have made their way online over the last few years. Things like the alternate version of the story visiting Coruscant again, to an intense battle between Kylo and Rey in a unique-looking throne room, to a far more prominent spotlight on Finn’s character—from what fans do have, it sure seems like a completely different beast.
That version of the story sadly never saw the light of day due to Lucasfilm letting Trevorrow go from the project, instead opting to bring in J.J. Abrams. But, if the Jurassic World director was given the opportunity, would he ever visit the galaxy far, far away again?…
October 24, 2000 — Assembling a movie from over a hundred hours of footage is a daunting task, but such is the role of Ben Burtt, editor for Episode II. As a typical example of this distillation process, Burtt is currently cutting together what will probably end up being a five-minute action scene. “It’s huge,” explains Burtt. “There’s over seven hours of footage shot for it. I have to go through all that was shot in different ways, angles, and performances. I have to become intimately familiar with that material so I can say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that Obi-Wan says his line faster in this take’, or ‘He says it with irony in this take, and he says it frightened in another take’ or whatever it might be. It’s just a tremendous amount of material to go through.”
Episode II is currently in post-production, a process that typically takes 20 months for a Star Wars movie. Gone is the 200-plus person production crew, and now a bank of powerful computer workstations handle the results of the 14-week shoot. “It’s all focused down to this room,” explains Burtt, of his editing room. Aside from new computers upgraded for Episode II, the editing rooms received much needed decorations: classic movie posters. “We wanted some inspiration so we got some new ones,” smiles Burtt. “Westerns, pirate movies and Captain Marvel.”
Every day director George Lucas and Burtt sit at an AVID workstation, scrutinizing the footage gathered in Sydney and abroad, slowly molding the film to its finished version. “I was able to assemble maybe 60 to 70 percent of what was shot over there in Australia, without George’s input,” explains Burtt, of his initial “assembly cut,” a rough no-frills presentation of the basic story. “I showed that to him. Now, we go back to make his first cut of the film, inching our way through the film, starting with the first frame, and working in story order. So each day, we try to make some progress. We may get a minute done; we may get three minutes done. It’s fairly slow going. It’s a lot of footage and a lot of decisions to be made.”
Lucas’ own film-roots lie heavily in editing, back when trim-bins, physical splicers, and endless reels of footage were the norm. Now, with Episode II existing entirely in the digital realm, this process is heavily streamlined, with carefully inventoried shots stored in a database, just a keystroke away. “I can find things quicker,” explains Burtt. “If it was physical film, something that we do now in minutes would have taken hours.”
The digital format also allows incredible flexibility in the construction of shots. Directors are no longer bound to what was captured on location. “George is directing in the editing room,” says Burtt. “He may rewrite something or re-conceive a scene. It’s also the first time that he’s had a chance to review his footage and reflect on it. Now, he can sit back and forget that stress of directing on-set, and instead evaluate and critique what he’s got. Not only do you have every shot to pass judgment on, but also every pixel within every shot. There’s nothing to stop you from moving things around, changing lighting, or altering sets, splitting characters up and rearranging things. That’s what’s happening now. It’s his usual process, which is to take apart what he’s done, and experiment with what he’s got.
“Really what happens here is that we’re creating layers of the movie,” explains Burtt. Director and editor work closely to cut the live action, which Burtt likens to the “foreground” of the movie. From there, the live action footage moves over to the Animatics Department. “They put in the mid-ground and the background,” explains Burtt. The Animatics Department puts in low-resolution temporary effects under Lucas’ supervision. “They do the first pass of the visual effects within a scene,” says Burtt. “They’re getting a tremendous amount of work to do, putting in all the backgrounds and the CG characters that are missing to work out a lot of the visuals that George wants.”
Once the imagery is supplied by Animatics, Burtt recuts the scene or layers of that scene based on the growing collage. This painstaking process continues, scene by scene, until the finished cut of film starts to take shape. “At some point,” says Burtt, “we can watch the whole movie from beginning to end, and that will reflect all kinds of story changes perhaps within the entire film, and the process will repeat again. We’ll recut the foreground, the animatics teams will redo the midground and backgrounds. And later down the road, a given scene will finally get settled on. It can then be turned over to ILM for them to create the effects and complete whatever other post-production processes are required for each scene to be fully finished.”
Episode II Art and Architecture:
An Interview with Kurt Kaufman
November 16, 2000 — When not helping envision the new concepts of Episode II, Concept Artist Kurt Kaufman tries to find time to illustrate for himself, for relaxation. “I’m usually just too burned out to do that. But when I’m not working here, I do traditional and computer illustration, professionally and recreationally, to keep my skills up. Landscapes, vehicles, architecture.”
His subject matter is not surprising, since this is also what Kaufman worked on in Episode II. “If there’s a focus to the work I do, then I’d say it’s mostly architecture,” he says, “and a lot of background and scenic shots. Very little of what I do is establishing the initial look. Mostly I extrapolate on looks that have already been established by some of the other designers. But I’m doing a lot more concept design on this film than I did on Episode I.”
Kaufman studied transportation design while at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The move to Los Angeles exposed him to the world of film. “My dad was a car designer at Ford,” explains Kaufman, “and I thought I would probably do car design or product design of some kind. But when I was in school I got disillusioned with real world design, and became intrigued with the film industry. Of course Star Wars was very inspiring, but when I saw it, it never really occurred to me that I could actually work on something like that. That was such a world apart from where I was. But when I was in school Alien and Blade Runner came out. Those movies really inspired me, and I started thinking seriously about working in the film and entertainment industries.”
After graduating from Art Center, Kaufman worked in LA as a freelance designer and illustrator for about five years. He eventually landed a job in northern California, working at Industrial Light & Magic, where he met Doug Chiang in the ILM Art Department, along with a crew of other very talented artists including Iain McCaig. Later, when Chiang was organizing the Art Department for Episode I, Kaufman was brought on board.
“Kurt is one of those great team members who can bring a lot in from his experience,” says Chiang. “He’s an industrial designer, so he complements the team really well because he can fully flesh out environments and vehicles. He approaches it from a very practical design point of view, and brings to it aspects of reality. The designs look like they can work. It’s one thing to have people who can draw things really well, but it’s another to have people who can really figure it out and make it look like they can function.”
For Episode I, Kaufman joined the team later in the game, and much of the concept phase was already completed. His contributions, however, were important for the Animatics Department. “Mostly what I did on Episode I was filling in blank areas behind the live plates that had been shot. There was a lot of architecture as well, predominantly Theed, Coruscant and Tatooine.”
When The Phantom Menace moved into post-production, Kaufman moved to the ILM matte department to work on finished shots. “A sequence I worked on that comes to mind is the sequence where Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon and Jar Jar are in a Gungan submarine. It comes up out of the water and it’s the first time you see Theed,” says Kaufman. “Matte painting is all done digitally now; it’s a combination of digital painting and assembling other elements. These shots had some beautiful miniature models in them. It’s a major team effort at that point.”
For Episode II, Kaufman was brought aboard much earlier, and worked on both concept designs and storyboards for the major action sequences. “I prefer doing concept design.” says Kaufman, “For me, it’s a lot harder and more demanding, but it’s also more rewarding. I like being involved in the whole process, though. Hopefully after the Art Department is done, I’ll get to go down to ILM and work in the matte department again. Following through on the final art is really rewarding as well.”
Kaufman’s transportation design background served him well for Episode II, in the design of a Naboo bus that will be seen in the film. ” I try to work in my car influences, but it’s difficult because it’s not the real world, plus I’m trying to predict what George Lucas is going to like and what Doug is going to like. But definitely my automotive design education has helped me get to this point.”
Another scene Kaufman’s particularly looking forward to takes place in a shadowy abandoned district on Coruscant. “I did a concept for that scene, so it’s mainly mine with some of Marc Gabbana’s influence.”
Collaboration is key in the Art Department, and Kaufman has worked closely with Jay Shuster, Ed Natividad, Marc Gabbana and Doug Chiang. “Doug is the one I get most input and direction from, and some of the work is shared. A lot of what the other artists do influences a lot of what I do. And, of course, in many ways it’s all derived from George’s original vision.”
Kaufman’s own style has grown in his time with the Art Department, which he credits to the caliber of artists he worked with on a daily basis. “It’s much more disciplined here. There’s less focus on technique, and more focus on design and composition. ” he says. “Some of my work in the past was comparitively loose and sketchy. My work has come a long way because I’m working with people who are really motivating, inspiring and some of the best in the business. Working here at the Ranch on Star Wars with this crew has definitely been a high point in my career.”
Disney has released the official release dates for every episode of its upcoming Star Wars series Andor on Twitter. After the first three episodes premiere on Wednesday, September 21, there will be one episode per week over the following nine weeks.
Episode I’s chief artist Doug Chiang has taken up where Ralph McQuarrie’s paintbrush left off, and has brought a new look to Star Wars for the new movie. Find out about some of the influences shaping Chiang’s designs in this special interview.
Episode I is fortunate to rely upon a remarkably talented individual for the distinctive new look of its environments, spacecraft, and other elements of design. Artist Doug Chiang has taken up where the great Ralph McQuarrie left off, and has brought a fascinating imprint to Episode I. Chiang’s work includes not only the creation of a huge body of original artwork and designs, but also the supervision of the team of extraordinary conceptual artists brought together in George Lucas’ Episode I Art Department. Beyond this, Chiang works closely with the effects supervisors at ILM and is overseeing the miniature set and model construction to ensure that the Art Department’s work is translated faithfully to the screen. He is as busy now as he was in pre-production, since design is still very much in progress for some of the more elaborate sequences presently being put together.
Taking the helm of the Star Wars Art Department would be a daunting challenge for anyone, but Chiang has risen to the occasion with an appealing mix of fresh artistic style and great respect for those who built the art of Star Wars before him. An interview in Star Wars Insider #39 explores Chiang’s background. Here on http://www.starwars.com, David West Reynolds carries on from that article to explore the influences that Chiang has brought to the look of Episode I.
What kinds of thoughts got you started on the art of Episode I?
When I first started, I didn’t know whether George wanted more of the same designs that we had seen in the earlier trilogy–the kind of work that Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston had produced. So I thought a lot about trying to identify the exact look of Star Wars in Ralph’s work. I wanted to identify his visual style and the qualities that made it distinctly Star Wars, and incorporate that into my own work.
Ralph’s work displays such grandeur with striking imagery, and I wanted to try to capture that. I considered Ralph’s work very closely, and what really struck me was the clarity of design, how well his paintings and ideas read. He has a great sense of fitting bold images into unusual contexts. He present things in unfamiliar contexts, something that George likes very much–the unexpected. This approach adds to the richness and the depth of fantasy world history. In addition, Ralph’s colors are just as striking. His palette is fresh and bold, and sometimes stylized.
Stylized colors? Give me an example of what you mean by that.
[Well, for instance, Ralph’s blues in his Hoth paintings are really strong and vibrant, almost electric blues. Because the paintings work so well, you don’t realize right away that those blues are much more stylized than realistic. They’re powerfully effective at creating mood, and they feel like the actual movie scenes more than they really look like them.
Was this approach something you chose to follow in your paintings?
At first I was very uncomfortable about being so bold in my own work, but since then I have pushed myself into new territory and tried some rich color combinations as well.
In the Star Wars work of Ralph and Joe Johnston, what has been the strongest influence on you?
For me it had always been about functionality when I came up with designs. The design quality was in how well they would work, and how they were built. For George, film design quality is not about details like that, but about how well a design reads to the eye, immediately. Ralph and Joe’s works really express that. They’re very clear and bold in concept, and I have tried to learn that quality.
So has Ralph checked in on you? I notice that you have one of his original paintings on your wall there.
He has come by three times and has been really kind. I think I spend most of my time just trying to live up to his work!
But Episode I is yours! What kinds of influences can we expect to see in your Episode I designs?
George Lucas influences, to start out with! After I had spent all that time studying the Star Wars style, George came in and told me he wanted something as fresh as Ralph’s original work, but different. We’ve been saturated in designs derived from the original Star Wars look for twenty years now, and George wanted something really new. He said, “push the envelope, discover new things.” It was a surprise, but really exciting. He said, “I want chrome, sleek shapes, Art Nouveau, and Art Moderne.” That’s when I realized that this was going to be something new and not just a rework of the earlier material.
How would you describe the look you’ve developed in Episode I?
This film takes place a generation earlier than the classic trilogy, and in it you see vehicles and ships treated as art forms. Many of them are romantic and elegant. It is a craftsman’s era. Every detail is given care. It is kind of like the 1920’s and 1930’s compared to the later 20th century. Towards the later times of the classic trilogy, designs become more assembly-line like, with mass-produced aesthetics, hard angles, and a machined look. More utilitarian. The era of Episode I is more polished, more individualized, even overly-designed, but very refined. You see artistic values expressed in vehicles that are pure craft and aesthetics. Some elements are purely visual statements. Something simpler could function, but the design statements turn them into works of art.
Are there deliberate links between Episode I designs and those seen in the classic trilogy?
Absolutely. There is one ship in particular that very much foreshadows the look of a design from A New Hope, and there are other conceptual links as well.
What’s your toughest challenge in working up these new designs?
There is a fine line between a handcrafted look and a look that is “too sci-fi,” or “too design-ey.” I think that you get that “too sci-fi” look when you use present-day aesthetics and try to project it forward into a foreign world without the history to back it up. As a result these designs date very quickly. To get around this, I’ve found that you should avoid making things up without anchoring them to a strong foundation based in world history.
What areas of world art or history have you drawn on for Episode I?
I took early 1950’s American car design as a starting point for some of the space fighters, for chrome and sleek streamlining. For another culture in the film I drew on traditional African art stylization to get the look of their vehicles, their aesthetic. I combined that with hints of animal forms, and this invested the designs with personality, which is one of the hardest things to do.
What kind of design input do you get from George?
George is always very directly involved. He is a fantastic designer! Sometimes he will make very specific requests while other times he will just ask to see something different and fresh. In fact he will often ask for combinations of forms that, at first, don’t seem to fit together. But that is where George’s design genius lies, in the odd juxtaposition of unrelated images. It took me awhile to adjust to this. But this kind of direction takes the art into new areas, and we have ended up with some of our best designs by wrestling with direction that seemed impossible.
The illustrations for this feature all come from the portfolio that Doug Chiang had put together before he came on board for Episode I. We chose these artworks to demonstrate Doug’s style and range, and in them you see some of the influences that emerged later in Episode I.
Star Wars: Episode I has presented Creature Effects Supervisor Nick Dudman and his team with a daunting array of challenges in the realm of creating convincing alien characters. The broad and unusual range of life forms populating the worlds of Episode I begin their lives as sketches. In sketches, practicalities do not operate, and the artist is free to create according to imagination. But to make it off the sketch-paper into the movie, the creature has to take form…somehow. Once selected and modified to director George Lucas’ satisfaction, the creatures are computer-generated (CG) or realized as physical creations (animatronics, prosthetics, puppets).
Nick Dudman told us, “When they first approached me about animatronic or prosthetic work in the film, they did not know how much there would be. They had decided that Yoda would be a puppet, made the same way as he was before. And then the list of animatronics creatures started to grow. Gradually all these other creatures started surfacing, where they would say, ‘well, actually, maybe this should be a puppet too.'”
Dudman is the first to admit that some things simply belong in the realm of CG. “There are lots of things we can’t do that CG can. I have no intention of ever going to a full-size brontosaurus! With CG, you don’t need to.” And ILM is shouldering an impressive load of creature effects that draw upon the unique capabilities of the computer medium. At the same time, animatronics work remains the ideal solution for many effects. “There are plenty of things where you can say, ‘actually, for this shot, this sequence, we don’t need to CG it.’ And so we build it.” Meetings with ILM sorted out how the creatures in each shot would be most appropriately realized. It’s not unusual to have a single character realized in different ways. In Episode I, for example, Yoda will be performed by Frank Oz once more. In later films, should the Jedi Master need to walk and move around, a CG Yoda will “step in.”
Some of these decisions came late. One type of creature was always planned to be CG. Just twelve weeks before they were due on set in the schedule, Dudman was suddenly asked, “Can you do these animatronically? And they have to lip-sync.” Dudman replied, “Yes, I suppose we can.” It was a race. His department reached into its magician’s hat of inspiration, late nights and determined effort, and the creatures were ready the day before they were needed.
Other creatures were intended from the beginning to be CG, but were created physically as well for other reasons. Dudman’s shop created one ‘CG character’ to assist ILM for lighting and coloring reference. “They used our suit to walk through the set and allow light to fall on it and show where all the highlights are. It’s a reference for ILM when they do their rendering later on.” This approach saves ILM the considerable time and trouble of doing it from scratch. On-set animatronics creatures also assist the actors in reacting and relating to non-human characters. “That human connection is one of the reasons why I like building animatronic things or doing prosthetic make-ups, because you actually walk something that’s real in front of people, and you get a reaction from them. With a lot of our creatures, the real kick for us, is just to be able to have kids on the set and see the reaction you get.”
Dudman is always quick to acknowledge the special powers of CG creations. “CG creatures look and behave beautifully. They always look right and always hit their marks. They’re great. And we are fully aware of the limitations in terms of what we can get our creatures to do as opposed to CG.” Nonetheless, animatronics and prosthetic work, even puppets, still hold an important place in the world of Episode I. Dudman carries on a rich tradition in his creature shop, having worked on The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi with the legendary Stuart Freeborn. Dudman’s history with Freeborn and the Episode I re-creation of a certain Jedi Master are stories we’ll visit here in the future.
Here you’ll find a collection of old features pertaining to various articles to do with the movies, in front & Behind-the-Scenes at SW.Com
Today, we have a small collection of thumbs from the Episode II Select series in which the teasing got worse for, what we thought at the time was the final Star Wars movie. Check out the small gallery.
The entire process of making Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999) are shown here in this documentary. From pre-production through post-production we get to see visual effects meetings, John Williams music sessions and even the storm that wiped out the pod-racers and props.
Back in 1976, Ben Burtt coined the title “Sound Designer” with his award-winning work on Star Wars. Before that watershed, no one had pushed the creation and development of sound to the extremes explored by Burtt. His work gave birth to a whole aural universe, complete with characters expressing themselves almost exclusively through sound effects — and that earned Burtt a Special Achievement Award at the Oscars ceremony of 1978. He then refined his art through several major projects, including The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and all three Indiana Jones movies. [Chewbacca growls]Since then, Burtt has gone on to explore much more than sound in the world of filmmaking, but fans will be glad to know that he is lending his special talent to Star Wars once more, as Sound Designer for Star Wars: Episode I.
Burtt left Lucasfilm in 1990 to pursue other interests as a freelancer: writing, directing, editing. Although he always kept in touch with his former colleagues — doing work on The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, for instance — he never really came back to Luke Skywalker’s universe until Producer Rick McCallum asked him to sit in the Sound Designer’s chair again for the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition. “I was the only one who could remember where most of the stuff was, where the tapes were, what we had done,” he says with a smile. “It was exciting to go back and get in touch with the picture again, the old friends who were there. R2-D2, and the lightsabers.” Following the Special Edition project, McCallum made Burtt “an offer he couldn’t refuse” and so Burtt stayed on board for Episode I.
Even though he could draw from an extensive library of sounds, including those used in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies, for the Episode I project Burtt went out to record new samples. He also drew upon the large collection of sounds he has recorded during the last decade. In all his travels, from his back yard to the far reaches of an exotic country, Burtt has carried his recording equipment with him, capturing everything and anything on digital tape. “You have to be constantly ready,” he says, “because good sounds often come to you by accident: lightning storms, strange vehicle noises, glaciers breaking apart…it can happen anywhere.” These recordings, most of them never used before, have provided Burtt with fresh raw material to mold into new Star Wars sounds.
While creating innovative atmospheres, Burtt takes great care to stay true to the original Star Wars ambiance. “There are things we will reuse, of course,” he says. “We’ve got [Laser fight from Episode I]lightsabers, we’ve got lasers, we’ve got so many signature effects which reoccur in this movie, and I think it’s only appropriate to touch on those because they’re familiar to the fans.” Indeed, one of Burtt’s goals had always been to establish a set of sounds which could stand the test of time. “I think we’ve achieved that with Star Wars,” he says. “We’ve created a ‘world of sounds’ that’s coherent and can endure the passage of time…it’s been over 20 years, and Star Wars still has a distinct sound to it.”
One of those distinct and memorable sounds is the voice of R2-D2. “R2 was, on the first film, the most difficult sound project,” Burtt recalls. “He appears again in this film, and he is very much in character, as he always is.” The old lightsaber sounds also appear in Episode I, though Burtt is reworking them to fit the faster fighting sequences that take place in the new movie. Each of the new lightsabers will also have its own signature sound, slightly different from the others. “I always try to match the sound of a unique weapon with the personality of the character who wields it,” Burtt says. “The Jedi lightsabers have a warm, almost musical sound, while the villain’s lightsaber sounds a lot more dangerous and nasty, a little like a buzz-saw. It sounds like the guy who uses this is truly evil.”
These sounds have been assembled into a rough mix to accompany the rough cut of Episode I. “We’ve already got all the basic ships and explosions and ambiances in it,” Burtt says. “It’s a continuation of the pre-visualization process achieved through animatics, except it’s done with sound. ‘Pre-auralization’, if you will.” At first, all of the effects are temporary. Then, as the final sounds are developed and perfected, the trial sound effects are slowly replaced by their permanent, official counterparts. “On the first movie, we had several experimental mixes of the picture. They were all temporary versions, of course, and some of them were rather sloppy. But we could sit down and run the picture from beginning to end and, with sound added, it would seem complete,” Burtt explains. This process allows everyone to critique the film’s sound based on a close approximation of the final version.
The digital revolution has made manipulating sound and sound mixes much easier than it was when Star Wars began twenty years ago. “Since we’re working with computer files now,” Burtt says, “it’s technically easier to manipulate the sounds and move them around. Adding sound to a movie that’s still being edited is just like applying paint to a house that’s being constantly modified and rebuilt. If someone adds a balcony or removes a wall, you have to start over, and that’s the way it was with sound back then.”
But with today’s technology, the computer can keep track of everything, which makes such dynamic sound designing and editing less of a headache. “Now we can build a very complex temporary mix, which is so much richer and deeper,” says Burtt. The translation from temporary sound tracks to final mix has also become less problematic. “It used to be that when the final cut of a movie was decided upon, you would scrap the temporary sound mix and start building the final tracks. But now, you get to keep everything, because it’s all digital and can be handled much more easily. So I’d say roughly 80% of the temp mix will end up in the final one.”
However, all of these technological advances don’t necessarily mean that sound work is easier now than it was twenty years ago. “The creative process is just as big and just as hard,” says Burtt, “but technology allows a smaller crew to tackle the challenge, and to do it in a more effective way. The sound crew on Episode I is about a third of what it was on Return of the Jedi, even though the task is just as complex.” The extensive use of new technology allows for more freedom in the exploration and creation of sound, enabling the crew to concentrate more on art than on technical considerations.
Much of Burtt’s time lately was spent finishing the sound mix for the Episode I teaser trailer. Despite the fact that it’s much shorter than an actual movie, a trailer presents unique and interesting sound challenges. “During the last few years, the trend has been to build trailers with very short shots, tightly linked together, maintaining a very quick pace,” Burtt says.
“This trend is hard on sound, because while the brain can process visuals this way — a quick succession of different images — it can’t do the same thing with sound. Short samples of sound take a longer time for the brain to decipher. If they’re bundled together too tightly, they don’t make any sense at all.” The sound can’t be as choppy as the stream of images, but at the same time it must follow the action and move at the same pace. Burtt and his team strive to get just the right balance of clarity and speed. “The team is new, and we’re still learning to work together. We’re getting a sense of what we can do, what we cannot do, and just how far we can push ourselves before our concerted efforts start losing effectiveness. So the work we did on the trailer is a great shakedown for us. We’re sort of gearing up for the final mix of the actual movie.”
George Lucas has often said that sound is 50% of the movie experience, and Ben Burtt fully intends to continue pushing sound development to the limit for Episode I. “This film is so filled with activity, people, and places,” he says. “There’s always something going on in the foreground, the middleground, the background — even off-screen. It’s a wonderful environment in which to let the sound go wild, expand, and completely fill all this world.”
Episode I exists in a technological paradox. It is a chapter of the Star Wars story that takes place decades before the classic Trilogy, and yet it was created two decades after the original movie. While some visual effects techniques have changed very little over the years, today’s effects specialists use many tools that didn’t even exist when audiences first sat down in darkened theaters to watch the adventures of Luke Skywalker and the Rebellion go up against the Empire. Many effects are being done far differently at the turn of the century, and onscreen results are better than they ever were. But that usually means that today’s effects also look different than their aging counterparts. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon ignite their lightsabers aboard one of the Federation Battleships.Through their work on The Phantom Menace, Industrial Light & Magic had to achieve a delicate balance between superior technology and movie continuity.
On Episode I, Visual Effects Supervisor Scott Squires and his team were responsible for the lightsaber sequences and everything that had to do with the city of Theed. So part of their work involved dealing with two effects that had been born with the original Star Wars movie: the familiar lightsaber blades, and the holograms, used as visual transmission devices.
“In Episode IV, Princess Leia calls upon Obi-Wan Kenobi for help.George Lucas liked the way the holograms looked in the previous movies,” explains Squires, “so we tried to recreate that look. The basic process involves shooting the holographic persons against either black or blue, and then isolating them. After that, the image is run through special filters to give it some transparency, to create video break-out and make it look like it has been processed.” Whereas visual effects artists normally try to make the process of their work invisible to the spectator’s eye, cleverly covering their tracks, the hologram effect is an interesting example of work done in the opposite direction. “With today’s technology,” says Squires, “ we could also make things look better, perhaps more realistic, but we need to keep it consistent through the whole series.” Seen through the hologram effect, the status of Episode I becomes doubly paradoxical. In Episode I, Darth Sidious often uses holographic projections to communicate with his accomplices. First, ILM uses advanced technology to degrade an image projection instead of enhancing it. And second, the visual effects wizards, whose digital tools would allow them to do an even better “demolition job” on the characters appearing as holograms, had to be careful not to degrade the image too much and run the risk of breaking continuity with the way holograms looked in the classic Trilogy. “Today, the hologram effect is done digitally,” says Squires. “But for the classic movies, the technique was quite different. They would shoot the character, then play the footage on a video screen, and shoot the video screen. This would already create some distortion and noise – but they added to it by having someone loosen the plug or shake the equipment around.” This inventive method made the image on the video screen appear degraded. Which it was.
Another classic effect, that of the lightsaber blades, also had to be kept just the way it had been established in the previous Star Wars movies, despite the leaps and bounds enjoyed by digital technology since A New Hope. “We could have done something much more elaborate, much more exotic,” Squires says, “but once again we simply had to respect continuity.” So even though the blades of the laser swords are no longer painted by hand, one frame after another, the digital artists have done all they could to retain the look and feel associated with the lightsabers of Skywalker father and son and Obi-Wan Kenobi, both at rest and in motion.
Luke ignites his lightsaber for the first time. In the first Star Wars movie, a scene where a lightsaber was ignited needed to be achieved in a least two shots, because the lightsaber handle had to be replaced with another handle fitted with a solid “blade” covered with reflective tape. In Empire and Jedi, lightsabers being ignited would have their blades hand-drawn at the end of the handles, while in Episode I igniting lightsabers were given their blades through computer graphics. The same techniques were brought into play to “doctor” the fighting sequences, were the metal rods used in lieu of laser blades were optically or digitally replaced. The technique used to generate the glowing, diffused light of a lightsaber – and many other visual effects – is called rotoscoping. Rotoscoping has been used throughout the Star Wars saga and is in fact one of the most essential tools at the disposal of the visual effects artists. Moving from the optical realm to the digital sphere, the art of rotoscoping is a perfect example of visual effects technology evolving as it should: right under the spectators’ noses without them noticing any seam in the transition.
Visual effects artists use rotoscoping to track a visual element they need to modify, remove, or add to a sequence. Developed in 1917 by animation pioneer Max Fleischer, rotoscoping remained virtually unchanged for seventy-five years. Traditionally, visual effects artists would use the rotoscope, a high-perched camera/projector combination looking straight down at a flat work surface, to project scenes from a movie, frame by frame. One of ILM’s rotoscopes, as used by artist Barbara Brennan in the early ’80s.On each frame, they would trace by hand the elements to be worked on, creating a series of cells used as guidelines to indicate where the special effects needed to go. For the lightsaber blades, for instance, rotoscoping experts traced the “stick” blade of each prop lightsaber, showing the animators exactly where the blue, red and green glows needed to be positioned. Once the blades had been created as separate elements, they would be optically added to the live-action images.
With the computer, things are different. Now rotoscoping is accomplished within the digital realm, and new tools have been developed to speed up the process. “Nowadays you can indicate to the computer that your elbow and arm are here,” says Squires, “and that you want these two elements traced. Digital rotoscoping then allows you to tell the computer that ten frames later the elements are over there, and the computer will go ahead and generate everything in between the two positions.” Once the guidelines have been established for each frame, computer animators step in and create the effects that will be later added to the original footage. Everything is now digital, but the technique remains surprisingly similar to what it has always been. And through better technology and special effects techniques stepping from the physical world into the virtual one, ILM strives to remain true to the classic look of the Star Wars saga. “For things like the lightsabers, we’ll put in the glow and the shimmer, and when they cross we’ll add a flash and all the other details that fans are used to,” Squires says. “But no matter what the technology is or becomes, we’ll always remain consistent within the Star Wars universe.”
In the midst of making a movie, when pre-production is in full swing and everything has to take form quickly, there needs to be people to make it happen, to deftly turn clay and other media into “visualization” tools, or mock-ups. On Episode I, one of those key people was Robert Barnes.
“I’m a long-time Star Wars fan,” Barnes says from his office at Skywalker Ranch. “I’ve always been fascinated by the energy and creativity poured into these movies.” Born and raised in California, Barnes studied art and industrial design in college. “Industrial design combines all the artistic techniques I like,” he says, “and it adds the practical angle of product production, because you’re designing devices that are supposed to be used and not just looked at. I really like that.” Barnes added to his skills by also studying sculpture and painting.
After two years of hard work at California State University, Long Beach, Barnes received an assignment to illustrate a short science fiction script. His instructor brought in the Sketch Book of Joe Johnston – one of the original Star Wars designers – and Barnes was hit by a revelation. “I discovered that I was studying in the same program where Joe Johnston, John Dykstra (visual effects pioneer and former ILM wizard), and Steve Gawley (current ILM Model Supervisor) had been,” says Barnes, “working on that assignment, and hearing the stories from my instructor (Rob Westerkamp), who had been a schoolmate of theirs, made a connection between my childhood love for science fiction ‘stuff,’ and real life. I had always remembered seeing the very first “Making of Star Wars“‘ on television as a kid, and for the first time I realized that it was possible to actually make a living out of that.”
But when the time came to make the jump, things weren’t as obvious to Barnes as he might have liked. “My wife had to talk me into applying for an internship at Industrial Light & Magic,” he recalls. “It was a daunting task, but I finally gave in – one day before the deadline! I put my package together overnight, sent it, and waited.” The last-minute gamble paid off: ILM invited him to come aboard. “I was in the ILM Art Department, doing visual research, putting presentations together, building artwork catalogs and doing a bit of basic sculpting. I also got to work on an architectural model when the department moved, and that was a lot of fun,” says Barnes. “This was my first experience in the movie business, and I got to see how things were done on the other side of the screen. I liked what I saw.”
After his internship, Barnes went back to school in order to complete his training and get his design degree. Upon graduation, he promptly got an offer from ILM, which wanted to hire him as a production assistant. Barnes was happy to be reunited with his visual effects buddies. But after only two months, Episode I Design Director Doug Chiang called and offered Barnes a job as production assistant on the new Star Wars film. “I felt a bit bad about leaving ILM so early,” Barnes says, “but this was too good an opportunity, and the people around me understood that. So I packed my things and moved to Skywalker Ranch.”
Barnes quickly became an expert at quick and effective visualization. Whenever a design needed to be mocked-up so that everyone could see what the object or character looked like as a three-dimensional element, Barnes would whip something up and make it happen. “You just have to be quick, and not be afraid to use anything to reach your goal,” he says. “Foam, air ducting, mat board, liquid latex, gauze, anything that will do the trick.” The key: keep it cheap, keep it fast. Barnes first started by helping Production Designer Gavin Bocquet build foamcore models of Otoh Gunga, the underwater city of the Gungans, and went on from there. “At one point I worked on Podracer mock-ups,” Barnes says. “The mock-ups were built in foam at 1:24 scale, and we’d use a lipstick-sized camera to simulate some shots between and around the models. I felt like we were kids playing with toys.” Barnes didn’t dislike the experience, of course. “I also got to sculpt the first representation of the underwater environment the Gungan sub goes through – the series of underwater crevasses and cliff walls,” he says. “The whole conceptual model was sculpted in a big block of foam, and painted in shades of dark blue, to simulate the kind of lighting you would get at such a depth.”
Among Barnes’ many other projects was the construction of the first full-size battle droid. The mechanical wonder was built out of foamcore, and fully articulated. When it came time to visualize some Podracing scenes with the help of videomatics – crude video footage used for reference – Barnes conjured up Anakin’s cockpit, full size. “That was really fun, because I got to work directly with George detailing the cockpit and adding antennas and instruments. And we all couldn’t resist the temptation to climb in and work the controls. We’d all been working on Podrace elements, but this was the first time we could put ourselves into it.” He also crafted a life-size foam Sebulba puppet, and gave the mock-up pilot a mock-up cockpit. He did the same thing for the videomatic used to visualize the ground battle, skillfully giving life to an assemblage of foam pieces that became a very realistic representation of Jar Jar. Barnes’ diversified skills also allowed him to paint most of the creature maquettes based on Terryl Whitlatch’s drawings. Then he moved on to clay sculpture.
Barnes started by modifying already existing sculptures. In the case of the Sando Aqua Monster, for instance, Barnes was asked to re-sculpt the head and change body details to make the whole creature look more massive. “I used texture to convey a sense of size,” he explains. “I would create fine texture to replace large bumps and the like. We also gave the Monster smaller eyes, which is a good indicator of huge scale.” Barnes also sculpted a handful of characters, like an early version of the pot-bellied Watto. “The challenge here is to take a 2D painting or drawing, and give it a 3D form,” says Barnes. “We sometimes have multiple views for the same object, but they’re all in two dimensions. And that process is right up my alley. It’s product design: interpreting 2D drawing in 3D concepts.”
But why painstakingly create such sculptures when these characters will be re-built as computer models anyway? “Despite all the computer power now available, visual effects artists still rely on clay models,” says Barnes. “They are usually scanned into the computer, and serve as the basic structure on which the computer models will be built. They also use the sculptures along the way as reference material. That’s why there is still a whole team of concept sculptors at ILM. They’re real masters – I’ve learned a lot from those guys.”
Back for Episode II, Barnes will have an opportunity to keep learning and to keep perfecting his fascinating art of bringing concepts to life as quick as a wink.
Welcome to the Classic Moments Archives. A feature of Star Wars. Com, no longer active. This is not a complete archive but have salvaged what I can. Please note: Not in order of publication.
Star Wars : Episode VI – Return of the Jedi
200 MPH
“The (Endor speeder bike) chase is about two and a half, three minutes long, and it’s a great chase. It’s with our heroes–who are usually up in ships flying through the air. This time it’s down on a level you can relate to–down on the ground in the forest, where we have all been before. And they are zooming through these giant trees at 200 miles per hour, careening around the trees, hitting them, and having a ball!”
Howard Kazanjian
Producer The Making of Return of the Jedi
Arete
When a guard moves to shove him, Luke jumps off by himself, flips back into the floating skiff, and catches his lightsaber, thrown by Artoo. This striking style of action marks Luke as having achieved another characteristic of the classical Greek hero: Arete — excellence.
Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Art of Inspiration
“Ralph (McQuarrie) is better at inspiring people through his art than anyone I know. His paintings are more than just paintings, they tell a story, they illustrate his designs, they give everyone at Lucasfilm something to shoot for.”
– Joe Johnston
Special Effects Art Director Bantha Tracks #14
November, 1981
Be the Ewok
“You set up mirrors wherever they go so that as they are walking along, they see that they are actually Ewoks; they are not people anymore. Each Ewok actor has to see himself as an Ewok or he will never come off as one.”
– Jedi Director Richard Marquand
Bantha Tracks #20, May 1983
Beginning of the Future
“In the time line of the film industry, Jedi would be the beginning of the future, not a giant leap. Because it was basically a wire-frame model, it wasn’t up there on the complexity scale, but it worked great as an effect.”
Bill Reeves, founding member of Lucasfilm’s first Computer Division
on the first computer generated imaging used in Star Wars: the rebel war room hologram in Jedi Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #8
Better Door Caricature
“Our first Jedi expedition was last September, when we recorded the sound for an enormous door that opens in an early scene. I remembered an ammunition dump with a large, old iron door that had been sitting, rusting since World War II. It opened with a squeaky kind of scrape. That’ll be my basic door sound, and once I add an earthquake rumble and some other things, it’ll seem like an even bigger and better door caricature.”
Ben Burtt, Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17, August 1982
Big Little People
“Over 120 little people responded to the original Ewok casting call in London. Some applicants were rejected, being told for the first time in their lives that they were too tall.”
– Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Blue Harvest Letdown
“When shooting (Jedi) in the United States we called the film Blue Harvest. Camera Slates, invoices, hotel reservations, call sheets, production reports, and crew hats and T-shirts all read Blue Harvest. So when a visitor would ask, ‘what are you shooting’ and we said ‘Blue Harvest,’ they went on their way. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had said, ‘We’re shooting the next film in the Star Wars trilogy’?”
– Howard Kazanjian
Producer Return of the Jedi: The Illustrated Screenplay
Body Movement Synchrony
“I remember George saying one day (during editing of Return of the Jedi), ‘Threepio is out of synch.’ I said, ‘What do you mean Threepio is out of synch? He doesn’t even have a mouth!’ But you know, it was true, and it was very important to George that every little inflection, any kind of body movement coming from the robots and the different creatures, be put with the right syllables.”
Duwayne Dunham
Co-Editor Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Calamari Instruction
“Look right! Look left! Shout out the first command! Gesture at something you see out the left window! Now react as if a big explosion has just happened off to the right! Shield your eye on that side! Shout the next command!”
Richard Marquand, Director, giving instructions to Admiral Ackbar on set Bantha Tracks #18, November 1982
Carbon Spoiler
“It doesn’t spoil anything for people to know I’m coming back. They know I’m gonna get out of that carbon stuff. But it’s not how I do it, not if — but when.”
– Harrison Ford
August, 1980
Carbon Thaw
Having Han Solo coming out of carbon freeze on-screen was not in the original draft of Return of the Jedi. In the second draft, Han fell out of the block looking quite dead. When Leia took off her helmet and kissed Han, he woke up suddenly.
– Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Conclusion
“The part of the film that has always moved me most is the throne room battle in which Luke Skywalker confronts and defeats Darth Vader and the Emperor. It combines high drama with a really beautiful set, on which is staged the conclusive confrontation between the light and the dark sides of the Force. In that sequence, the whole story of the trilogy — which ultimately is about Luke’s journey — is resolved.”
Rick McCallum
Producer, Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition The Art of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Dancing with a Princess
“I enjoyed working in Yuma, Arizona, on the big sail barge in the desert there. That was nice, and we stayed at a nice hotel, and I used to play the harmonica with the band at night when we came back to the hotel. I’d play the harmonica, and dance — we were dancing with Carrie Fisher!”
– Kenny Baker (Artoo-Detoo) Star Wars Insider #39
Dancing with an Ewok
“Threepio always tries to look his best at the end of each movie — even (in) Return of the Jedi. Do you know how hard it is to look good whilst dancing with an Ewok?”
– Anthony Daniels Star Wars Insider #42
Dare to be Cute
“We realized that (the Ewoks) were getting to be a very cute creature, a very teddy bear-like creature, which first we fought a great deal. But, eventually we dared to be cute.”
– George Lucas Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Darth Dub
“We need so much looping because many of the actors don’t speak in their characters’ voices. Either they are wearing a mask or helmet where you can’t record them, or their voices, like Darth Vader’s, will be dubbed later by a different actor. We don’t even attempt to get those voices down during shooting, because they are thrown away. We concentrate on Luke and the others that can be used.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Degrees of Confrontation
“There was a feeling I had that I would like the (Jedi lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader) to be bigger than the fight in Empire. And then George said that it doesn’t have to be bigger, because basically it can’t be. George is very blunt. He said, ‘It’s just a couple of guys banging sticks against each other. Don’t worry about that. It is bigger because of what is going on in their heads. That is what makes it bigger.’”
Richard Marquand
Director The Making of Return of the Jedi
Different Spaceships
“Creating new ships comes down to designing something you’ve never seen before. We’ve all seen spaceships in different movies, books, and TV shows. What haven’t we seen yet? It’s always a challenge. It has to do with taking the character of the ship and taking the character who is using it and trying to let the design tell a little bit of the story. Like Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. It’s all about him; it’s menacing-looking, it’s long and lean, it looks evil.”-
Joe Johnston
Art Director/Visual Effects Creator Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Disappearing Discipline
“One of the things that will never get explained in the films is how Ben was able to retain his identity, because it happened somewhere between the third and fourth movies. I set up that this is a discipline that he learned from Yoda; Yoda told him how to do that.”
George Lucas
1997 Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Don’t Tell Me…
“It’s sometimes funny when we go out and buy (supplies). We go crazy in hardware stores. When we bought our tubing elbows from the building supply company, the guy said – ‘Don’t tell me, you’re from Lucasfilm, right?’”
– Steve Gawley
Model Shop Supervisor Bantha Tracks #22
November, 1983
Down the Line
“When we were doing [Jedi], I remember I had done a series of sketches of Vader’s home, and there was a sea of lava that his house looked out on. I remember having trouble drawing it because everything was either orange or a shadow; it was very intense. But before we got too far, George said he would save this for somewhere down the line, and I stopped working on it.”
– Joe Johnston Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Earthly Limitations
“In the first movie we were on sand–it was all kind of a brown color. In the second one, I put it in the snow, so it was all kind of white–and then I did the green, swampy kind of thing. In the third one, you know, what can you do? In terms of environments, you have to shoot it somewhere on this Earth. So, a forest was really about the only thing I had left.”
George Lucas Return of the Jedi Special Edition, 1997 VHS release
Endor Costume Inspirations
“Han’s costume actually resulted from a discussion that came about when we were fitting Harrison Ford. He suggested a duster, and we did a mock-up of one immediately. It seemed like the right choice, and we went for it. The helmets Luke and Leia wear were modelled after World War II helmets that had fabric on them. I used to go to a surplus store, and I had seen a lot of helmets that were made out of cloth. So I bought some of them and adapted them to a new and original design.”
Nilo Rodis-Jamero
Costume Designer Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Ewok Individuality
“Once the direction of the design was established, I started doing weapons and different fur patterns so that we could distinguish the characters. If you look at cattle, you’ll notice that they all look different, their coats have different patterns. We were concentrating on giving the Ewoks different headdresses; some of them had armor, some of them had ritual kinds of beads, distinctive fur coloring, etc… It was an interesting design experience to basically take these teddy bears and come up with six or eight different ones.”
Joe Johnston
Art Director/Visual Effects Creator Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Ewooks
“The Wookiee planet that I created for Star Wars was eventually turned into the Ewok planet in Jedi. I basically cut the Wookiees in half and called them Ewoks! I didn’t make Endor a Wookiee planet because Chewbacca was sophisticated technologically and I wanted the characters involved in the battle to be primitive.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Fallen Angel
“Father, please. Help me.” And at last Vader seizes his master in order to save his son. As the Emperor’s lethal electric charges rain back on Vader, he throws his master into the shaft at the core of the Death Star. Regeneration has occurred within the very walls of the tyrant’s kingdom. Vader has detached himself from his evil master and has been transformed through his son. Vader is, in a sense, a fallen angel who reveals his true essence at last.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Falling Up
“On the barge there’s a sequence where Boba Fett gets knocked over, and we didn’t really have the right shot to make the sequence work, so I reversed one shot of Boba Fett falling down and made it look like he was getting up.” –
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Fast and Scary
“The X-wings look like they’re basically hot rods. The TIE fighters look frightening, especially the interceptors we used in Jedi. They not only look fast and deadly, they were intended to look scary.”
– Joe Johnston
Art Director/Visual Effects Creator Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Functionality
“Dealing with the droids is sometimes easier than dealing with the human characters because in a sense, they’re more functional. They can actually do things. The fact that Threepio can speak a lot of different languages and Artoo can do mechanical things made it easier for me to incorporate them in the story.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Funeral Pyre
” Vader’s costume burning at the end was not there originally. This was added at the last minute. I remember that we said, ‘What happened to Vader? Did Luke leave him on the Death Star?’ So the scene was shot up at Skywalker Ranch, and we used the same music from Star Wars in the scene where Luke is staring at the two suns on Tatooine.”
Duwayne Dunham
Editor Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Funky Rebels
“We take a different approach towards Rebel equipment, vehicles and transport equipment than we do for the forces of the Empire. Rebel equipment is not as sleek, it’s not as high-tech – it’s almost funky in comparison to the cold, hard-edged and menacing lines of the Empire fleet.”
– Ken Ralston, Visual Effects Supervisor Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition, 1983
Furry Tibetans
“For the Ewoks, I was inspired by a recording on a BBC documentary of an elderly woman speaking Tibetan. It was very high-pitched and sounded like a good basis for Ewokese to me. Eventually then, what evolved was a pidgin, or double talk version of words from Tibetan, Nepali and other Mongolian languages. Huttese was created by the same process.”
– Ben Burtt
Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Gift to the Fans
“George literally decided that day to include Boba — he said it was his ‘gift to the fans.’ George directed me in the scene. I was supposed to stroke the cheek of one of the palace dancers, but the lady had a lot of grease paint on, so I came up with just chucking her under her chin.”
Don Bies, (Boba Fett – Return of the Jedi Special Edition) Star Wars: Boba Fett magazine
Go Fish
“In Star Wars, Princess Leia leads only a small part of the Rebel Alliance. The Commander of the entire Rebel Fleet is Admiral Ackbar — a member of the Mon Calamari race of highly intelligent master chess players from the planet Dac.”
Maureen Garrett
Director, The Official Star Wars Fan Club Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Guardian of the Labyrinth
The Emperor is now the monster at the heart of the Death Star’s labyrinth. In the Greek story of Theseus and the Minotaur, the maze is guarded by a creature who is half man and half animal. Here the guardian is Vader, who is half man and half machine.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Hand-To-Hand
In myth, one of the ways in which the hero proves himself is through hand-to-hand combat. In the best heroic style, Luke is able to vanquish the horrific rancor without the use of his lightsaber. But this sense of triumph is short-lived, as Jabba decides that Luke, Han, and Chewie will walk the plank, pirate-style.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Honky-Tonk Woman
“I went in to see the first mock-up of her (Sy Snootles), and she had these little teeny lips. And it just occurred to me — Wouldn’t it just be great if at the end of this long snout there were these giant, red lips. Mick Jagger lips.” –
George Lucas Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Hot Heads
“You even have to take the creatures’ heads off so the actors don’t faint from the heat. When we first started shooting, we had a lot of trouble with the creatures fainting. I almost passed out myself. The work can be a bit trying, but it’s a lot of fun to do. It’s a great crew; we’re a family.”
– Carrie Fisher Bantha Tracks #16
May, 1982
I Love You Déjà Vu
” ‘I love you,’ ‘I know’ was very popular in The Empire Strikes Back, so when we got to this scene in Jedi, we though it would be fun to use it again.”
– Lawrence Kasdan
Co-Writer, Screenplay Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Image thanks to (Star Wars Behind the Magic)
Internal Grand Canyon
“This leads to the reactor chamber of the Death Star, which is quite spectacular. It is a sort of internal Grand Canyon, built of cardboard tubes, light sticks, sprinkler pipe, fluorescent lights, and mirrors.”
– Steve Gawley, Model Shop Supervisor Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition, 1983
Juggling George
“By the time we got to the third film, we had so many different characters that it got a little more difficult to deal with all of them. Juggling with all the different characters and keeping them all in the air without ever dropping them was a challenge.”
– George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Kindred Spirits
“I don’t think Bib Fortuna was particularly evil. I felt he was someone who knew that he could never be number one, but was very attracted to the idea of power. He obeyed Jabba the Hutt and felt a kindred spirit with the great slug.”
– Michael Carter (Bib Fortuna) Bantha Tracks #24
Spring, 1984
Lava Caves
“The Emperor was going to be in a cave surrounded by lava. The throne room was down in the lower levels of what turns out to be the Empire’s headquarters planet. I imagined it to be dark and spooky with enormous buildings and a metal surface and, down below, huge avenues like on Wall Street in Manhattan. George stated that he wanted a planet that was a city with endless built-up areas. In my mind it was built a thousand years ago, layer after layer. The Emperor’s office would be at the bottom of it, so far down that you would have lava.”
Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Like a Woman
“Leia’s character undergoes quite a change in Jedi. They found a way for her to be very nice while remaining strong and committed. Leia is quite feminine, her character is as clearly defined as ‘the boys’ are, and she even dresses ‘like a woman’. At least I’m not always telling Harrison what to do.”
Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) Bantha Tracks #16, May 1982
Little Black Belt
“Since most of the Ewoks live in trees, we had to find a good number of little people who could do stunts. One even had a black belt in karate.”
– Stuart Freeborn
Make-Up And Creature Design
May 1983
Little Furry Guys
“I did hundreds of drawings of little furry guys in the woods. A lot of them were troll-like, gnomes. Some of them had cute little puppy-dog faces. George said, ‘Make them cute.’ So I did more drawings. Then I did one with a little bonnet with his ears poking out the top. George came in and said ‘That’s it.’ So that’s how the Ewoks were designed.”
Joe Johnston
Conceptual Artist ILM: The Art of Special Effects
Man in Black
“I remember George telling me that in samurai movies costumes say a lot about the characters; the way the costume is folded, the way it’s tucked in is very important. So I thought, Luke has become a Jedi; he is more distant, more serious. I thought, What do gunslingers wear when they mean business? They wear black.”
Nilo Rodis-Jamero
Costume Designer Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Maternal Memories
“The part that I never really developed is the death of Luke and Leia’s mother. I had developed a backstory for her in earlier drafts, but it basically didn’t survive. When I got to Jedi, I wanted one of the kids to have some kind of memory of her because she will be a key figure in the new episodes I’m writing. But I really debated on whether or not Leia should remember her.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Monster Menu
“We were essentially building these costume figures around our own bodies because we really didn’t have any idea who the performers in England would be. To compensate, we made a number of generic monsters — small, medium and large.”
– Phil Tippett
Creature Designer
Spring 1983
More Tentacles
“Before, there was just a couple of tentacles, and there was kind of a funny mouth with a few spikes sticking out of it. There wasn’t anything alive about the whole thing. And so what we’ve managed to do is create a kind of a beak that comes out and attacks them. And, more tentacles–and, it just looks more realistic and much more threatening.”
George Lucas Return of the Jedi Special Edition, VHS release
New Heroes
Throughout this final phase of the trilogy, new heroes are made as the crisis demands it; Luke, Han and Leia have become mature leaders who inspire others. Thus, it is Chewie who saves the day at the shield bunker, Lando and Wedge who will blow up the Death Star, and ultimately, Vader himself who will destroy the Emperor.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Nine-To-Five
“It’s Neverland. It’s Oz. It’s a galaxy far, far away — a great place to go and live out the fantasies you can’t get in the nine-to-five world.”
– Mark Hamill
Spring 1983
Not Easy Being Cute
“It certainly wasn’t much fun being an Ewok, either at Elstree or in the forest while we were shooting. Every so often, on the set, we had to peel them out of their suits and take off their specially designed sets of underwear, because they would be soaking wet, and send them (the underwear, not the Ewoks!) off to the laundry while they put on a spare set. I have a lot of respect for their endurance.”
Howard Kazanjian, Producer Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition, 1983
On His Own
“I felt that one of the major issues in the third film is that Luke is finally on his own and has to fight Vader and the Emperor by himself. If you get a sense that Yoda or Ben is there to help him or to somehow influence him, it diminishes the power of the scene.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Organized Disorganization
“We were going for a feeling of the whole sky being filled with battling ships, but without the chaos — sort of organized disorganization.”
“As far as most people are concerned, I’ll go to my grave as Princess Leia. In the street they call out, ‘Hi, Princess,’ which makes me feel like a poodle. See, my grandmother had a dog named Princess.”
Carrie Fisher
The Official Star Wars 20th Anniversary Commemorative Magazine
Personas
” Frank Oz is the persona of the most nubile, the most sensuous, the most well rounded performer ever to grace the silver screen. Frank Oz is — Miss Piggy.”
Billy Dee Williams Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Preservation
“Someone had the idea to take a publicity shot of George Lucas amid a sea of models and miniatures used to make the trilogy. ILM then added a starfield with the ominous Death Star under construction hovering overhead. It wasn’t until that day on the gigantic ILM soundstage that we had seen all these pieces in one place. We were stunned by the volume of it. George turned to me and said, ‘You know, we need to save all this stuff. We need to start an archive. You’re in charge of it.’”
– Deborah Fine
Director of Research and Archives 1978 – 1996 From Star Wars to Indiana Jones: The Best of the Lucasfilm Archives
Primates and Potatoes
“(The rancor was) described by its designer as a cross between a gorilla and a potato.”
– Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Pull the Chain
“She (Carrie Fisher) loved Jabba. She just adored him. I was just worried for her because the chain that goes around her neck and that he holds is very tight. The guys inside Jabba couldn’t pull the chain properly because they couldn’t grasp with the three-fingered hand very well. So I told them ‘Well, just hold the chain and try to keep it taut.’ They didn’t have any feeling, so they choked her. She said ‘Hey, pull the chain, pull the chain. I want to feel that I’m really being captured.’ So she encouraged them to do that.”
Richard Marquand
Director The Making of Return of the Jedi
Repositories of Exposition
“During the post-production on a Star Wars episode, Darth Vader and C-3PO’s lines get re-written because they don’t have any moving mouth parts to lip-sync new dialog with. If you find out at the preview the movie still misses some important concept, there’s no problem having C-3PO say something about it. Threepio and Vader are great repositories of exposition because they can say anything, even long after the film is edited together.”
Ben Burtt, Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17, August 1982
Salacious Stardom
“We never knew he would be the star that he turned out to be. What happened was, when we weren’t even shooting with him, the puppeteer under the floor would be playing with Salacious and would have him do something unexpected, such as peck at somebody’s ear, or some other impromptu action, and we couldn’t help but fall in love with him. So, gradually, we enlarged his part.”
Howard Kazanjian
Producer The Making of Return of the Jedi
Sandy-Browny-Greeny
“Artoo doesn’t do sand and they had earlier found he didn’t do rocks. Years later they would find that he didn’t do forest floors either. In each case they would carefully lay plywood sheets on the tricky terrain and paint them the appropriate colour; sandy-yellow, browny-grey or greeny-brown. Cunning! Well, you never noticed, did you?”
– Anthony Daniels Star Wars Insider #32
Size Matters
“We had to coordinate a lot of our model construction with what was being done in England and how their sets related to what we were going to do. Scale was very important. Based on what lens the cameraman was gong to use, what the size of the set in England was, and the size of the human beings in relation to the set; we could figure out mathematically exactly what size the model should be.”
“On one level, the barge and the skiffs are very archaic. They had to look almost as if they were pleasure craft with decorative elements, yet they had to be high-tech vehicles that could float over land. The barge was designed before the skiffs, and the skiffs are almost like lifeboats from the barge. I wanted both vehicles to look alike, to have similar designs They had to look like they had been built by the same culture.”
Joe Johnston
Art Director – Visual Effects Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Skulls and Forests
It is no accident that the concluding sequences of the trilogy contrast the lush green environment of the Ewoks with the cold unfinished technological tomb of the Death Star. The Imperial weapon floats like a skull above the Endor forest, just as death is constantly hovering over life.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Slave Girl in Style
“George always talked about a slave girl outfit. I kept thinking, how am I going to do this in style? I mean, this is Leia. I actually struggled with that for a long time, and all I kept coming up with was clunky, Ben Hur kind of stuff.”
Nilo Rodis-Jamero
Costume Designer Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Special Edition Performance
“The scene in Jabba’s palace was supposed to have a big musical number, but unfortunately, we ended up with only a couple of shots. Now, thanks to digital technology, we’re able to turn this scene into the real musical number that it was supposed to be in the first place.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Stunt Ewok
“Kenny (Baker) really tried, but I was worried for his safety. When you’ve got quite small hands, you can’t even grip the handlebars. So I finally asked a stunt person (to fill in) for the sequence where the Ewok first steals the bike, and he takes off so fast that he is just holding on with his hands, and his legs are flying out behind him, sort of flapping in the wind. To do this, we stood the bike up on its rear end and had the stuntman in the (Paploo) costume hold on; then he is hanging there and sort of kicking his legs. The effect (was) wonderful.”
Richard Marquand
Director The Making of Return of the Jedi
Sultan Slug
“He’s based on all those sort of evil sultan-like characters — Marlon Brando would be a good example, in The Godfather. There’s always been this sort of rotund, evil sultan who sat on his bed while people were being tortured.” –
George Lucas Classic Creatures: Return of the Jedi
1983
Super-Weak Explosion
“One of the things we discovered was that a model has to be made of super-weak materials to blow up convincingly on film. In creating an explosion big enough to blow up a really strong model, it happens so quickly that it just vaporizes the model and you barely get anything on film. We got to where we’d make the pyro models with very thin-skinned urethane frames that were mostly air.”
Paul Huston, Chief Model Maker Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #6
Swashbuckling Boushh
“Only once did I get conflicting directions. When I came into Jabba’s throne room disguised as a man, Richard (Marquand, Director) told me to stand like an English sentry. Then George walked in and said, ‘Carrie, you’re standing like an English sentry. You want to be more swashbuckling.’”
– Carrie Fisher
May 1983
Termites
More than a year before the filming of Return of the Jedi, George Lucas was proposing ideas for the designers to work on. On one occasion, he sent over a print of a 16mm film showing a queen termite in her nest, tended by scores of smaller workers-she was a yellow quivering sack of slime. “This is what Jabba the Hutt should look like in Jedi.”
– ILM: The Art of Special Effects
Terra Firma
“I think while Star Wars was set purely out in space and Empire was often cold and wet and miserable, on Jedi, we were on terra firma, and it was just a nice film to work on. I suppose it’s the last one I worked on, and the memories are still there. Jedi was the nicest of the lot.”
– Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca) Star Wars Insider #28
The Sarlacc Pit Puzzle
“The scene at the Sarlacc pit was very difficult to edit… There was a lot going on in the sequence; you had Han regaining his eyesight, you had Leia chained to Jabba… Then you also had to show what was going on with the droids, Luke, Lando, Chewie, and Boba Fett. A sequence like this has to be put together like a puzzle, and you have to make sure that you pay attention to each of the pieces but that you keep the momentum going. By the time we finished the sequence and sent it to the negative cutter, I remember we got a call from the lab saying that the reel had more cuts in it than most movies!”
Duwayne Dunham Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Throw Me a Line
“My difficulty was trying to make sense of the dialogue. I had to do it piece by piece. It often required a few takes because there was a lot of blue screen going on. There were times when I couldn’t get the technical lines together. I had to ask George, ‘Please, throw the lines to me,’ and I would repeat them. It can be exciting, but it can also be quite tedious.”
Billy Dee Williams Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #4
Toxicity
“The Death Star surface was urethane foam — a combination of two chemicals which are mixed and poured in as a liquid; the mixture froths up like shaving cream, fills all the voids and then hardens. Many of the materials at this stage of construction are extremely toxic, and precautions are taken every step of the way.”
“I really get a kick out of using found objects. When we were constructing the parts for the shield generator on Endor, we used large plastic cups glued on top of each other, and little pill cups stacked on top. We put little rocket motors from a kit on top of that and painted the things orange and silver. If we can find what we need without starting from scratch, and it looks the way we want it to, that’s great. We have a certain way of looking at objects that someone else might throw away. It’s part of the fun of making things.”
– Steve Gawley
Model Shop Supervisor Bantha Tracks #22
November, 1983
Turning Japanese
“It was like working out one of those wooden puzzles the Japanese make. If you don’t put the right piece in first, ten moves later you wish you had and you’ve got to go back to the beginning.”
– Anthony Daniels, on donning his famous, yet puzzling costume
Tribute Magazine
Spring 1983
Un- Fortuna-te Jedi
“The teeth were difficult to work with because they kept falling out; especially when I raised my voice. One day I hit Mark [Hamill] square between the eyes with my bottom set.”
Michael Carter (Bib Fortuna) Bantha Tracks #24
Spring, 1984
Unbelievably Lovely
“It was all foam rubber and fur. Within five minutes you were boiling over with the heatvery uncomfortable. They were cute, great little characters. They were lovely, but to work in them, unbelievable.” – Kenny Baker (Paploo the Ewok) Star Wars Insider #39
Unearthly Creatures
“George felt that a lot of the creatures in Star Wars looked like something out of an Egyptian hieroglyphic panel. We made a conscious effort on Return of the Jedi to make things look more alien. We were concerned that they be less animalistic and more unearthly.”
Phil Tippett, Creature Design Supervisor Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition
Vader Breath
“Vader’s breathing is fun to put in because each time I work on a character I become him briefly. So for a week I’m Darth Vader breathing asthmatically through every scene.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Very Vaderish
“You haven’t seen my new costume. It’s all black. I told George it’s very Vaderish, but he said, ‘It’s supposed to be.’”
Mark Hamill Bantha Tracks #18
November, 1982
Who has the Power?
“My sense of the relationship is that the Emperor is much more powerful than Vader and that Vader is very much intimidated by him. Vader has dignity, but the Emperor in Jedi really has all the power.”
Lawrence Kasdan
Screenplay Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Whoop-Whoop!
“(Whoop-whoops) are sounds with musical elements in them that add variety and interest to the basic bike sounds. We recorded one source of the whoop-whoops at El Centro Naval Station, where they have a mock-up aircraft carrier deck on which the pilots practice night take-offs and landings. As the pilots come in really low on their approach, they throttle the engines and make adjustments for landing which produce a whoop-whoop sound. It’s the sound the jet thrusters make as they engage and disengage. It has a musical aspect to it that Re-Recording Mixer Gary Summers and I liked. When matched with the action of distant bikers shifting gears, it proved the unique sound we were looking for.”
– Ben Burtt
Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Welcome to the Classic Moments Archives. A feature of Star Wars. Com, no longer active. This is not a complete archive but have salvaged what I can. Please note: Not in order of publication.
Zen and Now
Some elements of the Force are reminiscent of Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on enlightenment by means of direct, intuitive insightsWarriors did not live in the future or the past, but in the present. Yoda echoes this concept when he complains to Ben about Luke, ‘All his life he has looked awayto the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was, what he was doing. Adventure! Excitement! A Jedi craves not these things.’ And then he chastises Luke: ‘You are reckless!’
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
You Know, For Kids
“I feel the characters were all strong, archetypal characters and they are now part of the cultural mythology, at least with the mass media of our times. Certainly, the characters are loved by kids and I kept my eye on the kids all the time. I wanted them to like it, to enjoy it, to understand it.”
Irvin Kershner, Director The Empire Strikes Back Official Collectors Edition, 1980
White Room
“I remember the floor of Lando’s world was absolutely white, and no one was able to walk on it without cushions on. It was constantly being polished and mopped.”
John Hollis (Lobot) Star Wars Insider #33
Wherefore Art Thou, Rebel Base?
“The unintelligible alarm signal from the Probot in Empire was the voice of a well-known Shakespearean actor — totally changed electronically. I generally don’t use sounds from other sources, but on occasion I like to throw fun things in. I don’t think anybody could figure out who they were originally.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Effects Editor Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Wax and Fur and Everything
“The wampa snow creature in The Empire Strikes Back was another one of our knock-together things. Phil (Tippett, Creature Designer) would say ‘We’ve got this thing to do. I’ll get a block of wood and some hinges from the carpentry department and you get a crowbar.’ And then we’d discuss how far we’d want the jaw to open up and I’d knock together something that we’d use as a puppet and then he would go and do his beautiful build-up work with all of the stuff — wax and fur and everything”
Jon Berg
Creature Designer ILM: The Art of Special Effects
War and Candy
“I have always likened Yoda to a powerful figure like Winston Churchill who might be having to make great decisions about the war, and yet while he’s doing it, he’s wondering if he should take that last candy in the dish or not, because he wants it really bad. It’s that paradox. I think it makes him more human.”
Frank Oz Star Wars Insider #42
Walking Tanks
“George said the Imperial weapons attacking Hoth should look like walking tanks. The intention with the walker was to make it more frightening and anthropomorphic so it would look like a big robot. The idea of having a head and shapes that looked like big eyes and a big jaw was really to make it look more frightening.”
Joe Johnston
Art Director/Visual Effects Creator Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Walk like a Wookiee
“Peter Mayhew was not an actor but he did so well as Chewbacca. Peter got sick He just passed out one day. We took him away and gave him a few days off. So I brought someone in who was just as big and put on the costume. I had him do just a few little things And I had to throw all of that footage out! He didn’t look like Peter. Peter had a certain walk, a certain way of holding his head and it was right.”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Vader’s Head
“I shot this scene very carefully. When the captain comes in and Vader is sitting in his capsule with his back towards us, all you see are scars on the back of his neck for half a second. I didn’t want the audience to see anything else. I imagined that beneath the mask Vader was hideous; his mouth was cut away, and he had one eye hanging low. I was very surprised to see that he was an ordinary man in the third film.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Two-Year Debate
“People were curious about whether it was true or not, and I purposefully left it so it would be ambiguous, so that you wouldn’t really know and people would sort of debate it for the next two years or more…”
George Lucas Interview with Leonard Maltin
The Empire Strikes Back, 1995 VHS release
Turned to Stone
“The act of turning a person to stone is found in many mythic stories. For example, as Lot and his family flee the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah to escape God’s wrath, Lot’s wife looks back and is turned to a pillar of salt. Perseus uses the Gorgon’s head to turn his enemies to stone. Han is turned to stone as he is encased in carbonite, and his rescuers will have to descend once again into the underworld of Jabba’s lair to reclaim him.”
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Travel Blues
“Getting to Dagobah was easy — It was just a few blue screens away.”
Mark Hamill
SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back
1980
Top Heavy Lobot
“That was murder. It had to be self-contained — they didn’t want any wires hanging out. So it was all battery-powered. They put it on a spring clip, so it clipped around my head. It was very heavy. At the end of the day, you were glad to get rid of it.”
John Hollis (Lobot) Star Wars Insider #33
Toolbox Trauma
“The bit with the toolbox falling on Harrison was improvised on the set… Another thing we improvised was when Harrison hits the control panels of the Falcon to make them work. We were afraid to do it, but I finally said, ‘Come on, this is fun, let’s do it!'”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Three Lines
“Empire is not an easy story to tell. There’s a lot of plot, a lot of unusual things and changes that take place. And there are many little sections in the script that have something like a three-line paragraph reading, ‘And then the battle started.’ It may have been three lines, but we had to shoot for weeks to get those lines on film.”
Irvin Kershner
Director The Empire Strikes Back Notebook
The Good Fight
” Princess Leia’s Rebel forces will not do anything in order to win. They will not sacrifice lives. They do not descend to the level of the enemy. That’s the difference between the Rebels and the Empire. It’s possible to fight because you love, not just because you hate.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
The Feel of Norway
“We all had to have special clothing while shooting up there. I remember that once you got on all the clothes, the goggles, jacket and boots, you would go outside and it felt like you were underwater. You couldn’t feel anything… I had never worn arctic clothing like that. When the weather cleared and the sun came out it was absolutely beautiful up there, though.”
Denis Lawson Star Wars Insider #23
The Executor Trials
“A tough ‘time factor’ can breathe life into things, or it can be frustrating. The Executor had to be done in seven weeks. We worked seven days a week, 14-15 hours a day to get that done on schedule. During that time we had a bunch of boxes piled up in the back where one of our guys would go out about once a night to kick them and let off steam. We all learned a lot working on that model.”
Lorne Peterson
Chief Model Maker Bantha Tracks #22
November, 1983
The Definitive Chewbacca
“Irvin Kershner, on Empire, he had definite ideas about what Chewie’s character was. He’d say, ‘Chewie should be doing this, that and the other’ and luckily, I presume, I got his message across, because I never got any complaints. It was, I suppose, luck more than good judgment on my part.”
Peter Mayhew Star Wars Insider #28
The Cane Incident
“(Irvin Kershner is) the one who suggested fighting Artoo with the cane. Yoda is a wise Zen master, but like any Zen master, he’ll smack you if you’re wrong.”
Frank Oz Star Wars Insider #42
Talking Backwards
“I remember that George had a feeling about the kind of speech he wanted Yoda to have. It had to do with inversion and with a kind of medieval feeling with religious overtones. Once we figured that out, it became very logical to have Yoda say things like ‘Good it will be…’ Inverting everything did the trick.”
Lawrence Kasdan
Co-Writer, Screenplay Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Subconscious Creature Assembly
“When I was asked to come up with a swamp creature on the planet Dagobah for The Empire Strikes Back, I looked at photographs of deep-sea creatures that exist many miles down in the ocean. I’d then put those pictures aside, and my subconscious would come up with a lot of different forms, assembling a creature from the various parts in my mind.”
Ralph McQuarrie Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #2
Stormtrooper Radio
“In Star Wars, I don’t think the stormtroopers said much when they died. In Empire, they just screamed. Not much actual dialogue, but we recorded what little there was by hiring some local disc jockeys to read lines into walkie-talkies transmitting from across the street. It sounded perfect.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Effects Editor Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Stop-Motion Feat
“If the first film was a technological challenge to get ships to fly in space, with a lot of movement, the second one was to do a stop-motion movie…”
George Lucas Interview with Leonard Maltin
The Empire Strikes Back, 1995 VHS release
Star Wars Sequel
On August 4th, 1978, it was officially announced that the title of the sequel to Star Wars will be The Empire Strikes Back.
Official Star Wars Fan Club Newsletter, 1978
Spontaneous Yoda
“Every scene between Luke and Yoda in Empire had to be looped later, not action scenes, but difficult, serious acting scenes. During looping the main actors have to go back in the studio and repeat their lines and recreate that scene again. That was a struggle a year later. You lose spontaneity and naturalness.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Effects Editor Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Spaceships and Snow
“The biggest challenge we faced were the snow scenes on the ice planet Hoth. The traditional blue screen techniques and the new ones we developed for Star Wars were all done against black space, which was very forgiving in terms of matte lines around the spaceships and generally making things look real. (With the Hoth scenes), it was as if George had come up with the most difficult thing to do – absolutely.”
Warren Frankin
Optical Photography George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
Snow Day
“We began shooting in March in Norway. When we got up the first day, it had snowed like crazy. The hotel where we were staying was completely snowed in. We had to cut our way out of the back door, and we looked and the snow was whirling around; it was twenty-six below zero. I needed to have shots of Luke running around in the snow without a coat on. We put the camera in the doorway of the hotel, and I asked Mark to run outside. When I said cut, he would run back inside the hotel and we would warm him up.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Smuggler’s Blues
“At one point in the script the characters were doing something, and I had Han say: ‘This is boring,’ and George said, ‘We never want to tell people it’s boring. If a character in a movie says something is boring, then the audience will begin to think that the film is boring.'”
Lawrence Kasdan
Co-Writer, Screenplay Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Skywalker Empire
“I went to see George and he took me to his office and showed me these drawings of what would later be Skywalker Ranch. He said, ‘This is what the film will pay for.’ I thought, wow, what a dream! That’s incredible! You know, it’s not like saying, ‘Look, we’re going to make a lot of money!’ It’s saying, ‘We’re going to build something.'”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Simple Solutions
“We had an electronic head and arm for Threepio, and I manipulated the mechanism with a joystick. But it wasn’t working. The propman said, ‘Give me fifteen minutes.’ We all went to get coffee, and when we came back, Threepio’s head turned perfectly and his arm moved naturally. I looked up and realized that the prop man had a fishing pole with a fine nylon string attached to Threepio’s arm. He had rigged another string around the head, which Chewbacca was holding. As Chewie moved his hands, Threepio’s head turned!”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Screaming Wilhelm
“I tracked down an old movie scream I loved as a kid. I call it a ‘Wilhelm’ after a character in an old western who got an arrow in his leg and let out that scream. Every time someone died in a Warner Brothers movie, they’d scream this famous scream. That scream gets in every picture I do as a personal signature. In Star Wars, the stormtrooper who pitches off the Death Star screams that scream. In Empire, a Wilhelm was screamed during the Hoth battle.”
Ben Burtt
Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Effects Editor Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Scalped
“There were lots of little gadgets and knee pads and the boots had two little jets on the toes… I found what I thought was my hair so I put it on underneath the helmet, hanging down. When I came out to show George Lucas, he said, ‘What’s that funny thing sticking out of your helmet?’ I said, ‘Isn’t it the character’s hair?’ ‘No,’ said George, ‘It’s a Wookiee scalp it’s supposed to be tied to your belt.'”
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett), on suiting up as the bounty hunter for the first time.
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #21
Rush Rocks
“I needed rocks to rise when Luke gets the power on Dagobah. Well, we didn’t have any rocks. It wasn’t prepared, so the art director on the set said, ‘I can make them really fast.’ He ran off and made little paper mache rocks with little wires on them and brought them back. It took about two hours, and we shot them.”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Quick on Demand
“Boba Fett moves slowly, deliberately, but you know he’s quick when he needs to be. He might stand there not moving for 40 minutes, but when he does move, that one movement will say so much more than a lot of running around and waving a gun at people.”
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) Star Wars: Boba Fett magazine
Prosthetics
“The audience had to know that Luke had feeling in his hand. That way, even though he has a mechanical hand, when he puts his arm around Leia, it isn’t creepy.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Plastering Paris
“International film distribution requires a completely different strategy than does U.S. distribution. While television is the primary advertising medium in the United States, there is often not enough commercial time available in foreign television markets. In Germany, for example, only four 30-second spots a year can be bought by a particular advertiser, and these must be reserved a year in advance. In France, television is state-owned, and allows no film advertising. For this reason, in Paris, Empire posters were the primary advertising method; they were plastered all over the subway walls.”
“I thought, the doors are closing and here is Chewbacca, who is like a dog, he is hurt, the one he loves is out there in the snow. So as the doors slam shut, I had him scream in agony. That wasn’t in the original script; that was a decision I made during filming. Take out the yell and it’s just doors closing.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Number One in Norway
“You know what the biggest problem was in working there? Going to the bathroom! We had on seven layers of clothes. We were set up on a glacier and nobody could go to the bathroom. We were dying!”
Irvin Kershner, on the Norway shoot for Empire
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Not Hollywood
“Of all the younger guys around, all the hot-shots, why me? I remember he [George Lucas] said, ‘Well, because you know everything a Hollywood director is supposed to know, but you’re not Hollywood.’ I liked that.”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Norwegian Tanks
“Originally, when the idea for the snow battle was being formulated, we were going to use existing Norwegian army tanks and were basing the layout of the snow battle on that. Then I came across a brochure that was done in the early ’60s which depicted a four-legged commercial vehicle. So we took that idea and developed a military version.”
Joe Johnston The Empire Strikes Back Official Collectors Edition, 1980
No One Will Believe Me
“The trouble is that no one will believe me if I say that Empire is better. They would think I was being paid to say it. I never expected it to be better, but it is better.”
Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) Bantha Tracks #7, Winter 1980
Multiple Personalities
“The stage that housed the big Hoth ice hangar was revamped around the Millennium Falcon into the Cloud City landing platform, then revamped again into the interior of the space slug’s mouth and finally the Millennium Falcon was removed and the bog planet Dagobah set was constructed. Four different sets on the same stage, two fairly simple and two very complex were done on a single stage — all within the short period of principal photography.”
Robert Watts
Co-producer Bantha Tracks #13
August, 1981
Muddy Water
“The Dagobah swamp scene in The Empire Strikes Back, in which a monster shoots out of the swamp hoping to grab R2-D2, was actually shot in George Lucas’ unfinished swimming pool. We piled the whole crew in the pool, which was filled with muddy water, and George shot the footage himself. Lot of Fun!”
Ted Moehnke
Supervising Stage Technician George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
Master in Disguise
“I wanted Yoda to be the traditional kind of character you find in fairy tales and mythology. And that character is usually a frog or a wizened old man on the side of the road. The hero is going down the road and meets this poor and insignificant person. The goal or lesson is for the hero to learn to respect everybody and to pay attention to the poorest person because that’s where the key to his success will be.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Make-Up for Obi-Wan
“We did very little make-up on him. He had a nice tan and his own beard. He looked pretty good as he was. His is a good face to work on, a marvelous face. In some actors the features seem to fight you. Sir Alec has a face that comes together immediately.”
Stuart Freeborn
Make-Up and Special Creature Design Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Luke’s Leap
Vader has not been able to dominate Luke, so he now tries to seduce him. “You do not yet realize your importancejoin me, and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son. Come with me.” Rather than surrender to the dark side, however, Luke chooses an almost certain death. As Vader croons, “Come with me, it is the only way,” Luke steps off into the abyss. The act of giving one’s life if necessary to preserve one’s honor is the ultimate sacrifice required of heroes, from those of the Homeric epics to the samurai of Japan.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Look, a Meteor.
“3PO’s character is transparent. There’s no guile, no deviousness, no mystery. He is so obvious and he always states the obvious. If everyone is cowering back as a meteor hits the window, he is the one who says, ‘Look, a meteor.'”
Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) Bantha Tracks #7, Winter 1980
Little Green Wookiee
“One story element I wanted to develop was Chewie’s jealousy of Han and Leia’s relationship. Though that was lost in the final script, I thought it was an interesting idea.”
Lawrence Kasdan
Co-Writer, Screenplay The Empire Strikes Back Notebook
Let it Snow, Let it Snow
“We took out the snow scenes in the first film partially because George doesn’t like shooting in the cold. This time, we were able to include a snow environment.”
Gary Kurtz, Producer The Empire Strikes Back Official Collectors Edition, 1980
Introducing: Boba Fett
“Not much is known about Boba Fett. He wears part of the uniform of the Imperial Shocktroopers, warriors from olden time. Shocktroopers came from the far side of the galaxy and there aren’t many of them left. They were wiped out by the Jedi Knights during the Clone Wars. Whether he was a shocktrooper or not is unknown. He is the best bounty hunter in the galaxy, and cares little for whom he works — as long as they pay.”
Bantha Tracks #5
Summer 1979
Intense Lineage
“I contemplated for a while whether or not I was going to reveal that Vader was Luke’s father in the second film. I was afraid the scene when Vader says ‘I am your father’ and then cuts off his son’s arm might be too intense. That is a pretty intense moment… But I conceived the scene so that you would not know if Vader was lying or telling the truth, so the audience would walk away saying, ‘He is a bad guy, he lied.'”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Indoctrination
“Luke must enter the tree cave ‘strong with the dark side of the Force.’ When Luke asks what is in the cave, Yoda tells him, ‘Only what you take with you,’ but Luke girds on his weapons anyway. They symbolize his impatience and lack of faith, his indoctrination into the ways of violence and hostility in the outside world.”
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Impressive Junk
“I was impressed with the set where Han goes to be frozen. That was 30 feet up in the air and it was a black set. There were no guardrails and it was a round set with about 50 tons of junk hanging overhead, which we got from junkyards. It was just junk but it was so impressive looking!”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
I’d Just as Soon…
“We didn’t need to spend too much time on the love story. When Han tried to kiss her, that was enough… Han is always after her, he’s always looking at her and she is always looking at him, and you have this right from the beginning. Basically, that’s all you need.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
I Know
“If she says ‘I love you,’ and I say ‘I know,’ that’s beautiful and acceptable… and funny.”
Harrison Ford Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
I Just Want to Paint
“Ralph (McQuarrie) kept saying to me, ‘I don’t want to know anything about how things work around here, I just want to paint.’ And I said ‘Fine, you paint.’ Well, he started coming in eight, ten, fifteen hours a day, just painting…”
Harrison Ellenshaw
Matte Painting Supervisor Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects
Hubris
One of the tragic flaws that may put the hero in harm’s way is the trait of hubris, an arrogant pride that blinds the hero to his true capabilities. Luke has rushed to meet Vader prematurely, and the cost is great: Vader slashes away Luke’s hand, and Luke’s flesh is now part of his sacrifice.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Hothsicles
“That wonderful set of the ice base was in fact polystyrene walls carved very cleverly by artists. With a stirrup pump, they would squirt liquid candle wax all up and down the walls. Before it dried, they’d throw salt at it, so the crystals would appear to sparkle. The icicles were tubes of hand-blown glass with a little hole in the bottom. They would drip and melt throughout. It was so realistic until you went and touched the wall and it wasn’t cold. The weird thing was with that all the salt on the floor, anybody with real shoes on, it would just rot the shoes right away. So lots of people would wear really weird foot attire on the set to save their shoes.”
Anthony Daniels
Dragon*Con 2001
He Isn’t?
“When we were at screenings of (Empire), people asked where Yoda was. He has been accepted by many as a real being.”
Mark Hamill
November, 1980
Half Nuts
“You have to be an engineer, painter, machinist, metal worker, mold maker, pattern maker, chemist–and half nuts. You work ten to twelve hours a day detailing an area that’s no bigger than a saucer.”
Mike Fulmer
Model Maker Star Wars: From Concept to Screen to Collectible
Get Yoda!
“We were doing The Muppet Movie in Los Angeles, and Gary Kurtz came. In my trailer, I saw a picture of what Gary described as a little guy called Yoda. Sometimes I have trouble getting characters and it takes a while, like Bert took me a year to get. Other characters evolve, like Grover. And other characters hit immediately somehow. Yoda hit immediately off that page to me… I strongly felt what he should be like.”
Frank Oz Star Wars Insider #42
Freudian Fairy Tales
“I decided that, instead of suddenly trying to make myself an expert on science fiction, I would do what I believed Star Wars was really all about — they’re fairy tales. So I got a hold of some books — a Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, a Jungian interpretation of fairy tales”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
French-Fried Asteroids
“In a shot with (several) elements, you can get away with inserting some personal humor. I’ve put wads of gum in some shots. This tennis shoe here is in the space battle scene. Even though no one can really see these things I know they’re there. In Empire there’s a potato in the asteroid sequence.”
Dennis Muren
Visual Effects Supervisor Bantha Tracks #21
August, 1983
Forces of Destiny
Cloud City marks the turning point in the trilogy; all the forces of destiny seem to meet here. Luke once again finds himself in a mazelike enclosure, but this time he is going toward Vader, not away from him.
– Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Force Philosophy
“One of the longest conversations (we) had in our first story conference was on the philosophical background of the Empire story and on the meaning of the Force. Basically, George is for good and against evil, but everyone has his own interpretations of what that means. In my opinion, what emerges about the Force are its similarities to Zen and to basic Christian thought. But in our meeting we didn’t talk about specific religions. Instead, George explained to us what he felt the Force was all about…”
Lawrence Kasdan
Screenplay Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
First Day
“I met Neil Krepla (Matte Photographer, not shown) in the middle of this big room, with parts of space models and optical machinery scattered all over, and he said, ‘Well, this is the set-up. If we can get it together we’re going to do some wonderful things.'”
Harrison Ellenshaw, remembering his first day of Empire art production.
Matte Painting Supervisor Industrial Light & Magic: The Art of Special Effects
Fett Evolution
“I designed the final version of Boba Fett. Ralph and I both worked on preliminary designs, and we traded ideas back and forth. Originally, Boba Fett was part of a force we called Super Troopers, and they were these really high-tech fighting units, and they all looked alike. That eventually evolved into a single bounty hunter. I painted Boba’s outfit and tried to make it look like it was made of different pieces of armor. It was a symmetrical design, but I painted it in such a way that it looked like he had scavenged parts and had done some personalizing of his costume, he had little trophies hanging from his belt, and he had little braids of hair, almost like a collection of scalps.”
Joe Johnston
Art Director-Visual Effects Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Essential Interruption
“It was essential to have Threepio interrupt the kiss between Leia and Solo because he is so taken with himself that it makes sense that he would walk in and say,’Hey, what are you doing here?’ He is not human; he doesn’t understand emotions.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Empire’s Elephant
“I remember saying, ‘This thing looks so much like an elephant, why don’t we just go out and shoot some film?’ It wound up being this whole expedition that went out — Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett and I, and a whole camera crew. The elephant we used was a sweet Indian elephant named Mardji, and she had a trainer. We shot quite a bit of footage of her walking back and forth, so we could get an idea of the motions an animal that size and configuration goes through in just walking.”
Jon Berg
Stop Motion Animator Star Wars Insider #49
Emperor Oomph
“I got a call from (Irvin) Kershner, and he said, ‘Listen, I want you to come down and read something.’ I didn’t have anything planned that day, so I went down to the recording studio. He showed me some clips, and he said, ‘Read it and get some oomph in it.’ So I read the stuff through, and gave it the oomph, and they tinkered around with it — and the result is that I get a lot of mail.”
Clive Revill (Voice of the Emperor) Star Wars Insider
Issue 49
Dripping Evil
“The costume was very hot, because it was extremely heavy. And in the carbon freezing chamber, there was steam coming up out of the floor. I was next to David Prowse, and our helmets were taken off every three minutes because it was so hot. We were dripping.”
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) Star Wars Insider
Issue 49
Days of Haze
“There was so much smoke on Dagobah! I began to get very sick so I wore a gas mask — an old World War II gas mask with a mike built in so they could hear me.”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Darth Deception
“That part of the story point was kept secret. We didn’t even have that in the script. Nobody knew that, not even the actors. When it came time to shoot, I explained it to Mark I told him he was Vader’s son and he thought it was great. And he acted it magnificently!”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Dark Saga
“Empire deepens the Star Wars saga, taking it to a larger, darker canvas. Luke is changed forever, spiritually. The things that happen to Vader are a logical step from Star Wars and will vastly alter the audience’s perception of the character. To me, the fact that the story is downbeat is very interesting and gives the story texture. If it had a heroic ending, Empire would be the same as the first film.”
Lawrence Kasdan
Co-Writer, Screenplay The Empire Strikes Back Notebook
Dagobah Fashion
“I wanted him to wear something that looked homemade, but none of the fabrics we selected looked right. Finally we found this raw silk from India, and it was just perfect. It hung nicely, and it looked homemade. We had a piece left over, and I had a jacket made out of it for myself.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Cool Outlaw
“I think the secret to playing Boba Fett — if you can say I played (him) — is the less you do, the better. There is no point in Boba Fett waving his gun around and saying, ‘Look at me.’ He was very cool, and he didn’t move much. I always thought of Boba Fett as Clint Eastwood in a suit of armor.”
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) Star Wars Insider
Issue 49
Coming of Age
” Star Wars speaks to us from that very optimistic, everything-will-work-out-all-right viewpoint we have when we are young. Empire reminds me of that time in our lives when we leave home and discover it can be a hard world out there.”
Mark Hamill Bantha Tracks #18
November, 1982
Cold Direction
“In Norway, the tauntaun froze up. We couldn’t get the smoke to come out of the nose, and we couldn’t get the movements right because the thing froze. George (had) said, ‘Remember, nothing’s gonna work.’ He meant the special effects on the set, and he was right. The first shot of the whole film didn’t work.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars Insider
Issue 49
Cold Anticipation
“I hadn’t anticipated being there at all. My snow scenes were supposed to be shot at the sound stage in the studio. I had just arrived in England as they left for Norway, and in no time at all, found myself whisked away to join them in Norway with no preparation, wearing a costume built for conditions on the stage. Another one of those bizarre experiences in life.”
Harrison Ford
Bantha Tracks #6
Caught in the Middle
“The evil Empire was opposed by the noble Alliance, and those who didn’t choose sides might get caught in the middle.”
Andy Mangels
Author Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Characters
Casting a Legend
“I went to Jim (Henson) and said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m busy, I’m doing this, and doing that, I’m making a movie and all that — I really can’t, but — How about Frank (Oz)? You know, Frank’s the other half of me.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’d be fantastic.’
George Lucas Interview with Leonard Maltin
The Empire Strikes Back, 1995 VHS release
Carbon Agony
“When the cast of Solo in carbon freeze was created the first time, he was standing straight up, looking normal. That’s what the prop department thought I wanted. I said, ‘No, he’s got to be looking like he is fighting to get out; he has to look like he is in agony.’ So we changed it to the way it looks in the film.”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Burnt Wookiee
“Carrie (Fisher) and I were in the Falcon cockpit. They had baby spotlights placed between my legs. Next, there was smoke coming out. Carrie turned and said, ‘Oh, Peter, you are on fire.’ I was totally oblivious to what was happening. It was a confined space, my (Chewbacca) head was on, and I thought, ‘Come on, let’s just get on with it.’ If Carrie hadn’t said something, there would have been a burned Wookiee.”
Peter Mayhew The Making of Return of the Jedi
Broken Blink
“You know, in the whole film, I saw only one blinkbecause they couldn’t make it (the Yoda puppet) blink. And I wanted him to blink because that gives you a reality.”
Irvin Kershner
Director
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #11
Bitter Pill
“Empire was so unlike Star Wars it was a bitter pill to swallow. There wasn’t that happy-go-lucky, triumphant feeling Star Wars left you with. Empire left too many loose ends, like Vader making Harrison Ford into a coffee table. I found the end so unsatisfying.”
Mark Hamill Bantha Tracks #18
November, 1982
Billy Dee Backlash
“There’s always been a lot of misunderstanding about Lando’s character. I used to pick up my daughter from elementary school and get into arguments with little children who would accuse me of betraying Han Solo.”
Billy Dee Williams Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #4
Ben’s New Role
“When Star Wars became a hit and I had a chance to make the other movies, I had to figure out a way to bring Ben back, but a lot of the issues he had to deal with were carried by Yoda. In a sense, I combined Yoda with the spirit of Ben. I wanted Ben to have some kind of influence, but I didn’t want it to be a direct influence where he could help Luke. So Ben has managed to keep his identity after he became one with the Force. One of the things he was doing on Tatooine besides watching over Luke was learning how to keep his identity after he became part of the Force.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Believe in Yoda
“So much of the reason Yoda was successful is because Mark believed in him and responded to him. If Mark didn’t respond to him so well, then the audience wouldn’t have.”
Frank Oz Star Wars Insider #42
Battle Gamble
“I definitely thought I was taking a big chance by having a big battle at the beginning of the film. But the whole idea was that the major confrontation at the end between Vader and Luke was going to be a personal battle, and I wanted to use a simple sword fight instead of pyrotechnics. So I had to put the big battle up front; I was relying on the emotional content of Luke and Vader’s confrontation. I wanted it to have another dimension and to be more interesting than just a basic battle.”
George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Bad Accent
“All the Americans in the film play the good guys, and all the characters who speak with a British accent are the bad guys. I did that on purpose. Vader, of course, has an American accent, but you see, he was a good guy before he turned to the dark side!”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Always Welding
“Do you know why I had Chewbacca work with a welding torch on the Falcon? That was the only thing I could find where you could see what he was doing. If he was screwing something with a tool, you wouldn’t see anything. So whenever anything needs fixing, you’ll notice the characters are welding!”
Irvin Kershner
Director Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
A Leg, an Antenna, a Claw
“We would come in to work at three in the afternoon and be ready to shoot by nine at night. We would then move a leg of one figure, an antenna of another, a claw of another. Then we would take one frame of film. And then the process started all over again. It took forever, and we usually didn’t leave until eight the next morning.”
Phil Tippett, Stop Motion Animator Bantha Tracks #9, Summer 1980
A Fistful of Credits
“I always thought of him as Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars. That was my model. Boba Fett always cradles his gun just so. You do those little things to give the character dimension, and you just hope people notice.”
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett) Star Wars: Boba Fett magazine
A Beauty To It
“Of the three films, Star Wars is a little grittier and rougher on the edges, in terms of effects, because it was our first effort. Return of the Jedi was the most incredible and intense, it had so much stuff in it. But I still say Empire was the prettiest of the three movies. There’s a beauty to it.”
Richard Edlund, Visual Effects Supervisor ESB and ROTJ Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #4
Welcome to the Classic Moments Archives. A feature of Star Wars. Com, no longer active. This is not a complete archive but have salvaged what I can. Please note: Not in order of publication.
Zit-umm-woop-new
“The mosquito-faced alien who tracked Luke and Ben Kenobi through Mos Eisley used the voice of a well-known western actor. I took an old loop line where the actor says something like, ‘All right, fertilize the water,’ and ran it through the synthesizer until it came out, ‘zit-umm-woop-new.'” – Ben Burtt
Special Dialogue and Sound Effects Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
You want to see an Oasis?
“One day, I was walking along the street, there was no pavement, it was all dirt, and Alec Guinness came along in a Mercedes and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Nothing.’ He said, ‘You want to see an Oasis?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ so I jumped in the car and I went with he and his wife to see an oasis. That was a nice trip.” – Kenny Baker, on filming Star Wars in Tunisia Star Wars Insider #23
Yin and Yang
“Just like I had Vader to contrast with Ben, I created Solo as a cynical world-weary pessimist to play opposite Luke. I tried to establish this kind of contrast with all the characters, even with the robots.” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Wookiee Mix
” Chewbacca’s voice is predominantly one bear in combination with a few other sounds, which helps to keep his voice consistent from one reel to the next.” – Ben Burtt
Special Dialogue and Sound Effects Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Wipe Out
“Wipes were used in the early days of film, in things like the old Republic serials, but used less and less in the post-World War Two era. I remember when I first saw Star Wars I was shocked to see that instead of dissolves it used wipes, which hadn’t been used in a long time.” – Tom Christopher
Film Editor, Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition The Art of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
What to do with Kenobi?
“As I was writing the third draft of Star Wars, I realized that after they escape from the Death Star, there isn’t anything for Ben to do, and I struggled with finding things for him to do and finally gave up. I figured I’d just write that part later on. When I came to the next draft, it became obvious that he was just standing around, and that was not good, especially for a character of his importance. So it was really in the last draft, the one I wrote before I shot the movie, that I finally came to the decision that I had to do what I had to do.” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Walking the Talk
“I met George while he was finishing THX 1138, and he talked about this Star Wars idea at the time. He just said it was going to be a vast galactic battle between factions of interplanetary war, and I said that sounded interesting, but I didn’t expect to ever hear from him again.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Veer Off
“In Star Wars you got the sense that if you veered off the main storyline, there were more worlds and cultures and stories. Introducing a young Jabba, who has a gang that includes Boba Fett, was a real chance to explore this world. Actually, I remember thinking at the time that the Special Edition work was the ultimate interactive storyline for us.”
– Joe Letteri, ILM Star Wars: Boba Fett magazine
Trouble With Artoo
“When someone asks me to describe Threepio and Artoo, I say they’re the original odd couple out of Detroit. They really are an archetypal duo: the tall one who is rather elegant and thinks he knows everything and the short, fat, stubby one who gets into trouble.” – Anthony Daniels (C-3PO)
The Lucasfilm Fan Club Official Magazine #1
Trench Jargon
“Probably the hardest thing I had to do in either film was that last battle scene in the trench in Star Wars. We did it in one continuous take and I had to memorize all those technical words and lines — like you’d memorize the Lord’s Prayer in Russian.” – Mark Hamill
November, 1980
This is Some Rescue “She is a leader, and even though she gets captured, the guys are the ones who are fumbling around and being in trouble… I mean, they can’t even rescue her!” George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Thinking Ahead
“One of the sequels we are thinking of is the young days of Ben Kenobi. It would probably be all different actors.” – George Lucas, August 25, 1977 Star Wars: A New Hope: The Illustrated Screenplay
The Starkiller
“The original name for George Lucas’ epic space fantasy had that extra article, ‘the,’ at the beginning. Concept artist Ralph McQuarrie came up with the design — a character that, at the same time, merged some of the best of Han Solo and Luke Starkiller, soon to be renamed Skywalker.” – Stephen J. Sansweet Star Wars Scrapbook: The Essential Collection
The Son of the Sun
The second and third draft of the script for Star Wars began with the following quote: “And in time of greatest despair there shall come a savior and he shall be known as: THE SON OF THE SUN” (“Journal of the Whills,” 3:12) – Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
‘The Girl’
“Originally, I was known as ‘the girl’. During my first day on the set, someone described the next scene I was in as, ‘The girl crossed the room and exits stage left. The camera operator will have to pan to keep her in frame.’ I asked whether I was to be ‘the girl’ or ‘the camera operator’. They got the idea. I’m now an honorary camera operator.”- Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) Bantha Tracks #16, May 1982
The Curtain Rises
“At the beginning of Star Wars you read the scrollup. That’s planned to make you feel like you missed some early chapters. You don’t need that data to enjoy the picture, as little kids know, it just makes you feel like you are coming in on the second act.” – Mark Hamill Bantha Tracks #18
November, 1982
Tarkin in Slippers
“I said to George [Lucas]: ‘I don’t want you to think I’m asking for more close-ups. But whenever possible, could you please shoot me from the waist up? These boots are killing me.’ He very kindly agreed. So, there I was, stomping around, shouting orders to cut people’s heads off right and left, and I was really wearing carpet slippers.”- Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) The Best of Star Wars
Swinging Scared
“When we did the swing across, it would’ve been fun if we’d been allowed to do it a second time. But it was like doing the upside-down roller coaster — We did it one time, and it was scary, and then if we had gotten to do it again it would have been fun. But they didn’t let us do it again.”
– Carrie Fisher The Making of Star Wars
1977
Sublight Motel
“I went to the White Sands missile testing range once in search of good missile sounds. I got a lot of different missile sounds, but they weren’t nearly as interesting as the air conditioner in the motel where I was staying. It was malfunctioning in my room and produced a very good throb. You might find it hard to believe, but that throb has been useful in constructing many of the large ship noises in all the Star Wars movies.”– Ben Burtt Return of the Jedi Official Collectors Edition, 1983
Strange Things
“I’d never even heard of George Lucas back in about 1976 when he suddenly appeared in my lab. He vaguely introduced himself. He was very quiet. I really didn’t take much notice because a lot of people were always just wandering in. He said, ‘I’ve heard of what you do and I’d like to see some of the creatures you’ve made.’ I usually keep something of everything I’ve done. He was proposing to make a film that would need a lot of strange things, and he made me interested enough to think that this was really something.” – Stuart Freeborn
Creature Designer The Making of Return of the Jedi
Story and Spectacle
“People still wonder why Star Wars was so successful. More than anything else, it was because it was about character and story — more than just a visual effects spectacle. For me, the essential moment in the film is the scene before Luke begins his journey. He’s anxious and restless, and he goes out to the crater and gazes up at the two suns above Tatooine. We see so clearly every young man’s yearnings: all of us at some point have experienced that moment. It’s the dream of wanting the journey so much. It’s not so much about finding the treasure. It’s more about the search for it.” – Rick McCallum
Producer, Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition
The Art of Star Wars: A New Hope
Starring Robots
“I love machines. I love gadgets. I think part of it was with Star Wars was that the robots had always been bad and I decided to make them good and make them the main characters of the film. When I started it was an outrageous idea. Everybody thought that I was crazy because in the beginning, the robots were really much more central characters than they are now.”– George Lucas The Empire Strikes Back Official Collectors Edition, 1980.
Staggering Beauty
“The last line in the script was that the Princess is way down the hall and she is staggeringly beautiful. I crossed off the ‘ly’ and ‘beautiful’ and felt this new wording more approached what I would bring to the character.” – Carrie Fisher Star Wars Insider #24
Space-y
“It’s kind of a space-y film. Would you like to do the music?” – George Lucas to Composer John Williams George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
Spacewatch
“George can do anything he wants now. The first one was so successful that he could set the next one in Redondo Beach.”- Mark Hamill The Making of Star Wars
1977
Solo the Monster
Han Solo appeared originally in the earliest drafts of the Star Wars script as a “huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” In the early version of the story Solo is a Jedi warrior and an old friend of General Skywalker. –Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Slicing Through the Ether
“Sound can be designed in different ways. In the Star Wars Saga you want to hear a space ship really slicing through the ether. To design that sound I inspect what the ship looks like, how fast it moves, and what it does, and develop my own concept of how it should sound, then combine subtle little bits that sound almost like a racecar or almost like a jet plane — not close enough to identify consciously, but if the sound effect is designed correctly then the emotional association will be there. You will hear a fast-moving, frightening object. The film will seem far more real because of the indirect use of elements borrowed from the real world.”
– Ben Burtt
Sound Designer Bantha Tracks #17
August, 1982
Six Ping-Pong Tables and a Jeep
“They had the equivalent of, say, six Ping-Pong tables in the parking lot somewhere in the Valley, with all the ‘tchotchkes’ glued to the surface–I mean, they cannibalized thousands of battleship kits, and just glued ’em all on, and they were making passes on it with somebody just driving a Jeep… And, of course that’s the footage of the TIE fighters flying past the surface.” – Mark Hamill A New Hope Special Edition, 1997 VHS release
Sinister Appearances
When 20th Century-Fox studio executives asked George Lucas to provide concrete examples of his vision for Star Wars, the filmmaker enlisted the help of Ralph McQuarrie, a commercial illustrator. Lucas gave the artist a script, and McQuarrie prepared sketches for the characters R2-D2 and Darth Vader. In a sketch for Vader, McQuarrie had given the character a mask, because he felt the evil villain “would need something with which to breathe when moving between spaceships.” Lucas didn’t care about this so much; he just liked the mask’s sinister appearance!- ILM: The Art of Special Effects
Sheer Audacity
“My favorite spacecraft from the Star Wars trilogy comes from my very first and still-vibrant memory of A New Hope. Speaking as a spacecraft designer, what space-faring vehicle could be more impressive than the Imperial-class Star Destroyer? What size, what power, what it must have cost to build. One can only marvel at the sheer audacity of its designers and the resources of the civilization that could afford her. Oh well, back to the real world of -million space vehicles (how many credits would that be?).”- Brian Muirhead, Project Manager for the Mars Pathfinder The Best of Star Wars
Sequels
“We’ve had a lot of speculation about sequels. We are working on story material that will develop into potentially one or more motion pictures that will use the same characters, and I’d like to consider them different adventures rather than direct sequels.”- Gary Kurtz
Producer The Making of Star Wars
1977
Seizing the Day
“We (Threepio and Artoo) were scripted to march up the aisle with the rest… On a good day I could do steps — at great personal risk. Like my cleaning lady, Artoo doesn’t do steps — even on a good day. So a decision had to be made. My companion and I would not make the trip at all. Instead we would lurk on the platform awaiting the arrival of the superheroes who could go the distance without seizing up.” – Anthony Daniels Star Wars Insider #42
Samurai
“George described Darth Vader to me as this tall, dark being who sort of fluttered in on the wind, with these black robes, wearing a helmet that looked like one of those flaring Japanese samurai helmets” – Ralph McQuarrie Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #2
Rubber and Wrinkles
“Playing the role of Princess Leia was fun a lot of times — well, it wasn’t fun all the time. After about two hours in the garbage room, the fun started to wear off, and your skin started to wrinkle, and your rubber suit didn’t fit right anymore.” – Carrie Fisher The Making of Star Wars
1977
Royal Attitude
“I came to Star Wars straight from an English drama school — quite a jump. I played Leia Organa, who is royal. That was a part I had never played and a type of acting I wasn’t used to. Leia is angry, which is part of her strength, but not all of it. She was very clear about her responsibilities toward her cause, the Rebellion, and that was it for her. That commitment didn’t leave her any time for relationships. While it was okay for ‘the boys’ to be strong, that same strength made Leia seem, somehow, almost mean or sarcastic with her ‘my way or no way’ attitude.” – Carrie Fisher Bantha Tracks #16
May, 1982
Royal Accuracy
“The ‘helpless’ female who needed rescuing was the best shot of the bunch. Check it out — Princess Leia never misses.” – Andy Mangels
Author Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Characters
Robot Wars
“In the scene where the Jawas are trying to sell R2-D2 to Luke and his Uncle, I was inside the robot and (my partner, Jack Purvis) was playing the head Jawa. There were all kinds of robots careening all over the desertOne robot crashed into me. Jack was yelling to me, ‘Lookout! There’s a robot coming!’ There was nothing I could do about it, it just crashed into me. It tipped me over.” – Kenny Baker Star Wars Insider #23
Reel 2-Dialogue 2
“R2-D2 cropped up when we were dubbing American Graffiti. We were working late one night and looking for Reel 2, Dialogue 2, and somebody yelled out ‘R2-D2.’ Both Walter Murch, who was mixing the film, and I loved that name so much we decided to keep it.” – George Lucas The Making of Return of the Jedi
Rebel Dental Plan
“It was rather strange! As you know, we shot against a blue screen. There were probably 20 different Rebel pilots sitting around on a soundstage and there was a cockpit of an X-wing set up high on what I would describe as a raft on stilts. It was almost like waiting to go to the dentist!” – Denis Lawson (Wedge Antilles) Star Wars Insider #23
Quick Draw
The Western’s gunfighter persona became, in Star Wars, the rough-riding, quick-on-the-draw Han Solo. Mos Eisley’s cantina is the frontier-town saloon, and Greedo is indeed the bounty hunter. Han’s quick dispatch of his adversary proves that Luke and Ben have hired themselves a proficient gunslinger. – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Prequel Prediction
“The man Leia called Father was obviously not her father. He is part of the group that ends up having to fight Darth Vader in the film that will be out in 2003 [laughs].” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, 1997
Predators
For his Star Wars fantasy, Lucas used a mix of themes from the Westerns of his youth. The first major Western motif we recognize is life on the frontier. Luke, Uncle Owen, and Aunt Beru are “farmers” living at the edge of civilization on the brink of wilderness; the Sand People take the place of the uncivilized “other,” the Western’s predators. – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Pole Position
“Whenever I used to watch the garbage-masher scene from A New Hope, I’d always picture some stormtrooper standing around on the Death Star with his stormtrooper roommates. ‘Hey, does anybody want this big giant pole? You sure? I’m just going to throw it away…'” – Dan Wallace Star Wars author
Performance Mix
“There were three different domestic mixes of Star Wars that went out originally, each done at a different time. The stereo version was followed later by the mono mix. Today, each mix is computerized and the settings are saved digitally, but in those days, each mix was a separate performance, so each would come out differently.”- Ben Burtt Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #10
Pecking Order
“You focus on the human story first, and then you begin to create this world that everybody inhabits, and playing with the lowest person in this hierarchy, I created droids. And that is really how they came about. I was looking for the lowest person on the pecking order, basically like the farmers in Hidden Fortress were.” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Over my Head
“When George first took me around Industrial Light and Magic, showed me the model room, the computerized camera for shooting the miniatures and glass paintings, my head started to spin. I said, ‘Look George, I don’t want you to get this wrong, but I’ve never worked on anything this complicated before.’ His reply was, ‘That’s all right. Nobody has.’ I felt much better.”- Paul Hirsch
Editor Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
One Website
“We’re starting out modestly, just as George Lucas did 20 years ago with a relatively low-budget space fantasy called Star Wars: A New Hope. Just as Star Wars grew, or rather exploded, in the public consciousness, this website will continue to grow and change. And like the films, our aim is to inform, entertain, surprise and amuse you. We’ll all have some fun, and we promise to provide the most up-to-date information (and shoot down rumors) on the Star Wars Universe.” – starwars.com
November, 1996
On the Catwalk
“We tried to find items that were in stock which approximated to the [Ralph McQuarrie] drawings. It was sort of a short cut way of doing it; we dressed the model up in whatever we could find. For instance, Darth Vader had this sort of black motorcycle suit on and a Nazi helmet, and a gas mask, and a monk’s cloak we found in the Middle Ages Department. Once all the costumes were assembled, the artists put on a live fashion show for George Lucas’ approval.” – John Mollo, Costume Designer Bantha Tracks #10
November, 1980
Nothing Special
“Star Wars was just another film, as far as we were concerned at the time. It was nothing special. Nobody expected it to be something terrific. I thought if Alec Guinness was in it, it must have some credibility. He must know more than I do”- Kenny Baker (Artoo-Detoo) Star Wars Insider #39
Necessary
“It was the first time a character I had played was so important to the film. It was necessary that this character worked, as necessary for them as it was for me.”- Harrison Ford (Han Solo) Bantha Tracks #6, Autumn 1979
Monstrous Proportions
“The studio sculptors and designers had thought and created for weeks. On the way from my dressing room I had frequently walked past a giant, steel armed, mucus-green tentacle, a football field long… And what did we get? A fearsome and utterly terrifying…mini periscope and a yard of plastic squid.” – Anthony Daniels Star Wars Insider #28
Modesty
“I definitely did the movie on the seat of my pants. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I mean, I had some experience in animation, I knew how to make movies, and, you know, I knew I was going to attempt to do something that had never been done before.” – George Lucas Interview with Leonard Maltin
A New Hope, 1995 VHS release
Modest Threads
“I didn’t want something very flashy in design; I wanted something very amorphous and vague on the costumes. We tried to keep away from anything that brought attention to itself.” -George Lucas Bantha Tracks #10
November, 1980″
I got the impression that George wanted all the costumes to be a lot more simple. He didn’t want the costumes to be the center of attention.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist Star Wars:The Annotated Screenplays
Missing Medal
“I say, yeah fine, but I got the last line in the movie because as the camera pulls back you can hear Chewie roaring, so I always think, I was lucky I got the last say.” – Peter Mayhew (Chewbacca), on not receiving a medal at the end of A New Hope Star Wars Insider #35
Milking It
“George staged the stormtroopers breaking through the door only twice; that’s all he had time to do, but he shot with six different cameras. The scene was very short, but because the angles were so drastically different, we were able to overlap some of the action and extend the length of the scene. Basically, the audience didn’t realize that we covered some of the action twice because we managed to go from tight angles to very wide angles.”- Richard Chew
Co-Editor Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Matchbook Memories
“(Anthony Daniels) did the role so well that the crew making the film often forgot that there was a man inside the suit and behind the mask. So Tony printed up a reminder on matchbook covers that he placed on cast and crew buffet tables. ‘They thanked me for the matches, but most of them didn’t get my point,’ he says.” – Steven J. Sansweet Star Wars Scrapbook: The Essential Collection
Making ‘Splosions
“We started off testing acetylene gas and plastic models of Boeing 747s just to see if that would work. We finally ended up using the standard squib, a mixture of gasoline and mothballs and vermiculite. It gives a pretty good scale explosion.”– Joe Johnston, Effects Illustration and DesignThe World of Star Wars: A Compendium of Fact and Fantasy, 1981
Locomotion Pictures
“Ever since I was in film school in the ’60s, I’ve been on a train. Back then I was pushing a 147-car train up a very steep slope — push, push, push. I pushed it all the way up, and when Star Wars came along in 1977, I reached the top. I jumped on board, and then it started going down the other side of the hill. I’ve had the brakes on ever since.” – George Lucas
Lifelong Friends
“The idea was that Han Solo was an orphan. He was raised by Wookiees, befriended Chewbacca, and they went off.”- George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Life on Tatooine
“George described the Tusken Raiders to me as nomads in the desert, Bedouin type of people. I could have created some alien-type creatures, but I simply decided to give them this mask instead. I knew they were going to have to live in dust storms, and I decided that they were aliens that required an adaptive sort of breathing device to make their life on Tatooine possible.” – Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Laser-Brain
“George said it was a lasersword, and I know that when you project a laser beam, it doesn’t just end after three feet, it continues to project out. But because it had to be used in fights, I gave it about the length of a medieval broadsword.”- Ralph McQuarrie
Concept Artist Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Jabba the Hutt, Cut
“Even when I first shot the scene with an actor, I had planned to replace him later with some kind of stop motion animated character. I imagined Jabba would be furry, but we just never had the time or money to do that shot, and I had to eliminate the scene. But I always wanted it in there.” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Indiana
“My dog Indiana used to ride on the front seat of my car. He was a big dog, and when he sat there, he was bigger than a person, so I had this image in my mind of this huge furry animal riding with me. That’s where the inspiration for Chewbacca came from.”- George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
In Your Face
“While Jabba is physically imposing in Jedi, he’s not menacing, but by putting him on the ground, he could be a really dangerous creature to have in your face.”- Joe Latteri, ILM, A New Hope — Special Edition Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #11
Imperial Machine
“Vader himself is made up partly of prosthetics, a symbol of how his spirit has been consumed by the Imperial machine. Yet Vader knows that machines aren’t everything; early on he reminds the Imperial officers, ‘Don’t be too proud of this technological terror.'” – Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
I Have a Bad Feeling About This
“I used the line ‘I have a bad feeling about this’ in all three films. It was just a funny understatement, and I liked using it whenever something really bad was going to happen, something outrageously bad. At the same time I was doing Star Wars, I was working on Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it was a line that I was really going to use in Raiders, but I realized that Indiana Jones, most of the time, is by himself when he is in those desperate situations. But I had so many characters in Star Wars that no matter what, I figured that there would always be someone there to say the line and someone else to hear it. So the line became a joke that floated not only in Star Wars but in all my movies.” – George Lucas Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays
Hi, I’m Mark Hamill
“I went in on one interview, didn’t see a script, didn’t do anything. I just talked about myself. ‘Hi, I’m Mark Hamill. I have four sisters and two brothers. I grew up in Virginia and New York and Japan.’ They said, ‘Thank you,’ and I went away.”- Mark Hamill, on interviewing for Star Wars
Official Star Wars Fan Club Newsletter, 1978
Hero’s Journey
“The hero’s journey actually begins with the call to adventure, the first occurrence of a chain of events that will separate the hero from home and family. Sometimes that call comes from the hero’s own nature, and the hero will set out of his or her own accord, but usually fate brings the call, often sending a herald — a person or animal who literally carries a message that causes the journey to begin.”- Star Wars: The Magic of Myth
Head Jawa Jack
“I actually came to the interview with my (cabaret show) partner, Jack Purvis. I got the job right away because they wanted someone small to get into the robot… I said, ‘I can’t just walk into a movie and leave my partner stranded.’ They said, ‘ ‘Well, we have plenty of work for Jack.’ And they made him the head Jawa.” – Kenny Baker (R2-D2) Star Wars Insider #23
Harrowing Hairdo
“I hear the (Special Edition) is fabulous. I understand that the special effects have withstood the test of time very well, and they’ve actually redigitized my hairdo because that was the only thing that really dated the film.” – Mark Hamill
The Official Star Wars 20th Anniversary Commemorative Magazine
Han and Bob
“A lot of the elements of Han Solo are a lot like Bob Falfa in American Graffiti. But I don’t — I hope — they’re not the same person. I never intended them to be. The jump to hyperspace is like the drag racing in American Graffiti“- Harrison Ford, comparing his two famous roles. The Making of Star Wars
1977
Hairy Script
“They started trying on all those awful hairstyles, and I was so scared that they’d made a mistake, because the script described how pretty the princess was.” – Carrie Fisher Star Wars Insider #24
Funny Sound Guru
“I’d call somebody and say, ‘I hear you have a trained bear that makes a funny sound…'” – Ben Burtt George Lucas: The Creative Impulse
