The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by J.W. Rinzler

“The first one I did was Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio walking across the sand. George had a picture of the little robot from Silent Running [1971],” McQuarrie says. “They were like square boxes with legs. So I thought, Well, if they’re square, I’ll make mine round, which was like a garbage can with a dome on top. Instead of two legs, I gave Artoo three legs, figuring he’d throw himself forward like a person on crutches. That would be the way he would walk. I picked up some landscape from a photograph [of the Oregon coast] because I liked the cliff, and I just put the sand dunes in.” “I showed Ralph the Metropolis robot and the Silent Running robot, and I said I want something like this,” Lucas adds. “And we’re still putzing with it. I knew I wanted one via Metropolis; it’s in the script, I wrote it that way. I wanted one to be a stubby little robot and I wanted one to be a kind of human robot. One is a public relations guy and one is just a standard robot robot.”