The Making of Star Wars (Enhanced Edition)

by J.W. Rinzler

Skager is thus the first on record, but hardly the last, to be perplexed by Lucas’s genre-bending ideas.

I don’t want to write it. I’m not a writer, I can’t write.’ But he said, ‘You’re never going to be a good director unless you learn how to write. Go and write, kid.’

I was bored by scripts, and most of the films I did were abstract visual tone poems or documentaries—those were the things I really loved.

“Xenos, Thorpe, Roland, Monroe, Lars, Kane, Hayden, Crispin, Leila, Zena, Owen, Mace, Wan, Star, Bail, Biggs, Bligh, Cain, Clegg, Fleet, Valorum.”

Ophuchi is a gaseous cloud planet where lovely women can be found;

Lucas adds, “I think Disney would have accepted this movie if Walt Disney were still alive. Walt Disney not only had vision, but he was also an extremely adventurous person. He wasn’t afraid.”

Annikin retrieves Leia but not the handmaidens, one of whom remains as a decoy.

very Phantom Menace-y

Artwo can talk, too, and tries to calm the other, but adds, “You’re a mindless, useless philosopher.”

While Guinness’s long career and reputation earned him a substantial sum, Hamill’s weekly salary was $1,000, Fisher’s $850, and Ford’s $750. Another veteran English actor to receive more than his American counterparts was Peter Cushing, who was cast as Governor Tarkin and paid £2,000 per day.

Anthony Daniels as C-3PO was going to be in nearly the whole picture. He also had only a single outfit, but it was budgeted at the much more grandiose sum of £7,750 ($18,189).

while the first unit shot scene B32 with stormtroopers, played by “six local men” who were paid 8,500 dinars for the day ($6.50).

But George came up to me and said, ‘It’s not a big deal.’ He acted it out, just walking up and saying, ‘Noo, I don’t think he’s going to try anything.’ At that point, I was thinking, Well, he’s doing it so small, so I’ll do it just like him—and he’ll see how wrong he is. So I did it like that—and he said, ‘Cut. Print it. Perfect.’ So I thought, Oh … I see.

Hamill thought it would be appropriate for his character to fall on his knees sobbing, but Lucas preferred a more neutral performance, so that audiences would be able to project their feelings onto him.

“Stuff had gotten stuck in the mud. Then the army trucks that came to pull the stuff out of the mud got stuck in the mud—and stayed there until the weather changed.”

“What I remember about Sir Alec Guinness was that, before going on camera, he lay down in the sand in his brand-new clean costume and dirtified himself,”

Two or three times, he would say, ‘May I suggest something?’ And, gosh, I wish he would do that all the time, because he was always right.

He would say, ‘Stop and think of what you’re saying. Are you talking about going or are you going there?’ Because it’s not the fact that I’m going but where I’m going.

when the cameras rolled and Diamond donned the Tusken headgear, he realized he couldn’t see. As Hamill dodged the blind stuntman’s violent blows, his look of fear was real.

Luke and the twin suns—was attempted once more. With the clouds dissipated, they set up the VistaVision camera, waited, and got it.

“I started writing the revised fourth draft while we were in London doing preproduction,” Lucas says. “I continued it when I was in Tunisia and I didn’t finish it till we were back in England.

Because it was placed on the Tunisia-Algeria border, and because Tunisian military trucks were being used by production, the Algerian government registered official concern about what they perceived as a massive military mobilization on their border. “It’s true about the border,” Lucas says. “They had to come and inspect the sandcrawler to verify that it was not a secret weapon.”

The cantina exterior that Daniels stumbled toward was surrounded by many of the landspeeder prototypes, keeping to Barry’s maxim of zero wastage.

“But the remote control failed to stop the robot and he wandered onto the set of Jesus of Nazareth!”

It included the shirt I wore, but instead of the small collar, it had a huge Peter Pan shawl-type collar. I said, ‘No, no, no. That’s wrong. Can’t wear that.’

“George didn’t really want to go way-out on the people, other than the creatures,” Stuart Freeborn says. “Because that was supposed to be a kind of ‘shock’ scene.

“Alec Guinness had a very mischievous sense of humor,” Lucas says. “He would give me a hard time every once in a while, making me explain things that didn’t have to be explained. He wanted me to go through the drill. He loved to do that to me. I knew he was playing, but he would be smiling to himself almost saying, I’m not going to let you get away with it that easy.”

He has a total passion for what he’s doing; I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone so immersed in film. I have an idea that he goes to bed in it—wrapped up, you know, in the actual material.”

Angela Staines and Christine Hewett, played Han’s female companions (or “space girls”),

And from the first day on, they put a gun in my hand with charges in it, took me to a sound stage, and had me practice shooting it.”

No scenes had to be reshot, however, as Luke’s last name wouldn’t be spoken until he finds Leia in her prison cell: “I’m Luke Skywalker … I’ve come to rescue you!”

for while the script had his line as “You must do what you feel” when Luke hesitates about becoming a Jedi Knight, what Guinness said was, “You must do what you feel is right, of course.”

“I didn’t like having my breasts taped in. In space, they don’t bounce. Princesses don’t do that, so they taped me.”

‘What is all this about? I can’t understand a word of it.’ I told them, ‘Neither can I. I’m just saying the lines, and trying to sound intelligent.’ ”

a stormtrooper’s squib continues burning after the trooper falls. When “cut” is called, stunt coordinator Peter Diamond runs to the fallen trooper to make sure the stuntman is okay.

They called him ‘Darth Farmer,’ because David Prowse had this thick Welsh accent, and he couldn’t remember his lines—

The day of shooting, however, they ad-libbed, facing the wrong direction when the door opened, to add a comic touch.

I love in-jokes, so I said, ‘This is a prisoner transfer from 1138.’ But George came over and said, ‘Don’t do that.’

When the planet Alderaan blows up, Obi-Wan reels backward and clutches his forehead—“an unpardonable cliché” in Guinness’s opinion. “I still go hot and cold when I think of that scene,”

“Got real drunk and started dancing around with his pants rolled up.

But after working with him I was staggered that he was such a creative and disciplined person.”

“Carrie brought him a Buck Rogers helium pistol,” Hamill says. “And George wouldn’t put the thing down. We saw him in the hallways up at EMI, just kinda twirling it around. Couldn’t pry it out of him.”

It didn’t help that Lucas would speak to his friends Steven Spielberg and Marty Scorsese, who were making their respective films with 120-day shoots of twelve- to fourteen-hour days—more than twice the time that Lucas had.

“So I said, ‘John, you have to build another big hallway next to this little hallway’—and that created a whole big ruckus with Fox and everybody, because it cost a lot more money. I got a lot of flak—everybody came down on me. There was a lot of screaming and yelling. But ultimately, as the director, if you decide that it is vital to the film, it is vital to the film.

Also, I think George wanted the set to look, at first sight, like you are in your conventional all-white interior 2001-type spaceship—and then the door blows down and in comes Darth Vader—black against a white hallway!”

Originally the Rebel ship set consisted of only the redressed Falcon hold

Printed dailies from July 8, 1976. Prowse as Vader chokes the rebel captain.

they asked my stand-in to do it. She was a beautiful blond debutante, a girl small enough to get into my costume. She was really quite good.”

exposed 322,704 feet of film, with 226,717 feet printed, and recorded 219 magnetic rolls for sound.

the Death Star hallways and hangar, which John Barry had to repaint about seven shades of gray lighter, so they wouldn’t require so much illumination.

But you can’t blame or fault somebody for not being able to do the impossible—by definition, it’s impossible.”