StarWars hit theaters 43 years ago today. Look back at our 1977 interview with George Lucas
Yeah, but there aren’t any. There’s nothing but cop movies, and a few films likeRay Harryhausen films, but there isn’t anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in the culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing, because I had also done a study on, I don’t know what you call it, I call it the fairy tale or the myth.
It is a children’s story in history and you go back to theor the stories that are told for the kid in all of us. I can see the little kids sitting there and just being enthralled with Ulysses. Plus the myths which existed in high adventure, and an exotic far-off land which was always that place over the hill, Camelot, Robin Hood, Treasure Island. That sort of stuff that is always big adventure out there somewhere. It came all the way down through the western.Yeah, one of the significant things that occurred to me is I saw the western die. We hardly knew what happened, one day we turned around and there weren’t any westerns anymore. John Ford grew up with the West, the very toe end of the West, but he was out there where there were cowboys and shootings in the streets, and that wasI realized; that’s why he was so good at it. A lot of those guys were good at it. They grew up in the Tens and Twenties when the West was for all practical purposes really dying off. But, there was still some rough-and-tumble craziness going on. And the people now, the young directors like me, can’t do it because there isn’t anything like that anymore.and that kind of stuff, a very strong advocate of the exploration of outer space and I said, this is something, this is a natural. One, it will give kids a fantasy life and two, maybe it will make someone a young Einstein and people will say, “Why?” What we really need to do is to colonize the next galaxy, get away from the hard facts ofand get on the romantic side of it. Nobody is going to colonize Mars because of the technology, they are going to go because they think maybe they will be able… well, it is romantic, it is the romantic aspect of it that needs to be looked at for a second, which nobody had ever looked at before. I mean, everybody had looked at the hardware end of it.with the words: “A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” Well, I had a real problem because I was afraid that science-fiction buffs and everybody would say things like, “You know there’s no sound in outer space”. I just wanted to forget science. That would take care of itself. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science-fiction movie and it is going to be very hard for somebody to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned. I didn’t want to make aI wanted to make a space fantasy that was more in the genre of Edgar Rice Burroughs; that whole other end of space fantasy that was there before science took it over in the Fifties. Once the atomic bomb came, everybody got into monsters and science and what would happen with this and what would happen with that. I think speculative fiction is very valid but they forgot the fairy tales and the dragons and Tolkien and all theRight, and that is really the reason I did it. I had done sociological research on what makes hit films – it is part of the sociological bent in me; I can’t help it.Yes, I started out saying this is a fairly viable project, I thought it would make roughly $16 million. The thing is, okay, if I spend $4.5 million, then on the advertising and the prints and everything another $4.5 million, there is a little bit of profit in there, if it makes $16 million. I said this was a good venture, and I could take it to the studios… they do marketing and stuff but they don’t interpret it properly. The marketing survey is only as good as the people that are interpreting it, and when I went to one studio, United Artists, I said, this is what I’m going to do, it’sit’s adventure, it’s exciting, sort of James Bond and all this kind of stuff, and they said, no, we don’t see it. So I went to Universal and got the same thing.for $25,000. I was asking half of what my friends were asking, and the studio thought I was asking for twice as much as I would get, and they said, no, no. It is too much money and we don’t really think it is for us, so they threw it out the window. And then I finally talked Fox into doing it, partially because they sort of understood, they had done themovies, partially just because Laddie, Alan Ladd Jr., understood. He was a project officer then and I guess he sawbefore he made his decision and he said, this is a great movie and, what the hell, I was asking for $10,000 just to start this little project. They said, I think it’s got potential, so they went with it butthought it was going to be a big hit. I kept doing more research and writing scripts. There were four scripts trying to find just the right thing because the problem in something like this is you are creating a whole genre that has never been created before.You can’t, and how do you explain a Wookiee to an audience, and how do you get the tone of the film right, so it’s not a silly child’s film, so it’s not playing down to people, but it is still an entertaining movie and doesn’t have a lot of violence and sex and hip new stuff? So it still has a vision to it, a sort of wholesome, honest vision about the way you want the world to be. I was also working on themes that I worked with inof accepting responsibility for your actions and that kind of stuff. So it took me a long time to get the thing done. About the time we finished the preproduction, we did a budget on it. The first budget actually came out to $16 million, so I threw out a lot of designing new equipment and said, okay, we’ll cut corners and do a lot of fast filmmaking, which is where I really come from.were nothing, both under-a-million-dollar pictures. So we started applying some of our budget techniques and we got it down by $8.5 million, which was really about as cheap as that script could possibly ever be made by any human being. When I first met you in London, you were complaining that you could make a $2 million movie for $1 million but you couldn’t make a $14 million movie for $8 million. It was terribly difficult but we made it. We set the budget for $8 million, they said, no, make it seven. When we finally got the budget down to $7 million we knew it couldn’t be done, and we told Fox it couldn’t be done. They said make it $7 million anyway. I was practically working for free and my only hope was that if the film paid off, and if it cost $8 million, that would mean it would break even at $20 million.I think in the end my actual salary was $100,000, which again was still like half of what everybody else was making.Everybody has points, but the key is to make them pay off. I figured I was never going to see any money on my points, so what the heck. I also had a chance to give away a lot of my points, which I had done withPart of the success is the fault of the actors, composer and crew and they should share in the rewards as well, so I got my points carved down much less than what my contemporaries have. But I never expectedI struggled through this movie. I had a terrible time; it was very unpleasant.was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time and I was compromising myself to death. But I could rationalize it because of the fact that, well, it is just a $700,000 picture – it’s Roger Corman – and what do you expect, you can’t expect everything to be right for making a little cheesy, low-budget movie. But this was a big expensive movie and the money was getting wasted and things weren’t coming out right. I was running the corporation. I wasn’t making movies like I’m used to doing.THXwe had over 950 people working for us and I would tell a department head and he would tell another assistant department head, he’d tell some guy, and by the time it got down the line it was not there. I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before. I got rid of some people here and there but it is a very frustrating and an unhappy experience doing that. I realized why directors are such horrible people – in a way – because you want things to be right, and people will just not listen to you and there is no time to be nice to people, no time to be delicate. This was something else you said in London: “I’m tired of being a director, I want to go back to being a filmmaker”. Well, that’s true, that is really what I want to do. I’ve done this thing now. I’ve directed my large corporation and I made the movie that I wanted to make. It is not as good by a long shot as it should have been. I take half the responsibility myself and the other half is some of the unfortunate decisions I made in hiring people, but I could have written a better script, I could have done a lot of things; I could have directed it better. Back in California last summer you were again upset. You said the robots didn’t look right. Artoo looked like a vacuum cleaner. You could see 57 separate flaws in See Threepio, you didn’t like the lighting, everything seemed like it wasn’t coming together. Was it coming together? Well, for one thing, by the time we got back to California I wasn’t happy with the lighting on the picture. I’m a cameraman, and I like a slightly more extreme, eccentric style than I got in the movie. It was all right, it was a very difficult movie, there were big sets to light, it was a very big problem. The robots never worked. We faked the whole thing and a lot of it was done editorially.Every time the remote-control Artoo worked it turned and ran into a wall, and when Kenny Baker, the midget, was in it, the thing was so heavy he could barely move it, and he would sort of take a step and a half and be totally exhausted. I could never get him to walk across the room, so we would cut to him there and cut to a close-up, and cut back so that he would be over here. It is all really movie magic more than it was anything else. That’s why it’s amazing because when I finally saw the film I was surprised. I couldn’t see any seams. So I went to see it again and maybe saw a couple of seams, but that was it. I can see nothing but seams. A film is sort of binary – it either works or it doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all. It is a fusion thing and then everything else, all of the mistakes, don’t count anymore.work, then you can do an impeccable job with making the movie. People still see the mistakes, and they get bored and it just doesn’t work. And so what can you say?was about 70% of what I wanted it to be. I don’t think you ever get to the point where it is 100%.was about 50% of what I wanted it to be but I realized that the other 50% would have been there, if I just had a little more time and a little more money.is about 25% of what I wanted it to be. It’s really down there quite a bit. It’s still a good movie, but it fell so short of what I wanted it to be. And everyone said, “Well, Jesus, George, you wanted the moon for Chrissake, or you wanted to land on Pluto and you landed on Mars”. I think the sequels will be much, much better. What I want to do is direct the last sequel. I could do the first one and the last one and let everyone else do the ones in between.No, it would be interesting. I would want to try and get some good directors, and see what their interpretation of the theme is. I think it will be interesting, it is like taking a theme in film school, say, okay, everybody do their interpretation of this theme. It’s an interesting idea to see how people interpret the genre. It is a fun genre to play with. All the prototype stuff is done now. Nobody has to worry about what a Wookiee is and what it does and how it reacts. Wookies are there, the people are there, the environment is there, the empire is there… everything is there. And now people will start building on it. I’ve put up the concrete slab of the walls and now everybody can have fun drawing the pictures and putting on the little gargoyles and doing all the really fun stuff. And it’s a competition. I’m hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like, “I’ll show George that I can do a film twice that good,” and I think they can, but then I want to do the last one, so I can do one twice as good as everybody else. [Star WarsTrue, true. Now nobody who sees the film questions what a Wookiee is, nobody questions what a Jawa is, they accept it right away because the film has a foundation of imagination, an elaborate underpinning of detail that makes these things plausible. So let’s take it one step further. Say, for instance, that you were an anthropologist and just came back from the Wookiee planet. What would you report? That’s in the earlier scripts. I had actually written four different plots and different stories with different characters, and they involved different environments. In one of the scripts there is a Wookiee planet. It’s a jungle planet and there was a whole sequence where the Empire had a little outpost on the Wookiee planet and Luke [Sky-walker] gets involved with the Wookies and he fights the head Wookiee. He wins the fight but he doesn’t kill the Wookiee and the Wookiee says, okay, you are going to be the son of the chief and all that kind of stuff. He rallies the Wookies and the Wookies all attack this imperial base. The imperial base has tanks and all kinds of stuff and the Wookies beat them off, and then Luke and Ben [Kenobi] and Han [Solo] and a bunch of people train the Wookies to fly the fighters, and it is the Wookies that go after the Death Star, not the rebels that were on the planet. It was a much different thing, there was a very involved thing with the Wookies. The Wookies are… slightly primitive, they live in the jungle, and there is a great sequence which may end up in one of the movies where there is a giant fire and they are all dancing around the fire, all the drums are going and all that kind of stuff. The Wookies are more like the Indians, more like noble savages.Well, the Jawas are more like scavengers, junk dealers. We had a Jawa village scene in the film but we didn’t shoot it because the location was too far away, we just cut that out to keep on budget. We found these great things in Tunisia, little grain houses that were four stories high but with little tiny doors, little tiny windows, it was a hobbit village. So we had a whole sequence with these little hobbit-world slum dwellers but we had to cut it out.They didn’t really have any basis. The Jawas really came fromThey were the shell dwellers, the little people that lived underground in the shells. And in a way, part oftoo. One of the actors who was doing some voice-over for radio talk, Terry McGovern, came up with the word Wookiee.They’re the San Francisco San Anselmo/George Lucas players, a bunch of disc jockeys, Scott Beach. Terry McGovern. Terry was the teacher in– they’ve been in all my movies – we were riding along in the car one day and he said: “I think I ran over a Wookiee back there,” and this really cracked me up and I said, “What is a Wookiee?” and he said, “I don’t know, I just made it up”. And I said, “That is great, I love that word.” I just wrote it down and said I’m going to use that. There are lots of great pseudolanguages in the film – the Wookiee, the Jawas, Artoo and Greedo, the hit creature in the Cantina sequence, to name a few. Were these elaborately constructed? Yes. Right when the film started, we hired two people – one was an artist, Ralph McQuarrie, and the other was the soundman, Ben Burtt. I just went to one of my old instructors at USC and I asked, who is the best guy you’ve got, in terms of working on sound? And so Ben spent two years developing sound effects – he did all the ray guns, spaceships exploding, and toward the end he worked for like three or four months to come in with Artoo. I said I wanted to have beeps and boops and that. Well, it is easy to say that, it’s another to take those beeps, boops and sounds and actually make a personality. He spent a long time coming up with sounds. And I would listen to it and I would say, no, no, we need something with a little more sensitivity, he needs to be sadder here, he needs to be happier there. We need to know he’s angry here. And he would go back and he would work on the Arp and the Moog, he would talk into the mike and he would run it fast and he would run it slow and he would combine all these things, and he finally came up with it. It didn’t sound all the same, like a touch-tone telephone. To some people I guess he still sounds like a touch-tone telephone.Yeah. Ben had to write out the dialogue I never wrote. I just wrote, Threepio says, “Did you hear that,” and the little robot goes “beep-a-da-boop,” and Ben had to sit there and say, “Hmm, well, of course I heard that, you idiot”. So then he had to take that and he had to translate it. He did the same thing with the Wookiee, a combination of a walrus and bear and about five or six other animal sound effects that are all put together in a very sophisticated manner electronically to create one voice.Ben started using a lot of African dialects and then he took certain ones, learned the dialogue himself and then sped up the tape. He would get a couple of people in the office and they would go out and yell and talk and do this dialogue and they would speed it up. He did the same with Greedo, who he worked on for months.We had various ways for him to talk. Some were purely electronic – we had one word, which was just a person going oink-oink, and if you did it fast enough with the right rhythm and everything it sounds like a very bizarre language. We used harmonizers, we used a lot of electronic equipment; and that didn’t work, so finally Ben got together with a graduate student at Berkeley who is a real expert in languages, and he and Ben taped. They went through languages and languages and then they finally made up a language. Ben took it and edited it down, and we had the dialogue written out. In the script it was an actor who actually said the dialogue to begin with. Then we processed that electronically to give it a sort of phasing sound and, well, it was a lot of work.That was my idea. Somebody thought we should do subtitles on Han’s part too, but it would be too confusing, it is hard enough to understand now. The pace of the film is so fast that you have hardly time to read the subtitles because the cuts and everything are so short. I was fascinated by the relationship between robots and humans. Droids seem to be second-class citizens, as Threepio is quick to point out from time to time. But on the other hand, there is a very warm bond between droids and humans. Well, the droids were there to serve. Obviously droids are servants of man. They do as they are commanded and all that kind of stuff but at the same time I love droids, they’re my favorite people. I didn’t want them to be cold robots. Even the robots inI really wanted to get into the robots and their problems in life; a little equal time for robots, who have taken a lot of shit over the years and have never really had a chance to prove themselves.Right. They were designed as a sort of Laurel and Hardy team. They were the comic aspects of the film, the real comic aspects, the ones who were supposed to tell the jokes. I didn’t want the whole thing to be a comedy but I wanted to have a lot of fun. I didn’t want the human characters to crack jokes all the time so I let the robots do it, because I wanted to see if I could make robots be like humans.Yes. It was primarily because of the fact that it was a British voice, and I really wanted to keep the whole thing American. Some wag on the set in London said that the movie was going to come out sounding like the British versus the Americans. I tried very carefully to balance the British and American voices so that some of the good guys had the British voices and some of the bad guys had British voices. I also wanted to keep the accents very neutral. Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing have sort of mid-Atlantic neutral accents, I mean they are not really strongly British. Tony [Daniels] had the most British accent of them all, so I said, no, I want to make him American because he is one of the lead characters. I wanted Threepio’s voice to be slightly more used-car dealerish, a little more oily. I had an idea of more of a con man, which is the way it was written, and not really a sort of fussy British robot butler. So I tried and I tried but because TonyThreepio inside, he really got into the role. We went through 30 people that I actually tested, but none of the voices were as good as Tony’s, so we kept him.That’s James Earl Jones. He was the best actor I could possibly find. He has a deep, commanding voice.No, he sort of knew when we hired him. He is an actor, David Prowse, and he has a very strong brogue. He played the weight lifter inWhy does Darth Vader breathe so heavily?It was a nice touch, because it adds to the bogyman quality of the character. Ben had a lot of work in that too. He did about 18 different kinds of breathing, through aqualungs and through tubes, trying to find the one that had the right sort of mechanical sound, and then decide whether it would be totally rhythmical and like an iron lung. That’s the idea. It was a whole part of the plot that essentially got cut out. It may be in one of the sequels.It’s about Ben and Luke’s father and Vader when they are young Jedi knights. But Vader kills Luke’s father, then Ben and Vader have a confrontation, just like they have inand Ben almost kills Vader. As a matter of fact, he falls into a volcanic pit and gets fried and is one destroyed being. That’s why he has to wear the suit with a mask, because it’s a breathing mask. It’s like a walking iron lung. His face is all horrible inside. I was going to shoot a close-up of Vader where you could see the inside of his face, but then we said, no, no, it would destroy the mystique of the whole thing. I was quite happy to see Vader spinning off into deep space at the end, but not dying. The only thing missing was a title on the screen saying, “To be continued soon at a theater near you”.THX I realized that I put in an enormous amount of effort that I will never be able to use again. I know the world offorever but it took me so much time and so much energy to develop all that stuff, and then it got touched upon in one movie. Normally in a movie it’s maybe a book or a piece of history or a piece of my life. I sat down and wroteeverything. You have to think of the cultures and what kind of coffee cups they are going to have, and where is the realm between technology and mankind and where does ESP play a part of this…. And you go and sort of find the levels that you want to deal with. How far out do you want to go? Will the people relate to that?is designed with the international market in mind. The French are very much into this genre. They understand it more than Americans do, and it is the same with the Japanese. I own a comic gallery, an art gallery in New York that sells comic art and stuff; the guy that runs the art gallery also runs a comic store and we do a lot of business in France. They understand Alex Raymond, they understand that he was a great artist, they understand Hal Foster and they understand comic art as a real art and not as a sort of interesting, goofy thing. And I am very much into comic art, and its place in society as a real art, because it is something that expresses the culture as strongly as any other art. What Uncle Scrooge McDuck says about America, about me when I was a kid, is phenomenal. It is one of the greatest explorations of capitalism in the American mystique that has ever been written or done anywhere. Uncle Scrooge swimming around in that money bin is a key to our culture. [Prince Valiants are as beautiful and expressive as anything you are going to find anywhere. It is a form of narrative art but because it is in comic it has never been looked at as art. I look at art, all of art, as graffiti. That’s how the Italians describe the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian tombs, they were just pictures of a past culture. That is all art is, a way of expressing emotions that come out of a certain culture at a certain time. That’s what cartoons are, and that’s what comics are. They are expressing a certain cultural manifestation on a vaguely adolescent level but because of it, it is much more pure because it is dealing with real basic human drives that more sophisticated art sometimes obscures.No, I expected actually a lot more than it got. In fact, I am fairly pleased that they haven’t compared it that much towhich is really what it should be. On a technical level it can be compared, but personally I think thatis far superior. You know it had ten times more money and time and obviously it came out better. In special effects one of the key elements is time and money. Most of those special effects inwere first-time special effects – we shot them, we composited them and they’re in the movie. We had to go back and reshoot some, but in order to get special effects right, you really should shoot them two or three times before you figure out exactly how it should work, which is why it costs so much money. But most of our stuff we had to do as a one-shot deal. We did a lot of work but there is nothing that I would like to do more than go back and redo all the special effects, have a little more time. Which takes us back to this period of the last few months before release. The editorial thing that you were mentioning earlier, pulling things together by sleight of hand. What was it like leading up to the actual opening night? I heard that you were looping and cutting up to the last minute. The whole picture was very difficult because it was made on a very short schedule – about 70 days on the sets and locations. In England we couldn’t shoot past 5:30 so we worked eight-hour days. Whereas I visited Steve [Spielberg] and Marty [Scorsese] after I finished shooting and they were filming 12 – 14 hours a day. So they were actually getting another day’s work every day. They would have, like, a 120-day schedule, but if you counted the hours, they really had 200 days to shoot. While I had 70 real days to shoot, and it was very short for something that was that complex. It was the same in the finishing. The studio wanted to finish it for the summer, I wanted to finish it for the summer, and so we were up against the wall. When I came back from England, we were supposed to have half of the special effects done and actually they had about three shots finished and they were not up to what I felt were the standards of the film. Industrial Light and Magic had spent most of the early part of that year and a million dollars – which was about the whole budget in the whole time they had to shoot – building cameras and developing electronic computer systems and stuff. They didn’t really concentrate that much on actually making shots.Yes, everything was built from scratch. We built optical cameras, moviolas, a whole system based on VistaVision. John Dykstra built it and he really is a very talented guy who worked as a camerman for Doug Trumbull. He is very, very knowledgeable in building sophisticated camera-motion systems. He developed systems along with several of the people who worked with him in electronic and mechanical designs. It was quite extraordinary; we built a whole operation.Well, we weren’t so much at odds as much as I was more interested in the shots. I didn’t care how we got the shots, I just wanted the composition and the lighting to be good, and I wanted them to get it done on time. On a real production you have no time and you are doing the impossible every day, at a very hectic, accelerated place. Special-effects people have a tendency to think that if they get one shot a day, they are really quite pleased. They don’t work on the same pace that the regular production unit works. I believe that you can do special effects with the same intensity and in the same schedule that you shoot a regular movie, so there was a little bit of conflict there. And at the same time, I wanted the shots to look a certain way and be designed a certain way and we had difficulty with what was actually technically possible with the time laid out to accomplish it. It was purely a working problem and being at odds with John was no greater than being at odds with everybody else. I had just as many problems with the robots and the special-effects people in England as with the special-effects people in California. Was that one of your key administrative problems then, the wedding of the location footage with special-effects footage? No, I was just trying to get the special effects up to a quality that I wanted. I was happy with a lot of the special effects toward the end. The operation got very good. In the beginning the cameraman was still learning how to fly the airplanes, because it was a very complex animation thing, where you’re moving cameras and rolling, doing little motor things. When you watch it happen you are not working in real time; it is very difficult to plot out the way one of those planes move in non-real time, using tilting cameras and motors. It’s easy to take your hand and say, I want the plane to go this way, and it is very difficult to actually translate that onto paper and then film so that you actually get the ship to do that, and it took a long time just to figure out how to fly. There are problems that have never really been coped with before. Inthe ships run a straight line, they just go away from you or they cross the screen, they never turn or dive.The dogfight sequence was extremely hard to cut and edit. We had storyboards that we had taken from old movies and we used the black and white footage of old World War II movies intercut with pilots talking and stuff, so you could edit the whole sequence in real time. My wife, Marcia, can normally cut a whole reel – all ten minutes of the film – in one week. I think it took her eight weeks to cut that battle. It was extremely complex and we had 40,000 feet of dialogue footage of pilots saying this and that. And she had to cull through all that, and put in all the fighting as well. Nobody really has ever tried to interweave an actual plot story into a dogfight, and we were trying to do that, however successful or unsuccessful we were.I was very, very pleased with the score. We wanted a very sort of Max Steiner-type, old-fashioned, romantic movie score.There are 90 minutes of music in a 110-minute film. I wanted to use some of Liszt, Dvořák, some of thestuff and Johnny said no. He wanted to make some strong theme, fairly reminiscent in a few places but at the same time very original. The whole thing was really designed likeWe did it so that each character has their own theme and whenever that character is on the screen that theme is played.Well, they used to do it all the time, writing music for movies was closer to writing for opera or symphony. One interesting thing about the music – which is sort of like the movie itself – is that I really expected to get devastated in terms of people saying, “Oh, my God, what a stupid, old-fashioned thing and how corny can you get?” I am amazed that people just said, “Gee, that’s fine”. I really expected to get trounced very badly about the whole thing. And Johnny did too, a little bit. A lot of the lines in the movie are sort of… I wince every time I hear them.? I thought we were just talking about the score. I expected to get trounced on everything. Especially in the end when it came down to the score, which was romantic and dramatic. Not only a slightly corny dialogue here and a very simplistic, sort of corny plot…There is some very strong stuff in there. In the end, when you know better, it sort of takes a lot of guts to do it because it’s the same thing with the whole movie – doing a children’s film. I didn’t want to play it down and make it a camp movie, I wanted to make it a very good movie. And it wasn’t camp, it was not making fun of itself. I wanted it to be real. Even though Harrison Ford’s character, Han Solo, is right up to the edge of camp, very John Wayne-ish.“I been from one end of this galaxy to the other, kid..” But he did pull it off.] It fits in his character. Harrison is an extremely intelligent actor and we balanced on a lot of thin threads when we went through this movie. And when you’re doing it you never know when you are going to jump off the other side, which is one of the things like with the score. There were a lot of little discussions about if this or that would make it go too far, would it be too much. I decided just to do it all the way down the line, one end to the other, complete. Everything is on that same level, which is sort of old-fashioned and fun but going for the most dramatic and emotional elements that I can get. The Peter Cushing character, Grand Moff Tarkin, certainly applies to that formula. He got off some great lines. Especially right near the end, “Abandon the station, now at the hour of my greatest triumph?” The stuff in that is very strong. Peter Cushing, like Alec Guinness, is a very good actor. He got an image that is in a way quite beneath him, but he’s also idolized and adored by young people and people who go to see a certain kind of movie. I think he will be remembered fondly for the next 350 years at least. And so you say, is that worth anything? Maybe it’s not Shakespeare but certainly equally as important in the world. Good actors really bring you something, and that is especially true with Alec Guinness, who I thought was a good actor like everyone else, but after working with him I was staggered that he was such a creative and disciplined person. In the original script Ben Kenobi doesn’t get killed in the fight with Vader. About halfway through production, I took Alec aside and said I was going to kill him off halfway through the picture. It is quite a shock to an actor when you say, “I know you have a big part and you are going to the end and be a hero and everything and all of a sudden I have decided to kill you,” but he took it very well and he began to build on it and helped and developed the character accordingly.Everybody was upset. I was struggling with the problem that I had this sort of climactic scene that had no climax about two-thirds of the way through the film. I had another problem in the fact that there was no real threat in the Death Star. The villains were like tenpins; you get into a gunfight with them and they just get knocked over. As I originally wrote it, Ben Kenobi and Vader had a sword fight and Ben hits a door and the door slams closed and they all run away and Vader is left standing there with egg on his face. This was dumb; they run into the Death Star and they sort of take over everything and they run back. It totally diminished any impact the Death Star had.Right, but those kind of things dissipate without having a lot of real cruel torture scenes and real unpleasant scenes with the bad guys in order to create them as being bad or make them a threat. I was walking that thin line between making something that I thought was vaguely a nonviolent kind of movie but at the same time I was having all the fun of people getting shot. And I was very careful that most of the people that are shot in the film were the monsters or those storm-troopers in armored suits. Anyway, I was rewriting, I was struggling with that plot problem when my wife suggested that I kill off Ben, which she thought was a pretty outrageous idea, and I said, “Well, that is an interesting idea, and I had been thinking about it”. Her first idea was to have Threepio get shot, and I said impossible because I wanted to start and end the film with the robots, I wanted the film to really be about the robots and have them be the framework for the rest of the movie. But then the more I thought about Ben getting killed the more I liked the idea because, one, it made the threat of Vader greater and that tied in with The Force and the fact that he could use the dark side. Both Alec Guinness and I came up with the thing of having Ben go on afterward as part of The Force. There was a thematic idea that was even stronger about. The Force in one of the earliest scripts. It was really all about The Force, a CastanedaWell, then, theoretically there could be a sequel about The Force, there could be a sequel about the Wookies, about Han, about Luke… Yes, it was one of the original ideas of doing a sequel that if I put enough people in it and it was designed carefully enough I could make a sequel aboutOr if any of the actors gave me a lot of trouble or didn’t want to do it, or didn’t want to be in the sequel, I could always make a sequel without one.Yes. All the actors except Alec Guinness. We may use his voice as The Force – I don’t know. One of the sequels we are thinking of is the young days of Ben Kenobi. It would probably be all different actors.Stuart Freeborn, the special-effects and makeup man, spent a lot of time and energy on the Wookiee and did a fantastic job, and he was rushed to try to create the Cantina creatures while we were shooting in Tunisia. We moved the Cantina sequence up a week in the shooting schedule and I kept adding monsters all the time. So a few weeks before we were going to shoot that sequence Stuart got sick and had to go to the hospital, and so we didn’t get all the monsters finished that we wanted to have. The ones we had were the background monsters and they weren’t meant to be key monsters. I always knew eventually either Stuart or somebody would come back and shoot more monsters.When we got back to California we cut the film, looked at it and I still didn’t think the Cantina scene’ worked as well as it should have. So I wanted to shoot a second unit. That can get pretty expensive, and the studio said no way you’re gonna spend any more money on this picture, because we were already like a million dollars over the budget. And I said it is one of the key scenes in the movie and we have to have more monsters. And so we did a budget and talked to Alan Ladd Jr. It was really his project, and by now he was the president of the company. Ladd said do it, but the only way we would get away with it was we could do it for $20,000, and so I said, okay, I’ll do it for $20,000. So we ended up having to cut out half of what we wanted but it was sufficient. You know, I really wanted to have horrible, crazy, really staggering monsters. I guess we got some but we didn’t come off as well as I had hoped.I planned to use Glenn Miller for that sequence originally, but we couldn’t use it and Johnny had to come up with something familiar and I think he did a fairly good job. He came up with a really bizarre Sound that was very Forties, yet very odd. The whole thing was originally designed as a big-band number, but it worked out. The sequence where Han Solo’s ship hits light speed – hyperspace – gets a cheer every single time. People just love it. Technically it was very simple. The actual jump to hyperspace is sort of a pull-back on stars and then a shot of the ship disappearing real quick. I think more than anything else it is fun because the editing and the design of the sequence before it are very good. It’s from the point where the troops start shooting at them to the point where the ship takes off and there are about two very good music cues in there.You’re rooting for them to get away. It’s a real flashy escape, you know. There’s nothing like popping the old ship into hyperspace to give you a real thrill. I felt one scene didn’t quite work: the one where they almost get crushed by the moving walls in the trash bin. That octopus creature was unsatisfying. I believe it was called a Dia-noga in the script. The Dia-noga was originally supposed to be a giant, sort of filmy, clear, transparent jellyfish kind of thing that came shooting out of the water, with all these jellylike tentacles with little veins running through them. So first the special-effects people came up with this giant 8-foot-high, 12-foot-wide brown turd that was bigger than the set, and that just didn’t work. We finally got it down to where it was just one tentacle. That was all they could really accomplish.Well, the eyeball we did later, we did that in California with the second unit; we did that in the backyard. I never really got a monster. They spent an enormous amount of money building these giant things with hydraulics and all kinds of stuff and they looked terrible. And I said, I only want something sort of ethereal. But they kept wanting to build these giant things and I said, you don’t need that, let’s just put a bunch of cellophane on a string and pull it up out of the water or something. It got so ridiculous, I finally just said look, give me one long tentacle. What I really would have liked to have had was a bunch of tentacles. I have always had a problem with that scene. There was one like it inwhich I cut out. He fell into a trash masher, and there was a giant ratlike creature in there with him. I have never been able to accomplish it, and I don’t know why.Yes, he eats the garbage. The idea was the Dia-noga knows that the doors are going to close and the walls are going to close in and mash the garbage, and he sort of pushes himself against the floor and does whatever he does to survive, and he can’t eat the kid right then. It is a slightly esoteric idea. I still want the sequence and someday I will get something on the screen.One of my motivating factors for doing the film, along with all the other ones, was that I love toys and games. And so I figured, gee, I could start a kind of a store that sold comic art, and sold 78 records, or old rock ‘n’ roll records that I like, and antique toys and a lot of things that I am really into; stuff that you can’t buy in regular stores. I also like to create games and things, so that was part of the movie, to be able to generate toys and things. Also, I figured the merchandising along with the sequels would give me enough income over a period of time so that I could retire from professional filmmaking and go into making my own kind of movies, my own sort of abstract, weird, experimental stuff.Yes. The film is a success and I think the sequels will be a success. I want to be able to have a store where I can sell all the great things that I want. I’m also a diabetic and can’t eat sugar and I want to have a little store that sells good hamburgers and sugarless ice cream because all the people who can’t eat sugar deserve it. You need the time just to be able to retire and do those things, and you need to have an income……will be seed money to try to develop a store and do the other things that I want to do. I’ve made what I consider the most conventional kind of movie I can possibly make. I’ve learned my craft in the classic entertainment sense as well as I think I can learn it. What I want to do now is take my craft in the other direction, which is telling stories without plots and creating emotions without understanding what is going on in terms of purely visual and sound relationships. I think there is a whole world of film there that has never been explored. People have gotten so locked into the story film – the novel and the play have such a strong influence over film that it has sort of become the weak sister. And if the films work, I will try to get them out and get them distributed by whoever would be daring enough to pick them up. Maybe they will be entertaining, it’s hard to know at this point. It is in an area that I have absolutely no way of knowing what would happen and that is what excites me. And I have reached the point now that I can say, well, I am retiring. Because I really can retire now. I have never been like Francis and some of my other friends who are building giant empires and are constantly in debt and have to keep working to keep up their empires. But he is trying to create an independence that we are all trying to create, an independence from having the studios dictate what kind of films are made. You keep in touch with Steven Spielberg, Michael Ritchie, Phil Kaufman, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese… There are several groups. There is what we call the USC mafia – Bill Huyck, Matt Robbins and John Milius – and then there is the New York contingent: Brian and Marty and Steve were at Long Beach State the same time we were at USC. We became close friends and whatever competition there was was very healthy. Francis and I are really much closer because we have been partners. I know my friends by their movies. It’s strange, really. Francis is just like his movies and Marty is just like his movies and Brian is especially like his movies. We collaborate on each other’s work. They all came and looked atYou must be getting some pressure from your peer group not to retire. Yes, I have. The big thing now is that nobody believes it, especially Francis. He refuses to accept the fact that I am going to do it. When I say “retire” everyone thinks that I am going to go and live in Hawaii for the rest of my life. I’m not, I’m starting sort of a toy-store operation. I’m making my own sort of experimental films. At the same time I am going to be an executive producer on thesequels, which is really just a way of making a living but at the same time I’m going to follow through on the stuff I’ve already started. And who knows? Something may come along and I may direct something again but I think I can be more effective as an executive producer.It opens in Europe in October. And then I think it will open next July in Japan. I like Japan. I was going to shootthere and I spent some time over there. My wife says I am a reincarnated shogun, or at least a warlord. I’ll be fascinated to see what happens over there;No, science fiction has reached this very crummy level in Japan. They love it but it is still very crummy. It’s been exploited just like they did in this country. The wrong people have been doing science fiction. Science fiction – speculative fiction – is a very important genre that has not been taken very seriously, including the literature.Yeah. Why do space suits look the way they do? Why, when we went to the moon, did the astronauts look just like men who went to the moon inBecause the art director designed those space suits based on what he thought they would look like in terms of scientific input. But when you get down to it, a bunch of art directors from a bunch of old movies and speculative pulp fiction drew space suits and stuff way back when, and I have a feeling that they had a lot of influence on the way things look today, and the way things are, because the engineers and designers and all those people grew up. Also, just on a theoretical/philosophical level the ultimate search is still the most fascinating search, what is it all about – why are we here and how big is it and where does it go, what is the system, what is the answer, what is God and all that. Most civilizations, whole cultures and religions were built on the “science fiction” of their day. It is just that. Now we call it science fiction. Before they called it religion or myths or whatever they wanted to call it.Yes. It has always been the same thing and it is the most significant kind of fiction as far as I am concerned. It’s too bad that it has gotten that sleazy comic-book reputation, which I think we outgrew a long time ago. I think science fiction still has a tendency to react against that image and try to make itself so pious and serious, which is what I tried to knock out in makingBuck Rogers is just as valid as Arthur C. Clarke in his own way; I mean, they are both sides of the same thing. Kubrick did the strongest thing in film in terms of the rational side of things, and I’ve tried to do the most in the irrational side of things because I think we need it. Again we are going to go with Stanley’s ships but hopefully we a re going to be carrying my laser sword and have the Wookiee at our side.So I made my bid to try to make everything a little more romantic. Jesus, I’m hoping that if the film accomplishes anything, it takes some ten-year-old kid and turns him onto outer space and the possibilities of romance and adventure. Not so much an influence that would create more Wernher von Brauns or Einsteins, but just infusing them into serious exploration of outer space and convincing them that it’s important. Not for any rational reason, but a totally irrational and romantic reason. I would feel very good if someday they colonize Mars when I am 93 years old or whatever, and the leader of the first colony says: “I really did it because I was hoping there would be a Wookiee up here.”
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