“I’m telling the story of me... it might set a trend”: George Lucas on the set of Star Wars
Before it became a decades-spanning franchise, Philip Strick visited the set of Star Wars and spoke with the crew, including George Lucas. From our Summer 1976 issue.
The BFI Film on Film festival, which runs from 12 to 15 June at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX, will open with a screening of Star Wars (1977) from an original unfaded dye transfer IB Technicolor British release print.
“When I came here in the autumn of 1975,” said Gary Kurtz, waving at EMI’s Elstree Studios on a spring day of 1976, “absolutely nothing was happening.” Kurtz, who like so many former students at the University of Southern California’s film school seems to have got his first break directing a piece of Roger Corman’s The Terror, was co-producer of the enormously successful American Graffiti. On the strength of that, he was now doing a solo number, in a state of apparent serenity, on George Lucas’ Star Wars, for which Fox had put up a budget of six and a half million dollars.
“In Hollywood,” he went on, “the stages were so full of television shows and disaster epics we couldn’t get near them. It was unbelievable to me that over here there was so much space, so much talent, and so much opportunity going to waste. George and I had been preparing Star Wars for three years – in fact we could have made it before Graffiti – and we were ready to start shooting. So we moved in.”
Even as Star Wars arrived, such are the fortunes of the film industry, a large contingent of British talent was moving out, recruited by Richard Attenborough for rather more conservative military manoeuvres. But Kurtz and Lucas have secured some of the best names in the business, among them Gil Taylor (director of photography for Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy), John Barry (production designer for A Clockwork Orange), and John Stears (special effects man for several Bond films). And they tempted Alec Guinness, engagingly dubbed “a Knight to remember” by the publicity unit, to include science fiction among the subjects he has chosen for his return to the screen after some eight years. It is, naturally, a starring role.
It was plain at Elstree that Star Wars had taken over. All nine stages were festooned with amazing architecture, including a labyrinth of curling corridors, ramps and airlocks, a vista of one-dimensional rocket tubes, and a spectacular pirate spaceship, brooding like a huge concrete manta-ray over the meteor holes that had been burned into it during the previous day’s shooting. It looked like a sculpture by Chris Foss, the ubiquitous paperback artist, but in fact the basic art work for the production was by Ralph McQuarrie, an aerospace designer who had never turned his paints to adventure fiction before. The production offices were dominated by his works, superb vistas of alien landscapes and armoured figures battling with laser-swords. Suddenly you could see why Fox were happy to be involved.
A slight figure rendered even slighter by the occupants of the Death Star who towered around him, George Lucas was supervising the destruction of a planet or two under the orders of Peter Cushing. The front-projection scenes had only just arrived and turned out to be useless, so an entire wall of the Galactic Empire headquarters had been rustled up from nowhere and his actors were being posed and re-posed against it, muttering scraps of apocalyptic dialogue with steel-eyed intensity. It took the best part of a morning to get the scene right, a surprisingly generous slice from what was no more than a thirteen-week schedule. Over lunch, Lucas was as placid as his producer about the delay.
“I figure I’m still just a student,” he said. Close-up, he resembles a bearded Alfred E. Neumann in Clark Kent glasses. “I set myself a stack of problems and I want to see if I can solve them. After Graffiti – which we’d never have had the chance to make if Francis [Ford Coppola] hadn’t been prepared to lend his name on it – the way was open for me. So I decided I might never get to do a multi-million dollar movie if I didn’t do it now. It’s going to take another year – we’ve got at least six months of model and special effects work to do back in California – and at the end of that time I might just go back to little experimental movies. But I’ll have proved to myself that I can do the Hollywood epic thing, large cast, studio sets, elaborate plot, the whole unwieldy convention.”
For two and a half weeks he had taken everybody to Tunisia, where salt-lake flats provided the identity of the Planet Tattooine, home of Luke the Starkiller. It was so hot, even the robots melted. But everybody was delighted with the results, and the stills looked magnificent. Might one detect, in the central character of Luke, a symbol of personal enterprise not dissimilar from the malcontents of THX 1138 and American Graffiti? “Absolutely,” said Lucas, “it’s the same story. THX was allegory with a touch of cubism, Graffiti was sociology plus nostalgia, and Star Wars is total fantasy for today’s kids who don’t have the opportunity to grow up watching Flash Gordon and have to sit through movies of insecurity instead (like Earthquake or The Towering Inferno). I identify totally with Thex, struggling out from a benevolent and disintegrating environment; I wasted four years of my life cruisin’ like the kids in Graffiti, and I’m now on an intergalactic dream of heroism. I’m telling the story of me, and – who knows? – it might set a trend.”
He squared his shoulders like Bruce Wayne and strode back to the Death Star. At his heels, a remote-controlled robot, disguised as a train of small black trolleys, performed an excited pirouette.