J.W. Rinzler The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Tags: star wars, JW Rinzler, making of, empire strikes back, Irvin Kershner
Few films in history have been as meticulously pored over as the Star Wars trilogy, which is why the best compliment owed to The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is that it feels completely fresh. An exhaustive, official biography of one of the most beloved films of the past thirty years, Making Of runs a sprawling 350 pages, is replete with interviews and insights from George Lucas and dozens of other contributors, and contains over 1,200 rare photos, including conceptual art, storyboards, candid set photos and special effects designs. More importantly, it’s a smart and candid history that doesn’t shy away from the underlying sources of drama that fueled Empire’s production, from Lucas’s brush with financial ruin when the self-financed film went massively over budget, to on-set bickering between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, to creative tensions between the producers and their hand-picked director, Irvin Kershner.
Honed down from a file cabinet’s worth of material compiled by Lucasfilm executive editor J.W. Rinzler and his team of archivists, Making Of charts the film’s journey from pie-in-the-sky ideas in a notebook to an inevitable reality in the post-Star Wars world to a grueling international shoot punctuated by injuries, narrow escapes, and financial and creative arguments, to a post-production headache that pushed its special effects artists to the breaking point. (“ILM veterans say it’s the hardest film they ever worked on,” Rinzler says.) Although the book allows for multiple, even conflicting views on certain events, it never loses the ring of authority, which is not surprising considering that Rinzler has previously authored books on a number of Lucas works, including The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, The Making of Star Wars, and The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Rinzler recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about how he went about the task of documenting the making of a classic.
J.W. Rinzler: Did you make it all the way through the book?
Ryan Stewart: I did! I read the whole thing in one sitting. I think the centerpiece has to be that extensive, live microphone transcript from the Carbon Freezing Chamber set.
JWR:
Parts of that had been published before, in the original paperback that Alan Arnold wrote. He deserves credit not only as the author, but as the person who actually thought of putting a mic on Irvin Kershner. I don’t think that had been done before. But what happened when I was doing this book was that we got hold of the original tapes that Arnold made, and instead of going back to his edited transcripts and his manuscripts, we went back to the original tapes and had them re-transcribed. So, what you get here is a much more expanded and a more verbatim record of what went on during that day, on the set.
RS:
How do you feel the actors come off? There’s a lot of “Harrison isn’t speaking to me, and I’m not speaking to him, and here’s why...” It’s like high-school.
JWR:
I think that might have been a particularly hectic day. I don’t think it was always quite that crazy. Being on set that day was very difficult because of all the steam. It was also a set that had no walls, and it was an extremely complex, emotional scene. So, I don’t think it was normally that crazy, but I do think there are elements in there were constant. Kershner was always working really closely with the actors and they were always extremely engaged in figuring out what was right for their characters. They were all participating.
RS:
We get little flashes of Carrie Fisher’s personality, too, and the book delves a bit into her bohemian lifestyle at the time. Was her recent revelation that she did cocaine on the set news to you?
JWR:
It’s old news. Carrie’s been forthright, I think for a number of years now, about her personal life. And she’s been documenting it in her own way. So, yeah, it was definitely no surprise to me.
RS:
Is there more to the story, meaning her behavior on set?
JWR:
I think that’s pretty much the whole story. And also, I really didn’t go in for a lot of the ‘Who was angry at who on what day?’ kind of thing. But people did talk about it, and it was in the transcript, and so that’s just how it ended up being in the book.
RS:
The transcript also gives us a window into Kershner’s atypical shooting style, which was to skip the full master and go straight to mini-masters, more closely framed shots, which can complicate things.
JWR:
Yeah, I haven’t seen all of Kershner’s films, but I did watch a few of them for research purposes. I watched Raid on Entebbe, Eyes of Laura Mars, and The Return of a Man Called Horse. I watched a couple of others, too. I don’t know whether he shot those films in the same way that he shot Empire, but I know that [skipping the master shots] did cause problems in the editing room. George and Paul Hirsch liked to have more material, they liked to have the masters just like they liked to have the close-ups and medium shots, and in this case they didn’t have as much material. So, I think for certain scenes they were forced to do it pretty much the way Kershner had planned it, and other scenes not so much. But as Paul Hirsch has said, he thinks it ended up being a good compromise between the two styles and I think I would agree with that. But the thing about George is that he loves editing and Empire really feels different from the other Kershner films, so I would think that regardless of how he actually filmed, what happened in the editing room added up to a little bit of magic.
RS:
Did the second unit end up taking over some of the film’s important dramatic scenes? The book talks about how overtaxed Kershner was on time alone.
JWR:
I think Kershner did pretty much all the first unit. There was obviously a fair amount of second unit stuff that he couldn’t do, but those weren’t principal scenes. They were pick-ups, they were perhaps some scenes with Yoda and the mechanical units and things like that. I think he’s just such a perfectionist that even when it came to those scenes he would have preferred to have done them.
RS:
One thing I expected to come across in the book, but didn’t, is Harrison Ford making a vocal argument for the noble death of Han Solo. Maybe that’s an urban legend.
JWR:
I’ve heard of that, but I think it was something that happened more in connection with Return of the Jedi, as opposed to Empire. I haven’t researched Jedi yet, so we’ll have to see.
RS:
That book’s due in another three years, right?
JWR:
If we do it, yeah, it would be done in time for the next thirtieth anniversary. And it means that I get to work mornings and weekends again for a couple of years. [laughs] But we’re still not even sure if we’re going to be doing it. We have to wait and see what the sales are for Empire, cause it’s a big investment for the publisher.
RS:
I had always assumed that maybe Harrison Ford had been offered Indiana Jones by the time he was doing Empire, so they threw the carbon freezing in as insurance.
JWR:
No, the timing doesn’t really match up for that. I don’t know if you’ve got a copy of The Making of Indiana Jones, but George didn’t really decide upon Harrison Ford as a serious candidate for Indiana Jones until after Empire had already come out. I think they saw Tom Selleck and then things happened so that Tom Selleck couldn’t do it, and then what happened was [American Graffiti screenwriters] Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck went to a preview screening of Empire and afterwards they said to George “You’ve got to have Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones!” And Spielberg had been pushing for him as well, but all of that was not on his mind while he was doingEmpire. He was concentrating solely on trying to get the film finished before the money ran out.
RS:
Was that surprising to you, learning of the serious financial jam George got himself into?
JWR:
Yes, that was one thing I found surprising. When the bank pulled its money, I had assumed that George and everybody else still had enough money to just kind of go forward, you know? They were about two-thirds of the way through principal photography at that point, but in fact that was completely it. You have to remember that there was hardly any licensing at that point and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to pay the cast and crew. The level of desperation was a lot higher than I’d thought it had been.
RS:
Was the danger that if George went crawling back to Fox to complete financing of Empire, they’d take his Star Wars licensing rights?
JWR:
No, licensing wasn’t that big yet. And also, everyone thinks that George had the licensing rights for Star Wars, but he did not. Star Wars was 50/50. Fox was already doing pretty well with Star Wars, but what George had the rights for was Empire, and there wasn’t really licensing for Empire at that point. What he was actually afraid he was going to have to do was give back the Star Wars sequel rights to Fox. But instead of doing that, he basically just gave them a better deal on Jedi and he was not very happy about that.
RS:
George was pretty available to you throughout this project?
JWR:
Oh yes. Just as with the Star Wars book and the Indiana Jones book, I definitely needed his input, and also he wants to give his input. We have a working method now where, basically I write the rough draft – a draft that’s fairly rough but also fairly complete – and then I give it to him and he reads it in great detail and makes comments. It reminds him of all the stuff that happened back then, and then we have a long interview. One time it was like, three and a half hours, for one of those books. And we go over everything, all the pieces that are missing. There are always pieces missing, and people have conflicting versions, but George doesn’t mind if we end up with conflicting versions as long as his version is also included in there. Everyone has their own version of reality, of course. So yeah, he’s very involved and he sees the layout before it goes to print.
RS:
What other kind of access was granted to you? Did you actually sit down and watch the twelve reel assembly edit of Empire?
JWR:
Well, I was very fortunate to have an ally in the film archives who does a lot of pre-research for me. And we basically did go through all twelve reels, but sort of in fast-forward, and he would say “Now look at this part,” and “Look, this part is really different from what came later” and “This is different in such and such a way.” He would cue up certain things that he thought I’d be interested in, because he knows the films much better than I do, and as a result saves me probably an entire week of work, which is invaluable.
RS:
Assuming you had the run of the archives, what’s the coolest thing you encountered in terms of props? Did you run across Yoda?
JWR:
Yes! In fact, if you go to VanityFair.com, we have a sort of director’s cut of the making of The Making of the Empire Strikes Back, and they actually found the Yoda puppet after they went to press, so they were able to film it and get it into this video that we made about the making of the book, just as a kind of add-on. But yeah, I’ve seen pretty much everything. I’ve visited the archives many times, in fact I’ve spent entire months there.
RS:
It’s a shame Frank Oz didn’t get acting accolades for his performance.
JWR:
Without a doubt. That one is such a no-brainer. That Frank Oz didn’t get at least a nomination for Yoda is one of the many, many, many oversights of the Academy. But that’s the nature of awards, they’re never on the money.
RS:
At one point in the book you make a passing reference to a notebook of George’s that contains his notes for Episodes VII through IX, the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker. Are the ideas in that notebook public, or is it all under lock and key?
JWR:
I really don’t know, but I think much of it is probably locked away in George’s head. I do know that he’s spoken with Mark Hamill about it, and I know he’s spoken with Jim Bloom, the Industrial Light & Magic manager, about it. And he’s talked to other people about his ideas for it. I’ve personally never seen it, so I don’t know whether he actually wrote down the stuff or not. So much of the stuff that you write down as little notes can seem like it might have been for the prequels, or maybe for the next trilogy, after the original trilogy – he moves things around a lot and things shift. If you read The Making of Star Wars you might ask “Who was the ‘half-man, half-mechanical person’ that’s mentioned?” Well, it kept changing from draft to draft. So, I doubt that a lot of that stuff is fixed anywhere, except in George’s mind.
RS:
Do George and the main cast members consider Empire to be the pinnacle of Star Wars, as far as you know?
JWR:
I never really asked people if Empire was their favorite. I know that all the ILM veterans, to a man, and woman, regard Empire as the hardest film they ever worked on. I don’t know if that means it’s their favorite, though. And I don’t know, for George, which one is his favorite. I do know that there are lots of people at Lucasfilm who like Empire a lot, but there are also lots of people who like Star Wars, the first one.
RS:
Do you remember your first impressions of Empire?
JWR:
Well, let’s see, it came out in 1980, so I would have been 17. Actually, I told George this story once and it made him laugh, but I was not there opening day. I was kind of in my own world back then. I had seen a preview of Star Wars, though, I was lucky enough to go to a preview of that one, and it was mind-blowing. But for Empire, I was just in school one day at lunch and some guy came up to me and was like “Hey, I just saw Empire and I’m not going to tell you what happens, but I will tell you two letters – OE.” And I said “Oedipus?” And a friend of mine goes “Oh, Vader must be Luke’s father.” [laughs] The guy was like “How did you know that!?” So, before I even saw it I had the movie essentially ruined for me, in a sense.
RS:
Do you agree with the line from Kevin Smith’s Clerks, that people continue to respond to Empire because “life is a series of down endings?”
JWR:
I don’t, no. I would disagree with that, although there may be an element of truth to it. I don’t know the reason why they do, but I think in general it just has so many things in it – it’s such a rich canvas. The characterizations are deeper than in Star Wars. People are really able to get into the minds of Han Solo and Luke, and then you have Yoda who comes in, and then there’s Boba Fett arriving, and you’ve got this incredible snow battle that starts the whole thing out, and it’s got many more effects shots than the first film, and then there’s this incredibly personal duel at the end… You’ve just got so much stuff going on at so many levels that I think it’s incredibly rich, and yet it also moves so quickly. Even today, 30 years later, the film moves as fast as a modern movie, and in some ways faster because it has more context to it. It’s just a brilliant film.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is in bookstores everywhere.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is in bookstores everywhere.
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