The Lightsabre Interview

Irvin Kershner

Welcome to Lightsabre. We are thrilled to have as our guest the director of The Empire Strikes Back and a man who shaped the look of the Star Wars universe, Irvin Kershner.

The interview was conducted via telephone with Mark at Lightsabre Towers and Irvin at home. The interview began a five past twelve, five minutes late. Here’s the first part of the interview.

Irvin Kershner – Hello?

Mark Newbold – Hello, Mister Kershner?

IK – Who’s this?

MN – It’s Mark from Lightsabre in the UK.

IK – Yes.

MN – How you doing, you alright?

IK – Ok, it’s just twelve o clock, my god you’re good.

MN – (Laughs) I’m glad I got something right today then!

IK – You’re five minutes late.

MN – Well, I can’t be perfect.

IK – Yeah, good for you.

MN – Are you keeping well?

IK – Well, as far as health goes very well. Working on a new photographic show, I’m designing it. And I still have some films I’m working on. And, you know, things are going along.  I’m not teaching this year because I found that it was getting in the way of doing my work, so I’ve stopped this year and I don’t know what’ll happen next year.

MN – But it’s good to be busy, you’re still pleased to be doing plenty of stuff?

IK – Yeah.

MN – That’s great.

IK – So, what can I do for you?

MN – Well, I run a site called Lightsabre, it’s a Star Wars fan site.

IK – Listen, listen, I’d like you to do something. My hearing is not great. Could you…speak…slower, then I can understand you better.

MN – Not a problem.

IK – Ok, go ahead.

MN – I run a Star Wars website.

IK – Yes.

MN – And we specialise in interviews with actors and authors and artists. We’ve been very lucky, we’ve got a good relationship with Lucasfilm and I interviewed Rick McCallum about two weeks ago and during the interview I mentioned that I’d like to interview yourself and he was kind enough to put me in touch with the publicity department and they organised it for me, so I’ve been very, very lucky.

IK – Yes, ok well here I am.

MN – Excellent, well I’ve got some questions for ya.

IK – Go ahead.

Kershner and Mayhew on the Empire set

Q –You’ve directed numerous films, and yet to a very wide audience you're best known for directing The Empire Strikes Back. As a director, how happy are you with that, does that make you happy to be remembered for that particular film?

A – Well, I’ll tell you. It makes you happy, sometimes it makes you unhappy and I’ll tell you why. It was a great experience for me because George Lucas turned out to be the best producer I’ve ever worked with. The fact that he follows through on his word, he left me alone, he stayed in California and I went to Norway and England. He kept to his word. I had complete control. And he was supportive, all the way. To be remembered for the film is often the problem that a lot of authors have. They write many books and they’re remembered for one. Well, I’ve done many films and television, and everywhere I go they first talk about Empire, they might mention some of the other films. So I’ve given up on that, you just have to accept it, it’s the same as what we have with stars, you know. Remember a star for one thing they’ve done, really outstanding. I mean Clark Gable did Gone with the Wind, Vivian Leigh did Gone with the Wind, they’d done hundreds of pictures. So I guess I just have to enjoy it, I’ve been travelling a lot. In fact, this year I’ve been to the Amazon and France and Russia and all over the place and I get tremendous response. They want me to talk about the film and about Yoda and about the philosophy of the film and what kind of experience I had, you know I get all that stuff. And also every single week I’m getting huge amounts of mail with pictures of myself that they want me to sign. It’s really taking a hell of a lot of time. I realise how important it is to these people, there are fans all over the world, I get them from South Africa, from Germany, from Russia, I get them from everywhere. So it’s kind of an amazing phenomenon, and I guess you just have to ride the wind.

Q – You had a relationship with George before Empire came along, weren’t you his teacher at film school at some point?

A – Yes, at USC. And then we were sort of friends after that, and we even played tennis together many times.

Q – Oh right!

A – Yeah, but I didn’t really get to know him until making the film. Because the pre-production, we had to get the script right. We wrote a brand new script, we threw out the old script when I came on and then in the editing process I could always count on him if there were problems. George is a very, very good editor. I pride myself on being a very good editor too, because I did all my own documentaries. It was a very, very good relationship. And yes, the fact that I had him in a couple of classes, I don’t consider that that important (laughs) I don’t think he got very much out of school. I think he came equipped with his own vision.

Q – He was definitely his own man?

A – Yeah.

Kershner and Lucas on the Hoth soundstages

Q – Making Empire took a long time and it was quite a long shoot, there were technical problems and such?

A – Yes, it took me almost three years. Two years and nine months, it’s the longest I’ve ever worked on a film. The shooting was six months long. It was long because we had sixty-four sets, unheard of, and they were huge, they took up whole stages. We only had seven stages. The eighth stage, which we were counting on, was burnt down by (Stanley) Kubrick before we started shooting (The set was destroyed while Kubrick was shooting The Shining). And so I had to finish the days work and finish a sequence so they could take down the set that night, around the clock. And as I came in the morning it was an empty stage and they were putting up another set. (Laughs) And I did many, many scenes with one take. And this really scared the hell out of a lot of the crew, but I explained to them if we had to do cover takes, what they call protection takes, a two and a three, that to set up many of the shots took hours. Well, it would have doubled the shooting time, at least. So I made a decision, right early on to scare the hell out of the crew. First time we got on the set and we did a take and I said ‘Ok, let’s move on’ they said ‘Wait a minute, don’t you want to protect that take?’ and I said no, because I know the piece I want is in there, because I was pre-editing in my mind. And so they got used to it and it saved me a lot of time.

Q – There must have been a lot of pressure on set, making that film, with the original Star Wars being such a big hit.

A – Yeah, well you know, everyone thinks that when we started Empire that it was absolutely known that it was going to be a big hit. This is not true. We didn’t know whether Star Wars was a one-time phenomenon, and whether they would not accept a second one as being of any importance. It was not new, it had already been done. That’s the feeling people would have, so I adjusted it to make it the second act of a three act play. And the second act has to do with character, and I wanted to build the characters and I wanted to keep suspense, and I was depending on Yoda to be a very important, motivating force – the centre of the whole thing. And so I concentrated on that. I knew technically that no matter what I did in the storyboards could be done by ILM, if I hadn’t have been backed up by ILM the film might have gone for two years or three years or four years in the making, you know, but ILM were so good. And George told me before I left for England and Norway he said ‘Listen,’ because I said I was going to do all my own storyboards, it took me almost a year, he said ‘Don’t be limited by what everyone around tells you can’t be done.’ Because we didn’t have digital you know. He said ‘Don’t be limited. You dream up what you want and ILM will do it.’ You got it?

Q – Yeah.

A- It’s the opposite of the way it usually works, he said ‘You dream it up and they’ll do it.’ And he made sure they would.

Q – That must have been great for you as a director, to have that freedom?

A – You see, a lot of special effects it’s trial and error. You do it, you throw it away and you do it again, do it again. With digital it cuts the time way down, but we had to do it the long way. The camera had to travel on the rail a couple of centimetres at a time, it kept going all night and a day later we would take the film out and process it and look at it. If it didn’t work you had to start the machinery all over again, crawling along. It was, whoa, you waited! Did the shot work, did the shot work? And so you waited and suddenly after two days you know it worked.

Check back for the second part of our Irvin Kershner interview to read Kersh's thoughts on digital cinema and the infamous day of shooting the carbon freezing chamber scenes.