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The Lightsabre Interview J
Welcome to
Lightsabre. Speaking to us from his
office at The Presidio, our latest interview is
with the man who wrote the hugely successful Making of Star Wars alongside
the maker himself George Lucas. Please
welcome back to Lightsabre Jonathan Rinzler. Q –It’s nice to
welcome you back to Lightsabre. A –
Well it’s nice to be back. Q – It’s been about a
year since we spoke, it was July last year (2006). A – Time flies. Q – It really does. Well last time we spoke you were still
working on the Making of Star Wars, and you alluded to certain things but you
couldn’t really talk about it in any detail but now it’s out and it’s selling
like hot cakes we can talk more in-depth about the book. So how do you feel about it being such a
success, it’s been fantastically received. A – Yeah, well it’s been great. I think in a way we were lucky because it
was the one thing that said ’30 years’, and of course there hadn’t been a
making of before, at least not like ours (laughs), and it’s very gratifying,
because people have really been reading it and liking it and they really
appreciate the fact that it has a lot of stuff in it that hasn’t been seen
before. So it’s been great. Q – How fulfilling was it to be able
to go back and concentrate purely on the first film, with more detail than
anybody’s ever had access to. That
must have been fantastic, to have that kind of access A - Well, I mean basically we made a decision to do it archivally, before I knew that the Lost Interviews even
existed because I figured that was the way to go. Because 30 years later, who can remember
what happened? And then finding that
treasure trove of (Charles) Lippincott interviews was just great (laughs).
Q – You mention that in the book. You say you went into the archives and they
were in a box, but were they just in a corner under a pile of stuff, how were
they physically found? A – Well what happened was I just asked the librarians at
Skywalker Ranch if they had any papers related to Lippincott,
I didn’t even know there were interviews, papers or something. And they said that they thought there were,
and I can’t remember how long it was, a few days or a week later and they
said we’ve found four boxes. So they
found them. Q – Aren’t you amazed that no-one had
ever thought to ask before? A – Well I think it just has to do with the fact that for
ten years basically before that everybody was really working on the
prequels. You can’t imagine how
insanely busy it is (laughs). Q – I can well
imagine (laughs) A – Everybody’s kind of
overworked, and before that it was Young Indy, so basically if you just go
back everybody had other priorities.
And I think like I said, some people thought there already was a
Making of Star Wars book, so there was no reason to look in the first place. Q
– When did you actually start work on the book, because the prep time must
have been quite intensive? A –
At first I was just doing image work and I must have started
doing that early in 2006. I knew that
would take a long time, and that can be kind of mind-numbing, to look through
hundreds and hundreds of pictures, so I’d do an hour a day. In terms of the writing it was about two
years to do the whole thing, less actually, we did it pretty quickly. Q
– Yeah, the level of detail was amazing and some of the stuff that spins off
from what you would imagine a Making of Star Wars book to be, the peripheral
stuff I just found fascinating. A
– Like what?
Q
– Lucas and the Brat Pack and all the other guys of that era, their
camaraderie and the way they worked together and ran things by each
other. I knew that Lucas was involved
with American Zoetrope, so there were little bits feeding off that. Just peripheral stuff to what you would
imagine a making of book would be – day one we did this, day two we did that
– obviously there’s a lot more to Star Wars than that. I found that absolutely engrossing, so that
was my favourite part of the book, all the peripheral stuff. A –
Well that’s great to hear because that was the goal of the book, to place it
within that context, and it’s obviously not a biography but there were all
these other film makers who he was hanging out with who played key parts. Q – Yeah, I mean
Brian De Palma gave him a hard time, didn’t he?
(laughs) A
– Yeah, but as George pointed out he was the only one who actually
stayed afterwards and helped him rewrite the opening crawl. Q – Well you need
that sometimes, you need somebody to give you a kick up the backside and make
you think again. But how did you find
it getting your head around it not being 2007 but being 1975, 1976. How did you get yourself into the frame of
mind where you forget Empire and Jedi and the prequels ever happened and it’s
only Star Wars? A – Well in some ways it was
easy for me because I lived in Q –Looking at that
first film, and the evolution of the film from Lucas coming up with the ideas
to the battles getting it made and all the different studios that were
involved, who would you say was the real hero of Star Wars? A – Well I think there were
several heroes. I think Alan Ladd Jr comes to mind, because he was the one who basically
got it green lit at Fox. But of course
you could also argue that if he hadn’t green lit it at that point Lucas could
have taken it to another studio, which they were prepared to do. I think John Barry also comes to mind
immediately because as Lucas described him in the book he was a genius who
usually doesn’t even get mentioned in books about Star Wars, as he died (during the filming of Empire). Q
– Yeah, it’s insane. A –
Yeah, prematurely, and he was the one helping Lucas the most,
along with Robert Watts in Q – And he’s the
filter for it? A – Yeah, he’s the filter for
it, and particularly in ’74 and ’75, really being so gung ho and spending
$400,000 dollars of his own money. Which was a huge amount
of money back then (laughs).
Still nothing to sneeze at. It
never would have got off the ground.
Q – Back in 1975,
1975 the eleven million budget was a sizeable budget but why do you think,
apart from the fact that sci-fi films were rarely big hits, that people were
pessimistic about the films chances of success. Or was there more to it than that? A – Oh sure, I mean A –
Sci-fi movies didn’t make money, they never had made money and B- Nobody
could understand the script. Ralph McQuarrie did wonderful paintings but there were only a
dozen of those. And most people
looking at those paintings couldn’t imagine how they were going to translate
into a movie. Nobody could imagine the
end battle, such as it was because basically their only point of reference
was Star Trek and Flash Gordon. There
was just no way anybody could imagine what he had in mind. And even when they did start seeing it, it
still looked terrible. (laughs). You know,
nobody had done sound work like the kind he was doing with Ben Burtt. And Sam
Shaw describes it really well, the technicians
working on the film had never taken on a project like that before. There was just no precedent to those
things, there was just no reason to think that the film would be different to
anything that came before. Q – There’s moments
in the book where it’s quite clear that certain personalities are clashing
with each other, and you’re quite frank about it. Did you ever come across anything where you
thought “That’s a bit too strong, I can’t put that in the book,” or did you
pretty much have carte blanche to record it as it was? A
– Well you know, I got to know George a bit during Episode III, I followed him around for three years, and Rick and
all those guys and Episode 3 the book is fairly frank as well. What I learned is that as long as you’re
not dishing gossip for the sake of the gossip, as long as you’re saying,
“Well, here’s A’s point of view and here’s B’s point of view, here’s where
they clash,” that basically it was ok.
I often said “Ohh, I don’t know,” but this
is what happened. So I put it in the
book and George reads it, and I figured if he didn’t like it he’d take it
out. But I was worried, and when he read it he came back and said “Oh,
you’ve written a nice book.” (laughs) Q – You can’t get
better than that, can you? Fabuloso! A – Yeah, well he didn’t say fabuloso, he said it was nice. And I said “Nice? I kind of thought it was full of conflict
and tension and horrible things,” and he said “Nah, you can take everything you’ve mentioned
and magnify it by ten and that’s the way it really was.” Q – That’s the legend
of the making of the film, the British crew, the working hours and such. A – Yeah, and like he says
there were some people that didn’t work out, and some people that did. And
that’s true of any movie. Q – When he sat down
with the agent he got a lot of the merchandising and sequel rights worked out.
That was quite a ground-breaking thing
for A – Well, somebody starting
up their own special effects company to use the old term, visual effects
now. It may have happened, I wouldn’t
say it’s never happened but it’s certainly unusual. I know Ron Howard even mentions that in his
foreword to the Cinema of George Lucas book, ‘Why would you do that? Why take on even more responsibility?’ (laughs) So that was unprecedented. Having somebody start working on the
sounds, all the unique sounds even before you have a shooting script, that was unprecedented. Those two jumps to mind, but what you
mentioned before, the long drawn out contract negotiations, that wasn’t
unprecedented but he had some good people fighting for him. Tom Pollock in particular, those guys were
pretty tough.
Q – I guess the
fallout of those meetings and those decisions back in ’74, ’75 feeds through
to you and me talking about this book today? A – Yeah it does, because he got the sequel rights,
that was the big thing. And
even though they weren’t worth anything it’s still the stuff they usually
want to keep a hold of, but somehow they got them. I don’t think that’s happened since then,
I’m not an expert but… Q – That’s the reason
why I asked really, I’ve never heard of it happening since. A
– George Lucas is really the Disney of that generation. We haven’t done that kind of book, The
Cinema of George Lucas comes close but all the work that he did afterwards,
with the computer division, Pixar, ILM and on and
on and on. Pretty amazing,
unprecedented things. Q – On the subject of
ILM Lucas has said on more than one occasion that he only got a certain
percentage of what he saw in his minds eye on to the screen. In your opinion, how different would the
film have been if he’d been able to get 100% up there on the screen? A – I think all you have to do
is take a look at the Special Editions.
Some shots he wouldn’t have been able to do, no matter what. As he says there was just a glass
ceiling. He could imagine things, but
there was just no way they could do it.
But if you can imagine some of the shots in there that he might have
been able to pull off if he’d had three months and another million dollars,
then that’s what you would have got.
Obviously he wanted to have Jabba the Hutt in there, he just didn’t have time to get it to a
place where it was working. And he
wanted to have more X-wings, he wanted to have a more populated Mos Eisley, basically all the
things he changed (laughs). But really
they weren’t changes at all, that was just the way they should have
been. Q – Given the amount
of source material you had to sit down with two and a half years ago when you
started, was there much that didn’t get in the book? A – Del Rey
really came through because the book was originally going to be about 70
pages shorter, and I just said “Look, here’s the manuscript, if you guys can
find places to cut things out, let me know (laughs)” And there was another editor here
who read it, and nobody thought that there were things that should be cut
out. So pretty much it’s all in there,
we even got in the Expanded Universe thing in the hardcover edition. That was a question of whether George would
allow us to put it in there, but he gave his okay. The only thing that got cut out of there
was my recollection of seeing it at the Coronet Theatre, because they thought
that it’s just too weird to have me (JW) come in as a character in the book
(laughs). But I was there,
I was at a preview at the Coronet. It
wasn’t the big preview in Northpoint but it was
another preview. So I just happened to
be taken to see that when I was a kid. Q – You’ve mentioned
before about possibly doing an Empire Strikes Back version, an update of Once
Upon a Galaxy. I guess it’s fair to
assume that there’s an equal amount of information
out there for Empire? A – Well, there is a book on
Empire, we all agree that book is out there (laughs), it’s a great book. If we were to do it, and a lot of people
have asked, we would keep all that text and fill in the blanks. I can’t remember because I haven’t read it
in a while but there’s probably some pre-production stuff and some post
production stuff that’s missing and I think there’s probably stuff that we
can maybe get into more details about, which other books have already done
but we’ll do our version of, how the movie went over budget, things like
that. There was quite a bit of drama
around that, and then of course for that book…I don’t even want to think
about it because it scares me how many pictures and how much artwork
(laughs). It’s kind of daunting. First we’ve got to get through the Indiana
Jones publishing program. Q – Which is finally happening. When we
spoke last year you couldn’t say anything because it wasn’t a definite go? A – Yeah, I don’t think I
really knew at that point. It’s been a
definite go for years, then it’s not been a definite
go (laughs). But now it’s a definite,
definite go, as everybody knows. Q – Well they start
shooting in about six days? A – Yeah exactly, and I can’t give details but obviously we’re
going to do some publishing. The
details will be coming out over the next few months. Q – I’m sure we’ll talk again, it’s always good to speak to you A – Likewise. Q – Thanks again for your time Jonathan. A – You’re welcome. |
