(CHILDREN CHATTERING)
GEORGE: I grew up on a farm in Modesto.
Like most kids that grew up in the Valley, I had a strong interest in cruising.
I wandered around and spent most of my youth roaming the streets of the town.
(LAUGHTER)
Following the path that I was on, I was sort of flunking out of high school.
My mother kept worrying about me.
"He's not going to amount to anything."
My father kept saying, "He's a late bloomer.
"Don't worry about it. He's a late bloomer." (CHUCKLES)
Driving cars, going fast. I really liked that.
I liked the sensation of it.
I wanted to be a car mechanic, I wanted to race cars.
At the time, in high school, I had a very little car,
it was, you know, that big, and I was
turning into my driveway, it was a country road,
and uh, there was this guy.
So he was going about 90 miles an hour.
I didn't see him coming.
I hear a horn honk...
-(HORN HONKING) -(VEHICLE CRASHES)
...and then I'm gone.
They hit me broadside.
My car rolled about seven or eight times, wrapped around a tree.
And when I woke up, the first thing I heard
the nurse saying, "Don't worry, you have all your arms and legs."
I said, "What do you mean?"
Everybody kept saying, "You should be dead."
That's when I decided that, you know, maybe there's a reason I'm here.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
GEORGE: My father wanted me to go into the stationery business
and run an office equipment store.
They built it up for me to take over, and I said, "I don't want that."
I'll never work at a job where I have to do the same thing
over and over again every day.
It was probably the biggest disagreement we ever got into.
I said, "Well, I'll just go to school. I mean, I'll go to college."
You know, this is during the Vietnam War.
The only thing I could get into was the junior college.
I took lots of classes in the social sciences,
psychology and anthropology, and I got really hooked on it.
I said, "This is great. I love this."
And one of the books I had to read was The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
And I got very intrigued with the idea of how you build a society.
It was all done by stories, mythologies, heroes.
(BIRD SCREECHING)
It really wasn't until my junior year of college that I discovered film.
Ended up at USC.
Suddenly I was seeing all kinds of films that I'd never seen before.
Complete eye-opener. It was just a whole new world.
It's one of those things you eat, sleep and drink movies,
and you love every second of it.
I instantly knew that this was for me, that this was it.
I didn't know what a filmmaker was.
I didn't know what a producer was or a director or anything.
All I knew was that I wanted to make film and whatever that entails.
First semester there, and I started making student films.
Took the Cinema department by storm.
We met in the '60s when he premiered THX 1138,
his short film, during a film festival.
George won first prize.
THX 1138 4EB. This is Authority. You will stop where you are.
I basically said, "I'll never make a movie that good."
One of the things that really bonded us was we made movies for the audience,
even more than making movies for ourselves.
GEORGE: All of my friends,
they were all people who loved movies.
None of them were interested in making money.
They were just interested in making movies.
MAN: Lucas is out of school now, working with Francis Ford Coppola,
himself, a recent graduate of the film school at UCLA.
Coppola is directing The Rain People,
his third professional film for Warner Bros.,
and Lucas is making a movie of him making a movie.
The idea is you got to really...
You've got to really want to do something
and then nothing can stop you, I believe.
Would you tell us something about your young assistant, George Lucas?
Well, he's not my assistant, actually, he's an associate.
-MAN: Okay. -George won an award to come to
Warner Bros. and observe a film being made there.
So we were making Finian's Rainbow, and I see this skinny kid with a beard
and always looking. I said, "Who's that?"
And he said, "He's observing you."
GEORGE: On Finian's Rainbow,
we were the only two people on the set under 50 years old,
and the only two that had gone to film school.
We had an affinity.
We were young and very much against the establishment.
And so in '69, we went to San Francisco.
Both Francis and I said, "This is where we should be."
Not too many lobbies that have a friendly pool table right here.
That's true. We hope that at 3:00 in the morning,
that will be a comfort and an aid when we're working on a film
in the other room. This is the main...
GEORGE: We bought mixing equipment and editing equipment.
We were building a little studio there.
We would do everything ourselves.
I got to take one of my student films and turn it into a feature.
MAN: One Coppola production was filmed
in a garage at the San Francisco International Airport.
A science fiction story written and directed by George Lucas, who is 25.
Lucas and his wife are editing the film themselves.
Although Warner Bros. agreed to finance and release it,
Lucas retained complete creative control.
In terms of my film, have complete freedom
to say whatever I want to say.
Right, wrong or indifferent. At least I can say it.
MAN ON P.A.: THX is pronounced incurable and shall be held in detention.
With Warner Bros., they didn't come up here and look at what I was doing,
and I don't know whether they even read the script.
We finally showed him the cut, and they were like, "Oh, my God, what is this?"
(ELECTRONIC HUMMING)
MAN ON P.A.: Evacuate. All magna personnel...
GEORGE: The board didn't like it.
And they chopped it up. They ended up cutting out five minutes
and some of it was really good stuff.
There's nothing worse than the frustration
of having somebody who doesn't get what you're doing
trying to turn it into something else.
And as a result of our disagreements
with Warner Bros. over the final cut of THX,
we ended up losing a lot of our projects that we were gonna be doing for them.
The company we had built together, American Zoetrope, went bankrupt.
So Francis went off and did The Godfather.
He told me, he said,
"Enough of this artsy fartsy, science fiction, strange movies.
"I want you to do a comedy.
"Prove to me you can do a comedy."
(ROCK 'N' ROLL MUSIC PLAYING)
The first time that I met George was an audition for a movie that he had
with an indecipherable title, American Graffiti.
I had to look up the word "graffiti,"
because I didn't know what it was, and there were things about George
that I found mystifying as an actor.
He doesn't really do actor speak.
He's a little cryptic.
He talks about an atmosphere, a world.
And I remember it took six auditions over a period of about six months
for all of us to wind up being chosen.
I joked with him about that at one point.
He said, "Yeah, well, it took me that long to pick the cars, too."
I was fascinated when we were shooting American Graffiti
by the freedom he gave the actors, but also by the world creation of it.
And I wouldn't have known to use that term then.
The cars were as important to him.
A lot of it's from my own experience.
At the time, cruising was gone,
and I really felt compelled to sort of document the intimate nature
of man's relationship to machine.
Cruising was a uniquely American mating ritual.
(ROCK 'N' ROLL SONG PLAYING)
(INAUDIBLE CONVERSATION)
What did you say?
Wait. What did you say?
What did you say?
RON: On some kind of subliminal level,
it obviously clicked with audiences.
GEORGE: It was a big moment for me because I really did sit down and told myself,
"Okay, now I am a director.
"Now I know I can be creative in a way that I enjoy."
RON: One day we had been standing around Mel's Diner,
and I said to George, "What do you think you want to do next?"
And he said, "Well, I like science fiction.
"The advances that Kubrick made,
"I want to apply that to Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon
"kinds of movies, like a movie serial.
"Combine that with 2001 special effects,
"but the ships go real fast."
(CHUCKLES)
And that's kind of all he said.
That was about all I had.
I was just searching for a story,
and then I thought "mythology."
(THUNDER CRASHING)
The idea that a society creates heroes that they can admire.
But I could see it as a mechanism, a universal reality.
So I said I want to do one of those, only a modern version of that.
Well, first I had to do a story treatment.
I am not the greatest writer in the world.
I'd taken a proposal to a couple of studios,
and they had turned it down, completely confused by it.
Robots and Wookiees.
They couldn't read it and say, "I understand what this is all about."
Science fiction was not something that did well at the box office.
On top of that, it was aimed at young people
and most of the studios said, "Look, Disney does that.
"The rest of us can't do that."
(YOUNG GEORGE SPEAKING)
I knew I was going to have to sell it.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I hired an illustrator, Ralph McQuarrie, to draw the characters that I had done.
When he showed me those paintings, I said,
"That's exactly what I want.
"I've got 100 ideas here.
"Do this scene. Do this scene, do this scene."
The paintings inspired me to keep writing the script,
(CHUCKLES) and that's how I got through it.
The picture was going to be
a wonderful visual experience as much as being a story.
It was going to be like a roller-coaster ride.
Full of things that would make the audience go, "Wow."
(CHUCKLES) "Oh!"
At the same time, the new Fox Studio executive, Alan Ladd, Jr.
saw American Graffiti and loved it.
(ALAN SPEAKING OVER RECORDING)
GEORGE: I showed him the drawings and he said, "Wow, what's it about?"
I said, "Well, that's kind of a space opera, old-fashioned feel about it,
"and there's a giant dog that flies with the hero,
"and it's very hard to get what this is."
(ALAN SPEAKING OVER RECORDING)
GEORGE: We had a special effects budget on that movie of $2 million,
which now won't even buy you a shot.
(LAUGHS)
In the beginning, Fox was not very... Who were financing the film,
weren't very interested in building a new special effects company
that would just be specifically for making Star Wars.
So setting up ILM, I spent about half a million dollars.
Paying for it myself out of American Graffiti money.
And that's one of those things, if you get one guy
who's really good,
he'll bring all the other people with him.
It was an organism
that grew.
We were thinking of names, and most of the names were really bad.
But I thought, well, we were in a warehouse,
so it was very industrial, and we were using magic and light to create things.
It just popped into my head.
I said, "I'm going to call it Industrial Light and Magic."
ILM.
And I was going off to England, Tunisia to shoot the film.
-(CLAPPERBOARD CLACKS) -GEORGE: Action!
I've got to rest before I fall apart.
My joints are almost frozen.
GEORGE: I was in such bad shape when I was in Tunisia.
Everything went wrong.
The whole set blew down overnight and we had to shoot the next day.
We had nothing, no sets.
It was just one thing after another.
(ALAN SPEAKING)
People ask me, "Well, what's the secret of making movies?"
I said, "Persistence."
That's the only way you can describe it.
And if you give up or you, you know, falter, you can't do it.
You've got to be persistent under impossible conditions.
So I got on the airplane to fly home, first place I went was ILM.
When I came back, we had less than a year left to do the special effects.
They'd spent a million dollars
and they had... I don't know, three shots.
George was very angry.
You know, you could feel it in the room, even if he wasn't necessarily in the room.
I know he was unhappy, but I don't know whether
he was unhappy with me or the situation.
The studio was breathing down his neck.
I don't think he was feeling well.
One day, I needed to go to editorial and grab some piece of film for something,
and you had to go through the screening room to get to editorial.
Ran up full of energy, went flying into the screening room.
George and Dykstra were in a heated argument, yelling,
and I just ran right in the middle of it.
I don't even know what it was about.
(YOUNG GEORGE SPEAKING)
We were buried doing the work of building the equipment
and the miniatures 18 hours a day.
So, that we hadn't succeeded getting it all done
and executing the shots was the least of my worries at that time.
Ended up on my way home, flying from LA to San Francisco,
thinking, "Oh, my God, this isn't going to work.
"This is a mess and you'll never get to work again."
And I was having severe chest pains.
They took me to the hospital because they thought I might be having a heart attack.
They said, "Have you been under a lot of pressure?"
I said, "Yeah." (CHUCKLES) They said, "Well, it's probably that.
"Take some aspirins, call us in the morning."
Because it wasn't a heart attack.
It turned out to be angina or something.
But of course, everybody else was panicked.
What if I died? People don't even know what the movie is.
Yeah, it was in a million little pieces.
Nobody knew what I was really doing.
I was the fourth editor hired.
So a lot of work had already been done in the editing process
by the time I arrived on the scene, and I was deeply impressed with the whole thing.
But almost every cut had to be altered somehow.
I got up my nerve and I said, "Listen, George,
"there's something I really need to tell you.
"I've never worked on anything this big before."
He said, "Don't worry about it. Nobody has."
(CHUCKLES)
LUKE: I have a very bad feeling about this.
-BEN: Turn the ship around. -Yeah, I think you're right.
Full reverse. Chewie, lock in the auxiliary power.
PAUL: I was very frustrated editing without effects.
What did I get myself into?
How am I ever going to get this done?
George, at a certain point, decided that he wanted to get the opinion
of some of his colleagues, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese,
and Steven Spielberg.
I saw Star Wars for the first time in rough cut.
Well, there we are, Mos Eisley Spaceport.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
The film was, uh... To say it was not finished is a kindness.
-(SCREAMS) -(GUNSHOT)
(PRINCESS LEIA SCREAMS)
Get back to the ship!
LUKE: Where are you going? Come back!
STEVEN: He didn't have the effects yet.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
You're my only hope.
There was a great deal of debate about context
because there are only a couple effects shots in there.
Where are we?
Who are we?
Who are they?
Do we need they?
What is this menagerie of imagination,
George, that you've invited us to see and tear apart?
Even I, who worked on the film,
could barely follow the story.
It was much rougher than rough cuts usually are.
STEVEN: Half the film was just literally like
watching a documentary from World War II because that's all George had.
RED LEADER: This is it!
We should be able to see it by now.
Keep your eyes open for those fighters.
Me and Alan Ladd, Jr., the head of Fox,
we were probably the only people in that room that loved the movie
in the condition it was in.
But when R2 and C-3PO escape
and their vehicle purges, and you see it leaving
the docking platform and it goes into space,
that shot alone should have told all of us what that movie was going to be
with ILM's help. But it wasn't there yet in the rough cut.
When I said there were no other
special effects houses, visual effects houses,
there were not in the world, the whole world, there weren't any.
So I didn't have a choice.
I was on the bucking bronco and I had to go.
JOHN: It really became a thing where we simply got on with it.
For him,
it was more a matter of resignation than a decision
that the process was going to work.
RICHARD: Every time we shot a scene using motion control,
with a pan and the tilt and a boom and the track and all those things.
So it was so arduous to do a shot.
And we realized that we had so many thousand elements that we had to shoot.
There wasn't enough hours in a day for me to shoot everything.
And so Ken is shooting the cannons.
Dennis is shooting X-wing shots.
And then I'd ram the camera into the model,
and they'd have to come out and fix it, you know?
(CHUCKLING) I mean, this was not a perfect world, right?
Dealing with all these pieces of film.
It was like photo masochism.
I was actually really frankly worried
about how we were going to keep track of all this.
With a sophisticated prototype,
there's always problems, but for George, it was impenetrable.
GEORGE: We had all this very exotic equipment.
We were doing things that nobody'd ever done before.
John Dykstra was crucial in designing and making it work.
But we were running out of time, running out of money.
I said, "I don't care if you put it on a stick
"and just shoot it going through the dark. Put in a few stars.
"We got to get this thing done."
Several people were sent in to try and make us
more efficient and more structured.
George Mather.
He'd made a real effort to bring some organization.
He did what he could, and we grudgingly agreed to some of it.
But I think Rose really was the one that put it all together.
ROSE: When I arrived for my interview,
it was a pretty...
I don't want to use the word (BLEEP) looking place.
They did not have nice furniture.
It just looked like a dump.
Let's face it. There was a guy sitting next to me,
like, a runner, with his feet up, and I was asking the receptionist,
"How's it working here? Is George Lucas nice?
"Tell me about this film. It's a sci-fi film,"
and she seemed really uptight.
And then Dykstra opens the door and says, "Come on in for the interview."
And this young man gets up and walks in with me.
Well, of course, that young man was George Lucas.
He turned to me and asked two questions.
Do you take shorthand?
And can you start Monday?
I had seen American Graffiti, so I was already sold.
Okay. Whatever this guy wants to do, I'm on board.
And George had just returned from England, so mostly he was up north editing.
He would show up two days a week,
and my job was to follow him around and make notes.
Someone had to accompany him everywhere
and keep track of everything he said to every department.
But most of the time I was following Dykstra around.
(INAUDIBLE)
ROSE: He's just such an engaging, charismatic person.
He'd be so loose. He'd be so funny.
Then when George got there, it was all business,
and I sensed a coolness between them.
There was nobody organizing it.
I don't know how they managed to decide what to shoot when.
We needed to get an adult in the room
to say, "Look, this is what needs to happen."
ROSE: George Mather really brought order that gave George Lucas
tremendous confidence.
Mather and I listed every single element that needed to be done.
It got on the calendar,
and it just started flowing very smoothly.
We had a big book of the storyboards,
and every day I would type up the notes from dailies
and he would cut them out in little strips,
and paste them into this book.
RICHARD: Once the system was complete, I brought George down a few times
to step him through the process, and I said, "Okay, let's start with this shot.
"There's two or three elements in the shot."
Okay, I would shoot the first element,
have that developed in about 10 minutes,
put it on the Moviola,
and I'd say, "You like this move, George, or you want to modify it?"
And he says, "You know, maybe we can have it
"do a little bit more of this or something,"
and I would shoot another one.
He says, "Yeah, I like that now."
It's like, "Okay, let's do the next model, and then put the two together."
George now could see the two elements that I just shot.
So I did that a few times for him.
We schooled him, in a sense.
JOHN: He saw the work we were doing could be successful
because the product was significantly more interesting,
and more evocative than it would have been
if we'd settled for the cheap and cheerful approach.
DENNIS: But there were a lot of the shots that could have been done
with older processes, old techniques.
But what John had come up with was an elegance.
Once you bought into that thing,
you had a system that could do any type of shot you wanted.
For all of us, it was an education,
both in managing to pull the technology together
as well as to understand George's vision.
(INAUDIBLE)
RICHARD: For each shot, storyboards would give us the gist of the idea,
and then I would interpret the storyboard to figure out what to shoot first.
Something that really made me quake in my shoes was the opening shot.
Because if the opening shot didn't grab the audience and convince them
that they gotta watch this movie, we were in trouble.
JOHN: The best effect is one that has subliminal cues like scale
and focus to make this stuff indistinguishable from reality.
RICHARD: And George would come down and he would say,
"I want the Star Destroyer to look enormous.
"We can build this model on the wall and have ladders
"and, you know, other things that give scale,"
and I would say, "George, we already have a Star Destroyer
"that's this long."
"I want to do a test.
"Put your best guys on detailing the bottom of this thing
"and really making it tricked out,
"and then make me a Rebel blockade runner
"that's about the size of a cigarette, and I'll put that on a wire
"sticking out of the front of the ship,
"and we can try to create a bigger scale."
It was very important to be able to get the camera very close to the models,
and the camera is going to be hanging from the boom.
So I flip a Star Destroyer and got it level,
so the lens was basically 1/32 of an inch off the model
and it was actually scraping it at a couple points.
Basically, I shot it upside down.
And the next day at dailies, everybody's aghast.
It's like...
(DRAMATIC SCORE MUSIC PLAYING)
JOHN: The feeling that you got in that opening shot
when the Star Destroyer comes overhead
was precisely what George wanted.
And here's one of the keys that makes it work.
The entire ship is in focus, from the closest thing to the camera
to the furthest thing from the camera.
It's a really critical component to establishing scale.
And the model had little doors and windows.
Human scale things that tell you how big it is, right?
So it's those kind of subliminal clues and an understanding of how to use them
that makes it artistry, as opposed to simple mechanics.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)
I mean, it's a mystery.
It's like magic, really.
We're creating magic through this very lugubrious process.
(FUNKY MUSIC PLAYING)
Such a creative group spirit emerged.
Collaborative problem solving, on every crew in every department.
We knew we had to help each other. We had to be supportive of each other
in order to get the work done.
HARRISON: It's about making the movie,
telling the story, and don't let your ego get in the way.
RICHARD: A lot of problems got solved at the coffee machine.
People would walk up, they got some problem and they talk to you,
"Can you help me with it?"
We were a family.
ROSE: I just really liked that George would
stay late and help me on mundane tasks.
Would be 9:00 at night, and we'd be stamping storyboards.
JOE: Some of the times that he was happiest
is when he would go into the model shop and glue parts on a spaceship.
He really loved to do that.
DENNIS: We were behind, so it just took a long time to do that many shots.
He was great at compromising, you know.
"We can reuse this shot over here.
"We can flip this shot backwards
"and it'll look like it's going the other direction."
We started making quantum leaps.
Things accelerated.
ROSE: I mean, there were some rough spots.
To work in visual effects, you have to be crazy.
You have to be a little bit nuts.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
JOE: But since we didn't know what it was going to become,
there was nothing sacred and just build it and get it in front of the camera.
LORNE: It was fun all the time.
When it was grueling, it was fun.
JOE: The star field was hollow on the inside.
You could get in there and sleep comfortably.
One day somebody said, "Hey, don't leave the pillow against the light.
"These things get hot."
It was madness. It was madness.
ROSE: We had a lot of parties, and I'd mix punches and throw dry ice in it,
and they'd gurgle and bubble till I learned that that was poison,
that you really can't put dry ice in. (LAUGHING)
Oops!
As George used to say, "Give them enough pizza and beer,
"they'll do anything."
(LAUGHS)
It was like a fraternity house.
ROSE: The studio called us the Country Club.
Yes, we were in the hot tub, and yes, we waterslided,
and yes, we were immature.
But nobody worked harder, nobody stayed later.
We were breaking new ground.
It really was a lot of fun until it got toward the end.
You know, the crunch was on.
KEN: We were beating ourselves up to get the movie done in time.
The premiere is coming up, people are freaking out.
Sound department wants your work now,
because they have to put their sound in, oh, my God.
Joe was redesigning the storyboards and giving us different shots.
We were shooting like crazy and falling over each other.
Ken!
Just trying to get the work done.
Getting the models and lighting and shooting those as fast as we could.
It was a mission of faith.
Because nobody knew whether we were going to make it or not.
Everybody was very hopeful.
But I was under an enormous amount of pressure.
The crew was under an enormous amount of pressure.
When we were walking through the stages,
he was kind of frustrated, like things were not
coming together the way he would like.
He was disappointed in some of the shots.
Not everybody's work was given approval.
You know, he was,
I wouldn't say hypercritical, but... It's his movie.
It's... He's going to take the blame.
I'm a perfectionist.
And if it's not right, I get really upset inside.
Sometimes outside, but mostly inside.
-MAN: Okay. -(SIGHS) Okay.
(CLEARS THROAT)
PAUL: You know, my impression of George was that
he was the combination of extremely imaginative
and extremely practical.
And usually you find people who are one or the other, but not both.
GEORGE: I've learned to live with the fact
that everything can't be the way you want it to be.
You have to sort of do the best you can and move forward.
PAUL: George had always been unhappy with the creatures
that they had given him for the cantina sequence.
So, reshoots were planned.
GEORGE: We had shot the cantina scene in England
and I wanted it to be crowded with aliens.
They gave me some, but it wasn't enough.
I think it was a budgetary problem. There just wasn't that much money,
so it looked to me like what they had done in England
was go to a costume department,
got a bunch of Beatrix Potter-type things.
GEORGE: We shot everything we could, but then I said,
"Well, I'll just pick them up when I get home."
George hired me and Jon Berg
and a couple of out-of-work stop-motion animators,
and his direction was,
"Make me as many space aliens as you can in six weeks."
GEORGE: They drew drawings and I picked another 12 monsters.
PHIL: Ron Cobb did some designs,
and we would sculpt and fabricate his designs.
And then went over to a little stage on La Brea Avenue.
And George put us in our own masks.
And costume department would dress us up and that's kind of how that was done.
(ALIENS SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY)
GEORGE: Phil Tippett and Jon Berg, I liked them.
They were a good team.
We became friends.
(ALIENS PLAYING JAZZ)
George would come in once a week to check out our progress,
and one time he was looking around and he saw on the shelf
a stop-motion character that I had made when I was like, 20.
He said, "Oh, so you guys do stop-motion animation, huh?"
He showed us the chess set, and the assembly
that he had without any characters in it.
MAN: 330. Take two.
PHIL: George was initially going to have the chess set
just be people in masks shot against blue screen...
(DRAMATIC SCORE MUSIC PLAYING)
...but Future World had just come out,
and there was a scene there with actors on a chessboard.
My knight to your pawn.
George felt kind of scooped in a way.
You know, it was like his thing would not be original.
And so if he did it stop motion, it would have its own thing.
So he said to me and Jon Berg,
"Can you make 10 stop-motion aliens in two weeks?"
I said, "That's why we're here."
GEORGE: The one advantage we have at ILM is we got guys,
you know, off the street, which meant they could do anything.
PHIL: Right at the end of the schedule, right at the end of the schedule.
And so when Jon Berg and I went in to make a deal with George for it,
Dykstra had this big round table, and George sat at one end
and Dykstra had a replica old Western .44.
And while we were negotiating talking about our rates,
he would just like, spin the chamber.
He had no idea that he was doing it,
but we were sitting there going like, "Uh, is that too much?
(LAUGHS)
"We'll do it for free."
We had a cardboard box with all these little characters in it.
Took them to the set and asked George what he wanted,
and he goes like, "I don't know.
"How about this little yellow guy jumps out and the green guy picks him up
"and throws him down, and everybody else is watching."
And we're like, "Okay. You got it." (CHUCKLES)
We would shoot in the evenings, I think over three nights.
And it's just kids playing with toys, you know.
GEORGE: That was the only stop-motion work we had.
We were all happy with the results.
Now be careful, R2.
(R2-D2 MUMBLING)
(CHITTERING)
(GROWLS)
He made a fair move. Screaming about it can't help you.
Let him have it. It's not wise to upset a Wookiee.
(GRUNTS)
JOE: George was very generous with giving creative freedom to people,
and he would be very patient. If you had a question,
it didn't make sense to you, he would explain, you know,
why this is what I want to do.
When he came by, I got as much of his time as I could.
I remember him sitting at the drawing table
and drawing the sequence at the end of the film,
the attack on the Death Star.
George is not an artist.
He can put lines on paper, but he's not an artist.
And I was really amazed at his ability to convey the idea
in very crude visuals of what this attack was gonna look like.
The end battle was of particular importance to George
because the studio was threatening to eliminate it.
They had concerns about cost overruns,
and they thought, "Hey, they get to the Death Star,
"they rescue the princess. That's it. Story's over."
But George was determined to have this end battle.
GEORGE: Movies are kinetic.
It's about movement.
Forget the actors. Forget the story. It's all about movement.
The chase. The chases were the beginning form of cinema.
Chase, like anything else in a movie, it has to be built.
You got a beginning, a middle and an end,
and you have several incidents in there.
JOHN: At the end of the film, the idea was to create
a realistic-looking space dogfight.
They were attacking an invulnerable fortress,
the Death Star, and Luke's prowess as a pilot
allows them to succeed in destroying this behemoth.
The reason the Death Star had trenches in it
is because it was the only way we could achieve a sense of speed.
We had ridden motorcycles down gullies out in the desert and noticed
that when you were in the gullies, you're traveling by things.
They seemed really fast.
YOUNG JOHN: George wanted a city look,
like flying down the center of Manhattan high speed in some kind of a ship.
But the scale would be much larger.
Something that's supposed to look like you've traveled 40 miles
is going to have to be a mile a foot.
That's no mean feat.
That meant an incredible amount of detail on each surface piece.
LORNE: The Death Star surface,
it was the very first project I was hired to do for two months.
And it didn't take me very long to realize
why all the other model makers didn't want to do it.
They got burnt out.
You basically spent the day on your knees with big foam pads
and crawled around on the surface that was about 15 feet by 40 feet.
JOE: We built six molds for this gigantic Death Star surface.
We had to be able to cut them up and move them,
put them in different positions.
So you wouldn't recognize that it was a lot of repetition.
YOUNG JOHN: It's pretty astronomical, the number of combinations
that we had available to us.
JOE: At the end of the model,
we had to show that it goes on and on and on.
So we photographed a section of the Death Star trench
and glued it to a piece of Masonite.
I painted the detail on it.
LORNE: Just to make it seem more alive,
thousands of these little windows
had to be put everywhere with retro reflective tape
made out of glass beads that reflect back the light.
But there were tens of thousands.
That was my job to do that,
(MIMICS RAPID MOVEMENT) you know?
There was a moment when Marcia Lucas, George Lucas's wife at the time,
came down and looked at the Death Star.
She got the camera, looked at it, we lit it up,
and she said, "Hmm, the windows have to be a smaller scale."
(LAUGHS)
It's like, oh, my God, they had to be half as big.
DODONNA: The approach will not be easy.
You're required to maneuver straight down this trench,
and skim the surface to this point.
The target area is only two meters wide.
It's a small thermal exhaust port right below the main port.
KEN: When it came time to shoot the trench,
George is talking us through and there he goes.
It looks like he's not seeing anything
'cause he's so in his head, but you can see in his eyes
what he already sees as the finished product.
We're right in there.
We're loving this story and he's got us all excited about it.
"That's the scene. Go do it, guys," and off we go.
Look at the size of that thing.
This is it.
(ELECTRONIC BEEPS)
It's away!
JOHN: We figured out that we had to be traveling 20 miles an hour
as we went by the Death Star model.
We put it flat in the parking lot, and the only way we could get the camera
to a high enough speed would be with a motorized vehicle.
(ENGINE STARTS)
Guerilla filmmaking, put the camera in the back of the truck.
Richard climbed up there,
we drove by the model and set off the charges.
RED NINE: It's a hit! RED LEADER: Negative.
It didn't go in.
(OVER RADIO) Just impacted on the surface.
There weren't any rules.
It was like whatever worked, we'll make it somehow function
and we'll come out with this great thing.
R2, that stabilizer's broken loose again.
See if you can't lock it down.
An impossible schedule, an impossible budget,
trying to do things that have never been done before.
We were the Rebel Alliance.
(CHEERING)
Look out!
You're all clear, kid. Now, let's blow this thing and go home.
(LASERS FIRING)
(INHALES)
Everybody came through in the end.
(LAUGHTER)
-Hey! -Hey!
I knew you'd come back.
Finished the movie. Yay!
I couldn't believe it, really.
And on the last night, ILM was having its wrap party.
So everybody around us was whooping it up.
And a bunch of the guys who were smarter than me
took out 20th Century stock.
We didn't know what we were working on.
I mean, it was really just a job, five or six days a week.
We didn't really know until the movie came out.
GEORGE: And we were mixing,
we were mixing up until the day it was released.
And when we finished, we went to Hamburger Hamlet
on Hollywood Boulevard, right across from Grauman's Chinese Theater.
And they say, "Boy, something's going on out there.
"It must be a premiere or something."
And it wasn't until we walked outside that we could see that it was Star Wars.
It was like a mob. They closed the street off.
(STAR WARS THEME MUSIC PLAYING)
This is it, boys.
Seeing the final assembled product, on a giant screen with the sound,
I went, "Wow."
You see the joy that the people who worked on it had in doing it.
We were little over the top with some stuff,
and we got to get away with it because it was a first.
We were invited to the premiere and everybody was like... (FLAPS LIPS)
You know.
My parents loved it.
The lighthearted touch was so appealing.
They were lucky to have us for the visual effects group
because I don't think there was anybody else in the business
that could have done what we did.
(AUDIENCE CHEERING)
Thank you.
All those guys, every one of them, did yeoman work.
Everybody pitched in.
Everybody helped each other, and I appreciated it.
But at the same time, Star Wars was under duress for the whole production.
Scheduling, money, sets.
I wanted to get it my way,
and I didn't have the time or the money to do it.
He always said things like, "If I could wave my magic wand,
"I would put electrodes in my head and have the movie made right there."
RON: He used to say that he only got about 25%
of what he had in his mind on screen with Star Wars,
which, you know, of course, was shocking as hell to me
because it looked like 100% to me, but not George.
He could see through the magic.
GEORGE: I can see all the scotch tape
and the rubber bands that are holding it together.
But that's how movies get made.
They don't get made right,
they get made the best possible way under the circumstances.
I thought, "I'm sure we can figure out a better way to do this."
Maybe I better figure out what it is.