Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy
2004 (TV)
Mark Hamill: (Archive footage; reading a line) Fear is their greatest defense. I doubt if the actual security there is much greater than on Appalyer-Sullust and what there is is most likely directed towards a large scale assault. Mark Hamill: (the present) And I read that line and I thought, "Who talks like that?"
Narrator: Just one day into filming, the Sahara was pelted with it's first major rainfall in 50 years. Robert Watts: We were going out there to shoot. I came out in the morning and the rain was going horizontally down the street this way. I thought, "My God!" I just called a rest day on the crew and told them to go back to bed because there was no way we were going to shoot on that.
Peter Mayhew: (as Chewbacca) That old man's mad. Harrison Ford: You said it, Chewie. Boy, where'd you dig up that old fossil?
Harrison Ford: I think George likes people, I think George is a warm-hearted person, but... He's a little impatient with the process of acting, of finding something. He thinks that something's there. "It's right there, I wrote it down. Do that". You know. Sometimes you can't just *do that* and make it work.
Carrie Fisher: I had one outfit for the first movie and as George taught me, there is no underwear in space. Instead of that, there's gaffer tape. So I was taped down. And I used to say we should just make up a contest on the call sheet to see who's going to rip it off. But we didn't do that.
Bill Moyers: Timing is everything in art. You bring out Star Wars too early and it's Buck Rogers. You bring it out too late and it doesn't fit our imaginations. You bring it out just as the war in Vietnam is ending and America feels uncertain of itself, and the old stories have died, and you bring it out at that time and suddenly, it's a new game. Plus it's alot of fun. It's a lot of fun to watch Star Wars.
Gareth Wigan: George was enormously farsighted. The studio wasn't. They didn't know that the world was changing. George did know the world was changing. I mean, he changed it.
Carrie Fisher: You're not really famous until you're a Pez dispenser.
Harrison Ford: (on the success of Star Wars) I was like this - (rubs his palms together) Great. Terrific. Now I can go to work. I have an opportunity to take advantage of the success of this film and go to work.
Frank Oz: (about Stuart Freeborn) He was under the gun and it was very tense. Very tense. He had to get this thing done. We've got to start shooting with Yoda. And so while we were talking to him, I just had Yoda's head and I was just playing with it then I dropped it and it cracked. Then Stuart said, "I need a drink". So it was terrible, because here we're pressing so much and I'm the one that screwed it up.
George Lucas: (about Yoda) That was like a real leap. Because if that puppet had not worked, the whole film would have been down the tubes. It would've been a disaster. A silly little Muppet... It would've been Kermit running around in that movie. The whole movie would've collapsed under the weight of it.
Anthony Daniels: I was there for a while and then I thought, well nearly time to go. And then, kind of over George's shoulder, I saw a painting. And the most extraordinary thing happened. It just struck me because I kind of looked at this face, and the face looked back at me. We had the most extraordinary eye contact you know, he's looking right out of the picture. And he seemed to be saying, "Come. Come. Be with me", and the vulnerability in his face made me want to help him. Isn't that weird? He just looks utterly vulnerable. That painting completely changed my attitude to the whole project. Years later, I was able to go to Ralph McQuarrie and say, "You realize this is all your fault?".
Harrison Ford: It's what the idea was of the character relationships. Mark was the callow youth and I was the smart ass and we each had a clear section of turf to explore.
Harrison Ford: There's a princess with weird buns in her hair, a giant in a monkey suit or something, it was weird. It was very, very weird.
Mark Hamill: That to him was really inappropriate humor at the time, because I'm sure he's in the zone and he's seeing what he wants to do, and we're just, like, actors trying to stave off boredom because, you know, we've been in the trash compactor all morning.
Carrie Fisher: (about the scene of Luke and Leia swinging across the chasm via rope) That was really early on in the shoot when I was still worried about my weight, and I thought that we were going to miss and I'd hit the wall and they would say, "Nah, still too tubby. Let's bring in Jodie Foster".
Mark Hamill: The things that stick in my mind and make me laugh were, like, memos worried about whether or not the Wookie should have pants. They're looking at this thing and saying, "Couldn't he have some lederhosen?" This is great. Of all the things to worry about, the Wookie has no pants.
David Prowse: (as Darth Vader) Start tearing this ship apart piece by piece until you've found those tapes. Find the passengers in this vessel. I want them alive! Ken Ralston: I can still hear David Prowse's accent in the Darth Vader mask, muffled, because he would do the real dialogue, trying to curse Carrie Fisher or something. It was hilarious and terrifying at the same time, because we didn't know what Darth sounded like. That was the first time we heard him. We're like, "Is that it? Is he gonna be some Scottish guy? What is this?"
Carrie Fisher: We signed away our likeness so when I look in the mirror, I have to pay George a couple of bucks.
Mark Hamill: I lit up when I found out that they were going to make my face a mask on a box of cereal. With little dots where to cut my eyes out. The idea of me being on bubble gum cards, I thought you had to have athletic ability to be a bubble gum card so, I enjoyed the merchandising aspect of it.
James Earl Jones: George had hired David Prowse, but he said he wanted a so-called "darker" voice. Not in terms of ethnic but in terms of timbre. And the rumor is that he thought of Orson Welles. But he probably thought that Orson might be too recognizable, so what he ends up doing is picking a voice that was born in Mississippi, raised in Michigan, and was a stutterer. And that happened to be my voice.