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The best way to celebrate Star Wars
Day is to learn something new about a galaxy far, far away. So here are 50
fascinating facts about Hollywood's most iconic space epic.
1. LUKE SKYWALKER IS THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES.
Though equally inspired
by fairy tales, westerns, and 1930s sci-fi serials, George Lucas based the
framework of the story for the original Star Wars(1977)
around the theories of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero
with a Thousand Faces.
The book tracked common mythological
motifs and argued that myths from around the world that have been passed down
through generations—like Beowulf or King Arthur—share a basic structure. According to
Campbell, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a
region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a
decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure
with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” Lucas simply grafted these
ideas onto his story, with Luke as the main hero.
2. LUCAS ALSO RELIED ON AKIRA KUROSAWA FOR THE STORY’S
P.O.V.
Lucas struggled with just
how to tell this massive sci-fi space opera on a personal and relatable scale,
and he found the answer in director Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress.
Telling the story of a roguish general protecting a beautiful princess from an
evil clan behind enemy lines, “the one thing I was really intrigued by was the
fact that the story was told from the two lowest characters,” Lucas explained in
an interview for The Criterion Collection’s release of the Kurosawa classic. “I
decided that would be a nice way to tell the Star Wars story.
Take the two lowliest characters, as Kurosawa did, and tell the story from
their point of view. Which, in the Star Wars case
is the two droids, and that was the strongest influence. The fact that there
was a princess trying to get through enemy lines was more of a coincidence than
anything else."
Perhaps not
coincidentally, the word “Jedi” is allegedly derived from
the Japanese word Jidaigeki meaning
“period dramas,” or the types of films Japanese directors like Kurosawa
would typically make (the kind of movies that clearly influenced Lucas).
3. LUCAS’S INITIAL DRAFT OF THE SCRIPT WAS TOO LONG.
In 1973, Lucas submitted
a 13-page treatment of his story, originally titled “The Star Wars,” to
Universal Studios and United Artists following the success of his movie American Graffiti (which was nominated for five Oscars,
including Best Picture and a Best Director nod for Lucas) the same year. Both
studios passed, saying the far-flung sci-fi extravaganza was too confusing.
The treatment was
eventually picked up by
20th Century Fox head Alan Ladd Jr., who gave Lucas a preliminary
deal in 1974 to eventually make the movie. But the “final” screenplay Lucas
turned in was more than 200 pages long (the averagelength of a screenplay is between
95 and 125 pages), so Lucas excised the final two acts and presented the first
act of the screenplay as the finished story. The script was made into Star Wars, and the final two acts of the initial giant
screenplay were eventually expanded and fleshed out into what would
become The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
4. LUCAS USED VISUAL AIDS TO SELL THE MOVIE.
To get 20th Century Fox to approve
the then-massive budget of almost $10 million (though the final budget
eventually came in at around $11 million), Lucas pitched Star Wars with a series of 21 drawings he commissioned from
illustrator Ralph McQuarrie. These included scenes of C-3PO and R2-D2
crash-landing on Tatooine, Vader confronting Luke (then with the surname of
“Starkiller”) with his lightsaber, the Mos Eisley cantina, the Millennium
Falcon in Docking Bay 94, the attack on the Death Star trench, and a view of a
floating city that would eventually become Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back.
5. LUCAS INITIALLY PLANNED ON MAKING EXTREME CASTING
CHOICES.
Lucas toyed with the idea
of many different casting variations at points during pre-production. He
flirted with the idea of casting only African-American actors, then possibly
using only Japanese actors (such as Akira Kurosawa favorite Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan
Kenobi), and then possibly using only little people. Of the latter, Lucas said, “I think that idea
was a little influenced by The Lord of the Rings .”
6. HARRISON FORD WAS CAST AS HAN SOLO BY ACCIDENT.
Lucas shared the
seven-month-long casting sessions for Star Wars with
his friend and fellow director Brian De Palma, who was casting for Carrie at the same time. Lucas was looking for unknown
faces that he had never worked with before, and initially brought in Harrison
Ford—who had appeared as the antagonist street racer Bob Falfa in Lucas’s American Graffiti—to feed lines to the auditioning actors.
Lucas saw dozens of
actors—including a young Kurt
Russell—for the part of Han, but liked Ford’s delivery feeding lines
to the other actors so much that he caved and cast him in the part.
7. SOUND DESIGNER BEN BURTT CREATED A WHOLE NEW WORLD OF
SOUNDS.
Now-legendary sound
designer Ben Burtt got his
start on Star Wars fresh out of USC
film school. He was tasked with coming up with a completely new and organic
soundscape for the movie, which was at odds with the trend of creating
intentionally electronic and “futuristic” sounds for sci-fi movies at the time.
The first sound
effect he created was Chewbacca’s voice, which is a blend of
bear, lion, walrus, and badger vocalizations. R2-D2’s “voice” was made using
loops on a synthesizer matched with beeps and boops modeled after baby coos
performed by Burtt himself. Darth Vader’s infamous breathing was recorded by
putting a microphone inside a regulator on a scuba tank. The Tusken Raider yowl
is a mixture of mule sounds and people imitating mule sounds. The lightsaber
whoosh was made by blending the hum of an idle 35mm film projector and passing
a slightly broken microphone cable by the tubes of an old television set.
8. THE NAME “DARTH VADER” WASN’T ANYTHING SPECIAL TO
LUCAS.
“That’s just another one of those
things that came out of thin air. It sort of appeared in my head one day,”
Lucas said in J.W. Rinzler’s The Making
of Star Wars. He later told Rolling Stone: "'Darth' is a variation of dark.
And 'Vader' is a variation of father. So it's basically Dark Father.”
9. ORSON WELLES WAS ALMOST DARTH VADER.
George Lucas originally
wanted Orson Welles as the voice of Darth Vader, but dropped the idea when he
thought Welles’s famous baritone would be too recognizable.
10. JAMES EARL JONES PUT IN LESS THAN A DAY’S WORK.
Lucas chose Jones as the
voice of Darth Vader because of the actor’s unmistakable baritone. He was given
only $7500 for his services, and completed all of his lines in two and a half
hours. “Vader is a man who never learned the beauties and subtleties of human
expression,” Jones said. “So we figured out the key to my work was to keep it
on a very narrow band of expression—that was the secret.”
11. THE MOVIE’S ICONIC OPENING CRAWL WAS CREATED WITH
PRACTICAL EFFECTS.
The opening crawl for the original
movie (which was cribbed from
the Flash Gordon serials that also
inspired the film) was done practically, by carefully placing 2-foot-wide die
cut yellow letters over a 6-foot-long black paper background with a camera
making a slow pass over them to mimic the crawl. In total, it took three hours
to shoot.
12. LUKE AND LEIA’S SWING ACROSS THE DEATH STAR CHASM WAS
FOR REAL … KIND OF.
The relatively small
production of Star Wars at
England’s Elstree Studios meant that corners had to be cut wherever possible,
even for the main actors. When it came time for Luke and Leia to perform the
iconic swing over the Death Star chasm, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher had
to do it themselves because the production couldn’t afford stunt doubles.
The actors, who were
secured with safety harnesses, swung across the platform 30 feet above the
studio floor in one take, which is what you see in the final movie (though the
drop was lengthened to seem bottomless in post-production using a matte
painting).
13. THE ORIGINAL MILLENNIUM FALCON LOOKED COMPLETELY
DIFFERENT.
The original concept
model of the Millennium Falcon was long and cylindrical—very
unlike the flat design we know now. The model makers complained the design was
too similar to the spacecraft from
the 1970s British TV series Space: 1999, so Lucas
told them to create something completely different that looked like a flying
hamburger and sailed like a sunfish.
A variation of the Falcon
prototype did, however, end up in the movie. It’s the Rebel Blockade Runner seen
fleeing the Imperial Star Destroyer in the opening scene.
14. LUCAS USED REAL-LIFE WAR FOOTAGE FOR THE SPACE
BATTLES.
Industrial Light and
Magic is now one of the preeminent special effects companies in the world, but
back in the late 1970s it was just a group of artists in an empty warehouse in
Van Nuys, California. The company, which invented technology like special
computer-controlled camera rigs in order to create the special effects
for Star Wars, was tasked with completing a
year’s worth of work in just six months.
To give them ideas for
the type of high-intensity and cutting-edge sequences he wanted, Lucas used old
newsreels to cut together footage of World War II dogfights. ILM eventually
matched many of the sequences frame by frame—including the space battle in the
Millennium Falcon between Han, Luke, and the TIE fighters—directly to the
footage Lucas provided.
15. THEATERS DIDN’T WANT TO SHOW THE MOVIE.
Less than 40 theaters
agreed to book showings of Star Wars after
its release date was moved up to before Memorial Day (the studio thought it
would bomb in a crowded summer movie slate).
Around the same time,
20th Century Fox was going to release an eagerly anticipated adaptation of a
bestselling book called The Other Side of Midnight,
which theaters were eager to show. Fox then stipulated that any theater
showing The Other Side of Midnight must
also show Star Wars, which inflated the
number of screens for the movie. Needless to say, Star Wars eventually became the highest-grossing movie ever made up
to that time, while The Other Side of Midnight didn’t
even break the $25 million mark. And as requiring movie theaters to show one
movie in exchange for another movie was actually illegal, 20th Century Fox
ended up being fined $25,000—for
forcing theaters to show The Other Side of Midnight.
16. LUCAS INITIALLY FUNDED THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK HIMSELF.
Due to the overwhelming
success of Star Wars, and the studio trying
to undermine him at nearly every turn, Lucas decided to put up the money to
make The Empire Strikes Back out of his
own pocket, which was unheard of in blockbuster filmmaking. The unprecedented
move would give Lucas complete creative control, while still having a major
movie studio distribute the movie for its theatrical release.
This maneuver wasn’t
without its drawbacks, however. When the budget for The Empire Strikes Back ballooned to $10 million over
their original estimate, the entertainment branch of Bank of America that put
up a loan to help Lucas cover the movie’s costs pulled out, despite the fact
that this was the (relatively) financially secure sequel to the
then-highest-grossing movie ever made. Lucas then had to approach 20th Century
Fox to help, which forced him to give up certain rights on the movie. Lucas was
so unhappy with Fox’s approach to the new deal that he brought a new project he
was working on to rival movie studio Paramount. That new project was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
17. LUCAS RETURNED TO KUROSAWA FOR SOME INSPIRATION FOR
HIS NEWEST CHARACTER.
In J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of the Empire Strikes Back, co-screenwriter
Lawrence Kasdan explained Yoda’s archetypal but specific origins: “Yoda is the
lead samurai from Seven
Samurai ... Seven
Samurai is for me the greatest film ever made and enormously
influential for George. If you see Seven
Samurai, you see Yoda is Shimada, the lead samurai. He’s the mentor
figure who gets the whole picture.”
18. A NEW DIRECTOR WAS BROUGHT ON FOR THE SEQUEL.
Though Lucas decided to
back out of directing The Empire Strikes Back,
he remained a very hands-on producer, guiding the movie throughout production.
He offered the directing job to one of his old USC professors, Irvin Kershner, even
though he had never helmed such a big-budget effort before.
Kershner initially turned
down the offer because he thought anything trying to one-up Star Wars would be doomed to fail. Lucas then met with
Kershner to explain that The Empire Strikes Back wouldn’t
try to surpass the first movie, but would simply build on its mythology.
Lucas’s assurance—and the fact that Kershner’s agent reminded him the job would
be highly lucrative—convinced the professor to say yes.
19. HOTH IS NORWAY.
Instead of the desert
planet of Tatooine (which was shot on location in Tunisia in the first
movie), The Empire Strikes Back kicks off
on the ice planet of Hoth, which was shot partially on location at the
Hardangerjøkulen glacier in Norway.
During production
on The Empire Strikes Back, the worst
storm in 50 years hit the region, leading to long delays in shooting. The
minus-20-degree weather was so bad that at times the crew wasn’t even able to
leave their hotel for fear of whiteouts or worse. So instead of delaying the
shoot even further, Kershner and crew set up insert shots from the entrance of
their hotel. Luke fleeing the Wampa cave in the final film is one of these
shots.
20. VADER INITIALLY HAD SOME MEDIEVAL DIGS.
McQuarrie created a
series of thumbnail drawings depicting Darth Vader’s castle—some in an ice
planet location and others in the middle of a lava planet—but the idea was
scrapped for The Empire Strikes
Back. But Vader’s castle ended up in Rogue One, the ice planet concept became Hoth, and the lava
planet idea eventually became Mustafar in Revenge of the Sith.
21. YODA ORIGINALLY HAD A FIRST NAME.
In early drafts of
the screenplay Yoda was actually named “Buffy,” which was
completely changed in subsequent drafts to the full name “Minch Yoda,” and then
shortened to just Yoda.
The eventual Yoda puppet
was created by designer Stuart Freeborn in one week with help from The Muppets creator Jim Henson. Henson then
recommended Frank Oz as Yoda’s main puppeteer (Henson knew Oz’s talent since he
was the main puppeteer behind
Miss Piggy, Bert, Grover, Cookie Monster, Animal, Sam the Eagle, and Fozzie
Bear). Freeborn would go on to model Yoda’s
face after his own, and modeled his eyes
after Albert Einstein to give the little green Jedi some
wisdom.
After the release
of The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas lobbied for Oz
to get an Oscar nomination for his performance, but he was
ultimately disqualified for consideration when it was ruled that puppeteers
aren’t actors.
22. STANLEY KUBRICK CAUSED MORE DELAYS IN SHOOTING.
Sets were built for The Empire Strikes Back at Elstree Studios, where
Kubrick was shooting The Shining at
the same time. A massive fire broke out there in February 1979, burning down an
entire soundstage. So Kubrick took over some of Empire’s studio space, and Kubrick—an infamous
perfectionist—waited and waited, causing even more delays to Empire’s shooting schedule.
23. THE SPECIAL EFFECTS ANIMATORS HAD TO GET CRAFTY.
Many of the shots of the
Imperial AT-ATs on Hoth (which were inspired by the alien Tripods in H.G.
Wells’s The War of the Worlds) were all done
in-camera without bluescreen composites. Highly detailed snowy landscapes were
drawn for the backgrounds, while stop-motion animation was used for the walkers
in the foreground. The snow in these shots is a mixture of flour and
micro-balloon epoxy filler.
When they needed
asteroids in the background during the Millennium Falcon’s escape through an
asteroid belt, they simply spray-painted potatoes and
filmed them in front of a bluescreen to composite later. And that space worm
that nearly eats the Falcon? It was just a hand puppet shot at high speeds to give
it scale.
24. ALEC GUINNESS DIDN’T WANT TO BE IN THE MOVIE.
Sir Alec had a testy
history with his legacy when it came to Star Wars. He described the
first film as “fairy-tale rubbish,” and wanted nothing to do
with The Empire Strikes Back.
Lucas and the filmmakers
eventually persuaded the actor to appear as the ghostly version of Obi-Wan with
Yoda on Dagobah, but Guinness would only do it under very strict conditions:
He would work only one day but would start at 8:30 a.m. and be done by 1 p.m.,
and would have to be paid one-fourth of a percent of the movie’s total gross.
That 4.5 hours worth of work netted Guinness millions of dollars.
25. HAN SOLO’S BEST LINE WAS AN AD LIB.
In the fateful exchange
between Princess Leia and Han Solo before he’s frozen in carbonite, Leia says,
“I love you,” and Solo quips, “I know.” But the exchange wasn’t written that
way. The script had Solo just responding, “I love you, too,” before potentially
never seeing his true love again. But both Kershner and Ford agreed the line
was all wrong for a charming rogue like Han Solo.
In a few final takes
before breaking for lunch, Kershner switched things up, forcing Ford to think
on his feet by spontaneously calling “action.” Carrie Fisher delivered her “I
love you” line, while Ford naturally responded, “I know,” improvising what is
one of his character’s most iconic moments.
Another notable feat for
Han is that, not counting the prequels, he is the only non-Force-user to wield
a lightsaber, when he uses Luke’s sword to open up the dead Tauntaun for warmth
while the pair is stranded on Hoth.
26. VADER’S BIG REVEAL WAS KEPT UNDER WRAPS FROM NEARLY
EVERYONE.
In early drafts of the
screenplay, writer Leigh Brackett actually had Luke’s
father appear to him as a ghost as a separate character from
Vader, which was scrapped in subsequent drafts written by Lucas and
screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan.
The only people who knew
that Darth Vader was Luke’s father before the scene was actually shot were
Lucas, Kershner, and producer Gary Kurtz. Mark Hamill was told only moments
before the first take. To keep the moment a secret for as long as possible, a
false page was inserted into all scripts with Vader’s dialogue stating that
Obi-Wan killed Luke’s father. David Prowse, the actor in the Vader costume,
even delivered the “Obi-Wan killed your father” dialogue during takes while
Hamill played the scene with full knowledge of the true lines. The lines were
then added later when actor James Earl Jones recorded his dialogue for Vader.
Dutch and German speakers
should have known Darth Vader was Luke’s father from the get-go, as the Dutch
and German words for father are vader and Vater, respectively.
27. THERE WAS AN OPENING CREDITS CONTROVERSY.
To keep the iconic Star Wars logo with the opening crawl, Lucas and the
filmmakers wanted to once again put the full credits at the end of the movie
(which in the late 1970s and early ‘80s was an unusual practice), which caused
the Writers and Directors Guilds to try to pull the movie from theaters because
of credit rules.
On Star Wars, writer-director Lucas’s name was at least at the
start of the film due to the Lucasfilm Ltd. title card, but on Empire, the new director and writers were relegated to the
end credits. The DGA and WGA fined both Lucas and Kershner, and Lucas paid them
in full. The attempt to sabotage the movie by pulling it from theaters on a
technicality caused Lucas to withdraw his membership from the DGA, WGA, and the
Motion Picture Association (he has yet to return).
28. KUROSAWA RETURNED TO INFLUENCE LUCAS AGAIN, BUT IN A
FAKE TITLE KIND OF WAY.
The working title was a
play on writer Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest, whose hard boiled plotline influenced Akira
Kurosawa’s 1961 film Yojimbo.
29. CONTRARY TO LEGEND, RETURN OF
THE JEDI WAS THE MOVIE’S ORIGINAL TITLE.
Lucas and co-screenwriter
Lawrence Kasdan originally titled their movie Return of
the Jedi, but Fox thought the title was too bland, and forced the
pair to change it to Revenge of the Jedi.
The alternate title
lasted so far into production that official trailers and posters for the
movie featured the “Revenge” title until Lucas realized that
within the mythology he created Jedis do not seek revenge. So the title was
changed back to Return of the Jedi just
weeks before the movie opened on May 25, 1983. The “Revenge” theme would pop up
again—in the third prequel, Revenge of the Sith.
30. SOME BIG NAMES WERE ON THE SHORTLIST TO DIRECT RETURN OF THE JEDI.
Steven Spielberg was
Lucas’s first choice to direct the third installment of the series, but
Spielberg was forced to bow out due to Lucas’s unceremonious exit from the
Directors Guild, of which Spielberg was a prominent member.
Then-relative newcomers
David Lynch and David Cronenberg were also tapped to potentially direct. Lynch
was coming off the commercial success of his movie The Elephant Man, but turned Lucas down to direct the
big-screen adaptation of Dune instead.
Cronenberg was also coming off of a hit—the horror classic Scanners—but also turned Lucas down to write and
direct Videodrome.
Lucas eventually settled
on Welsh director Richard Marquand because he liked his previous movie, the
1981 WWII spy thriller Eye of the Needle.
31. RETURN OF THE JEDI WAS
CALLED SOMETHING DIFFERENT ON PURPOSE.
By 1983, the fervor
surrounding new Star Wars movie
had reached an all-time high, with cast, crewmembers, and the public willing to leak any new
information about the storyline they could. To combat this, the
new movie was shot under the production title Blue Harvest to
throw people off.
The thought was that if
production notices proclaimed the new Star Warsmovie was
shooting nearby, there would be unwanted attention. But if a nondescript movie
called Blue Harvest was shooting nearby,
nobody would likely care. The fake title also helped the production team secure
shooting locations without being price-gouged simply because it was a Star Warsmovie. The filmmakers even came up with a fake
tagline for their fake movie: “Horror Beyond Imagination."
32. IT TOOK UP TO SEVEN DIFFERENT PUPPETEERS TO BE JABBA
THE HUTT.
The Jabba puppet was partly inspired
by stout British actor Sydney Greenstreet, who had appeared in such
movies as The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. The massive puppet, created by Yoda designer
Stuart Freeborn, was controlled by a handful of puppeteers. Three puppeteers
were inside: one controlled the right arm and jaw, another handled the left
hand and jaw, tongue, and head movements, and both of them moved the body; a
third person was in the tail. Outside, there were one or two people on radio
controllers for the eyes, someone under the stage to blow cigar smoke up a
tube, and another working bellows for the lungs.
33. HAN SOLO WAS SUPPOSED TO DIE.
Solo’s fate after being
frozen in carbonite was intentionally left up in the air at the end of The Empire Strikes Back because Ford’s contract was
only for two movies. Ford eventually returned for the third, but urged
screenwriters Lucas and Kasdan to kill off Han Solo because there was nothing
constructive to do with his character.
Kasdan agreed,
and didn’t want Solo to survive the carbonite freeze in order to signal to the
audience that anyone else in the movie could be next. Lucas ultimately vetoed
the idea because he wanted an uplifting ending for the trilogy with all the
main characters making it out alive.
34. LUKE ALMOST GOT A GIRLFRIEND.
Once Mark Hamill realized
Lucas’s grand plan with Vader as Luke’s father and Leia as his sister, the
actor suggested that Lucas create a potential love interest for
Luke to be introduced in Return
of the Jedi.Hamill went so far as to gift Lucas a coffee table book of
sci-fi art for inspiration with a request for Lucas to choose what she would
look like from the designs in the book. In the Expanded Universe, Luke
eventually got a girlfriend (and future wife), a fan favorite warrior named
Mara Jade.
35. THE BATTLE OF ENDOR WAS ORIGINALLY SUPPOSED TO TAKE PLACE
ON THE WOOKIEE HOME PLANET.
Early drafts of the
screenplay had the final battle between the Rebellion and the Empire take place
around the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk, with Chewie and his fellow walking
carpets battling the Empire forces on the ground.
The idea was eventually
scrapped because Lucas wanted the thematic thrust of the scene—that a primitive
society would rise up to help defeat a technologically advanced one—to ring
true. Within the Star Warsuniverse,
Wookiees are a technologically advanced species that can co-pilot ships like
the Millennium Falcon after all, so the lesser-evolved similar species of Ewoks
were created and the final battle was switched to Endor.
Bonus Fact: Star Wars has a little homage to The Lord of the Rings: The word Endor, the home planet of
the Ewoks, is the word for
“Middle-Earth” in one of the Elvish tongues in J.R.R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythology.
36. THE SPEEDER BIKE CHASE WAS FILMED VERY, VERY, VERY
SLOWLY.
The mile-a-minute speeder
bike chase on Endor between Luke, Leia, and a group of Scout Troopers was filmed in the
Redwood State Park near Eureka, California that was about to be
cut down for logging, giving the production near-free rein.
To make it seem like the
bikes were racing at breakneck speeds, Steadicam operators walked a slow,
step-by-step path through the forest and shot at three-fourths frame per second
for hours. When sped up on film to the standard 24-frames-per second, it made
it seem as if the P.O.V. shots were going 120 miles per hour.
3
7. WARWICK DAVIS GOT HIS BIG BREAK BECAUSE OF FOOD
POISONING.
Then 11-year-old Warwick
Davis was initially cast as an Ewok extra after his grandmother heard about an
open casting call on the radio in England for little people to appear in Return of the Jedi.
When Kenny Baker, who
played R2-D2 and was also originally cast as the main Ewok named Wicket, fell ill with food poisoning on the day he was supposed
to begin shooting his Ewok scenes, the filmmakers had Davis play Wicket
instead. Davis allegedly based his performance of the inquisitive little
critter on his dog. (Baker assumed the smaller Ewok role of Paploo.)
38. THE FILMMAKERS WANTED A MOVIE STAR TO BE THE UNMASKED
VADER.
The one moment at the end
of Return of the Jedi that fans had
been waiting years for was seeing Darth Vader’s actual face. When the time
came, audiences finally got that moment, and the face they saw was… Sebastian Shaw’s.
Shaw, who was primarily
known as a British stage actor before making his Jedi cameo, wasn’t the first person the filmmakers had
in mind. They initially wanted to make it a momentous occasion by casting a
well-known movie star like Laurence Olivier or John Gielgud to be behind the
mask, but later changed their minds. Instead of a recognizable star they
thought it’d be better if Vader turned out to be a nondescript person, and
eventually Shaw fit the role.
39. THE SAGA COULD HAVE ENDED VERY DIFFERENTLY.
During an early story
meeting, Lucas pitched an idea for the end of Return of
the Jedi that would have irrevocably changed the entire Star Wars saga as we know it.
His idea started out very
much like the end of Jedi now: Luke
and Vader engage in a lightsaber battle with Vader ultimately sacrificing
himself to save Luke by killing the Emperor, then Luke watches his father die
after taking his mask off. But then, in the proposed ending, Lucas suggested
that, "Luke takes his mask off. The mask is the very last
thing—and then Luke puts it on and says, 'Now I am Vader.'"
The idea was scrapped
because Lucas didn’t want the story to go that dark, and wanted a happy ending
after all.
40. THE TITLE OF EPISODE I WAS
KEPT TOP SECRET.
Lucas began writing the
first prequel for a new Star Wars trilogy
in November 1994, which was
titled “The Beginning” all the way through production until Lucas revealed the
new title as The Phantom Menace. To ensure
the movie wasn’t pirated, the film was shipped to theaters under the title The Doll House.
41. AUDIENCES GOT THEIR FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE PHANTOM MENACE BY SEEING MEET JOE BLACK.
Back in 1998, before
every new trailer was just uploaded to YouTube, the first teaser for The Phantom Menace was attached to
the movie Meet Joe Black, causing
attendance for the Brad Pitt romance to spike. Audiences allegedly went to see
the trailer and walked out before the feature even started.
42. Also 3000 YOUNG ACTORS AUDITIONED TO PLAY ANAKIN.
Lucasfilm casting
director Robin Gurland searched all over the world to find the kid to play the
kid who would grow up to be Darth Vader. She and Lucas narrowed down their
search to England, Ireland, Scotland, and North America, and scoured schools
looking for non-actors and agencies looking for working actors. They auditioned 3000 young actors in all, but whittled the search down to
three relatively unknown finalists: Devon Michael, Michael Angarano, and Jake
Lloyd.
Lloyd eventually won out,
but would only go on to be involved in one non-Star Wars related role after The Phantom Menace.
43. NABOO WASN’T ORIGINALLY NAMED NABOO.
Queen Amidala’s home
world was originally called Utapau in Lucas’s early drafts of the
screenplay, a name that should be recognizable to any Star Wars super fan. Utapau was the name Lucas gave to
the desert planet that would eventually become Tattooine in the early drafts of
what would become A New
Hope. Though the name didn’t make it into the first films of the
original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, Utapau eventually ended up in Revenge of the Sith as a
Separatist outpost.
44. THE TITLE OF ATTACK OF THE CLONES WAS
MUCH DIFFERENT DURING PRODUCTION.
The working title for Episode II was “Jar Jar’s Big Adventure,”
a bit of self-deprecating humor by Lucas as a nod to fans’ abject hate
for Episode I’sCG
character.
It might have been better
than what Lucas ended up using for the actual title. When he heard that Episode II would be called Attack of the Cloneswhile at a
premiere for another film, Ewan
McGregor’s initial reactionwas,
“That’s a terrible, terrible title."
45. ANAKIN WAS ALMOST PLAYED BY A MIDWESTERN STOCK
BROKER.
Similar to her work
searching for an actor to play Anakin in The Phantom Menace, casting director Robin Gurland met with
300 actors to play the teenage Padawan learner for Attack of the Clones. While the role ultimately went to
Hayden Christensen, other actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, James Van Der Beek,
and Ryan Phillippe were also in the running. But another non-actor supposedly
in the running was a 26-year-old Indiana stockbroker named Jeff Garner.
Garner allegedly
attracted the attention of actor and stuntman Ray Park (who played Darth Maul
in The Phantom Menace),
who sent Garner’s information to Lucasfilm after sparring with him at a karate
tournament.
46. YOU WON’T FIND ANY OFFICIAL CLONE TROOPER COSTUMES
OUT THERE.
Lucas leaned on CGI
pretty heavily in the prequels, and it shows. There were no physical Clone
Trooper costumes made for Attack of the Clones or
the rest of the prequels because every single one is a
digitally-rendered CGI creation.
47. A YOUNG HAN SOLO WAS SUPPOSED TO SHOW UP IN REVENGE OF THE SITH.
While Han Solo will get
his very own film next year with Han Solo: A Star Wars Story,
a pint-sized Solo could have showed up much earlier—in Revenge of the Sith.
Character designs of a 10-year-old
Solo were made for a scene that was
eventually cut from the third prequel involving the boy being
raised by Chewbacca on Kashyyyk, and helping Yoda find the location of the evil
General Grievous.
48. LUCAS WASN’T THE ONLY DIRECTOR TO WORK ON EPISODE III.
Lucas invited his old
friend Steven Spielberg to help plan out certain set pieces on the film,
including the climactic duel between Obi-Wan and Anakin and the battle between the Emperor and
Yoda in the Senate chamber. Spielberg accepted the offer because he wanted to
test out pre-visualization techniques before making his 2005 film, War of the Worlds. Spielberg is
credited as assistant director on Revenge
of the Sith.
49. REVENGE OF THE SITH WAS
THE FIRST STAR WARS MOVIE THAT WASN'T
RATED PG.
The third prequel was
rated PG-13 by the MPAA for “sci-fi violence and some intense images,” something
Lucas attributes to the fiery finale when Anakin Skywalker finally transforms
into Darth Vader.
“I would take a 9- or a
10-year-old to it—or an 11-[year-old],” Lucas told 60 Minutes, “but I don't think I would take a
five- or six-year-old to this. It's way too strong. I could pull it back a
little bit, but I don't really want to." The darker trend has continued as
more Star Wars movies have been
released.
50. YOU CAN’T VISIT ANY OF THE EPISODE III FILM LOCATIONS.
This is partly because
there aren’t any locations to speak of. There was no live-action location
shooting during principal photography on Revenge of the Sith. The entire movie was shot on
soundstages composed primarily of blue screens and sets. In post-production
pick-ups, background imagery of Phuket, Thailand was put into scenes as the
Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk; the Bernese Alps
near Grindelwald, Switzerland stood in for Alderaan; and footage of the
eruption of Mount Etna in Italy was used for the end planet of Mustafar.
