There is something ironic in the fact that the Irvin Kershner-directed The Empire Strikes Back is generally considered to be the best of the Star Wars films, due largely to the fact that upon first exposure to George Lucas’ saga the director was considerably less than impressed.
As Kershner explains it, on New Year’s Eve of 1976 he and Lucas were among the guests invited to Francis Ford Coppola’s house to ring in the holiday. “Star Wars was a breakthrough film in every way,” he prefaces the scenario, “but George had, in a crazy way, limited means when he shot the film. He was limited by budget and time, doing something that had never been done before. It wasn’t science fiction, it was a fairytale, it was a myth. And what he did was quite difficult.”
Which is all fine and good, though it doesn’t exactly jibe with the forewarning he’s given about that particular New Year’s Eve.
“During the day,” Kershner reflects, “George said, ‘You know, I brought some of the footage from this film that I’m shooting, Star Wars. I want to show it to you.’ Our response was, ‘Oh, boy, that’s great.’ So we all traipsed down to the screening room in the basement and George showed some scenes from what would become Star Wars. And we sat there with our mouths open — and not because we thought it was so great. We thought it was junk! We said, ‘Is he crazy? This is a comic book. These aren’t real people. What is he doing?’”
To further define the situation, he concedes that what was shown to them were snippets and small pieces of scenes. “Then the lights went on and George said, ‘Well, what did you think?’ in his way,” laughs Kershner. “We didn’t know what to say. Francis said, ‘I better get upstairs,’ and he ran out. And I wanted to say the usual thing when you go to an opening of a friend’s film and the film isn’t very good. You say, ‘You’ve got yourself a film, boy!’ And he turned to me and I said, ‘Boy, it’s different.’ He agreed. Then I realized that George loved comic strips, comic books – he collected them – and this is what he was trying for, but there was something that was niggling me. You know, he’s trying something and there’s no way to know what it’s going to be until he finished it. I went to the first Academy showing of the film. It was a Saturday morning and I took my 12-year-old son. The film, which I’d heard nothing about since that point, started and there were a lot of young people in the audience. They began to shout, and my son was sitting there, rapt. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen.
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Much of that is probably owed to the choice of Irvin Kershner as director. Cutting his teeth on such quirky character pieces as A Face in the Rain and The Flim Flam Man, and action pieces like The Raid on Entebbe, Kershner managed to hit the right note with Lucas. Whereas the late Richard Marquand, director of Return of the Jedi, said directing a Star Wars picture with George Lucas as executive producer was like directing King Lear with Shakespeare standing in the wings, Kershner says he insisted on maintaining his creative independence.
“George chose me because he wanted a film in which the people really came alive,” he explains. “I was afraid of the challenge at first, because Star Wars was such a unique film and I didn’t want to try to follow it. Empire has many more special effects, tons more sets and much more complexity in the characters. I had my hands so full that I stopped worrying about trying to make it better than Star Wars and just tried to make it right. It was daunting, which is why I turned it down at first. When George came to me at first I said, ‘Wow, what the hell can you do with the second one that you didn’t do with the first one?’ And I worried that maybe the audience had already had enough and they’d view a sequel as something just to make a few bucks. I’m not especially interested in sequels. I had made one before, Return of a Man Called Horse, but I did that because I really loved the subject and felt they failed in the first film. Fortunately, George didn’t want a typical sequel, and that made it a bit frightening because it was a much bigger picture than Star Wars. We had 64 sets – which is unheard of – and they were big. I would work on a giant set for two days and they would rip it down overnight and start building another one because we had to put 64 sets on seven stages. The film was all shot inside with the exception of the first 10 days in Norway [where we shot the Hoth sequences].”
When he was hired, Kershner was told by Lucas to make a sequel that was better than the original. “Actually,” smiles the director, “that was a nice way of saying, ‘Hey, this is important to me.’ You see, if Empire didn’t work, then there is no third one and it’s all over. We didn’t know if the audience was still there for a second one. We had no idea. We assumed it was, but we didn’t know for sure, and George was putting up his own money. Fox didn’t put up the money. When I went up to seek approval for something, George said to me, ‘Do you know why you’re making this picture?’ And he showed me all these detailed plans for [Skywalker Ranch], and he said if the picture is successful, this is what he was going to build. The fantastic thing about George is that he invests all the money he makes into moviemaking, and no one else does that. No one else who makes a lot of money in movies puts it back into the medium. Look at ILM and the other stuff he has developed. It is incredible. I really have tremendous respect for him. But that’s getting away from the point at hand. I analyzed Empire before production and came to the obvious conclusion that it was not just a sequel but the second act of a three-act space opera. Now, the second act does not have the same climax as the third act or even the first act. The second act is usually more ambiguous. It is quieter, but the problems are accentuated; you get into depth. It is not fast, like the end [of a three-part drama]. So, therefore, I knew that I would never have the climax because if it comes to a complete climax, where do you go with the third one? It is about revealing character.
“George gave me tremendous freedom,” elaborates Kershner. “George and I worked closely with Larry [Kasdan] for three months getting the script right. Then when the script was right, I went off to London alone, where the production was set up. I spent about a year locked away doing storyboards for the script so that every single effect, every scene that had anything unusual in it, was storyboarded. I insisted on being locked away to do the storyboards because by the time I went to shoot, I wanted to know every single scene. In fact, I knew every word in the script by that time so I didn’t have to even think, ‘Now what am I going to do next?’ Not that I followed the storyboards that religiously. I did follow them, but where things didn’t work I could change it because I knew where to go. So I could concentrate on the characters.
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“You see,” he continues, “the biggest problem with epic productions like this is the special effects take so much attention that you tend to let the acting slip by. I didn’t want that to happen, and Harrison [Ford] was constantly calling me on it. If we did just two takes and I’d say, ‘That’s great,’ he would say, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. What’s great? Was it great for the special effects or for me?’ And I’d say, ‘Harrison, I wouldn’t say ‘great’ unless it was for you. It really was great.’ And he would give me that wonderful look of his, you know, that wry look, and we would move on. We had a great relationship. I had good relationships with all the actors. I got Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Harrison together, and we talked and talked. I explained things, told them what the characters were doing, what they could try and how they could try to feel out their scenes and physicalize whenever possible. This was their language, they responded to that approach. If I hadn’t done that, I think I would have been in trouble. The way we worked made it fun; we really had fun doing the takes.”
The approach apparently worked, as evidenced by sequences between Mark Hamill’s Luke and Yoda – the Jedi Master that is essentially a muppet. Those scenes, featuring Luke in training as a Jedi, are completely believable.
“Let me tell you how that was done,” says Kershner. “The floor [of the Dagobah set] was about five feet above the actual floor of the stage. We built it up and put Yoda there, and there were splits in the floor so that they could manipulate him. Below the floor were about five TV sets and Frank Oz [voice of Yoda] and his crew. One person would control the ears, one person would blink the eyes, another person would move the mouth, one person moved one arm, another moved another arm. It was all scrutinized carefully, and all they could see were the television sets around them. Because we were getting sick from all the smoke on the set, I was wearing a gas mask with a microphone in it and I had a speaker, through which I would talk to Frank and Mark and the crew. And Frank would use a speaker for rehearsal, so that when Mark would say to Yoda, ‘Can you tell me where I can find the Jedi Master?’, he would hear, ‘Why do you want to know?’ – which was Frank answering him – through a speaker somewhere. But when we actually did the take, Mark didn’t hear anything. [Yoda’s dialogue] was put in later. We rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed until we got the rhythm and then we’d do the take and he’d say, ‘Can you tell me where I can find the Jedi Master?’, there was a pause, then he’d say, ‘Well, I want to know’ – pause – ‘It’s my business….’ And so on. See what I mean? Mark would know exactly how long to pause. He did a wonderful job of reacting to nothing but memory. Though Mark couldn’t hear him, he could see him. I wanted Yoda to look like he was Luke’s equal. I wanted Yoda to look like he could climb around. I wanted to give the illusion that he had emotions. It was not something that was put into stop-motion, you know, like King Kong, which is a miniature put in later. This was actual time. Anyway, these challenges are what make films so exciting – when you have interesting, believable characters and you see how they react to each other and their surroundings. The characters have to be real, no matter how fantastic the situation.”
Farewell, Irvin Kershner. The memory of The Empire Strikes Back will continue to endure, as well as your contribution to the Star Wars legacy.