Original Star Wars Producer Gary Kurtz Speaks

That’s the very last image of the film, right?
No, that’s not the very last image, we use it again. But, I mean this is at the beginning of that sequence. We dissolve to this long shot of the rebel fleet and then we cut to this shot where we move in on the one ship into the medical window. Then at the end, we pull out of that same window. So, we needed this shot and so ILM plans, shot the elements, composited the shot, this was before digital so it was all done optically, processed it and we had a negative for it all in about 48 hours. It was just amazing. They cut that into the print to make the 70mm prints for the last reel, just a few days before they had to be shipped so it was really tight. They did it and they did a great job, and we were really lucky too because a lot of those optical composites involved a lot of different elements. The first couple of gos, the color correction is all screwy and so we have to go back and redo it and change colors and things, so we were doing that constantly. It was like the opening shot of Star Wars had 36 elements in it and we never did get it absolutely right. But we got it pretty close, but that took like three and a half months and we were running it through the optical printer so many times that we scratched some of the early elements and we had to reshoot the elements. Now, you could do that kind of shot in a day or two. No matter how many elements you had and you could see it on the screen, you could see how they fit, what everything was and it would all be perfectly good in terms of color. So, it’s an entirely different world.

“It was like the opening shot of Star Wars had 36 elements in it and we never did get it absolutely right.”

So when did you and George Lucas start to not see things the same way? What was the beginning of it?
I think that was during the making of Empire. George got really concerned about how long we were taking, we didn’t go over budget and he banged me for the cost overruns on Empire.

And taking Irvin Kershner’s side…
And taking Irv’s side, yeah. At that time we were still talking about what was happening with Jedi and it already was apparent that he was changing his mind with what he wanted to do with Jedi and so it was kind of a mutual parting. It wasn’t acrimonious, it was just that he felt he would probably be more comfortable with someone else to handle the production chores on Jedi and I felt that I would prefer a different kind of challenge, that wasn’t kind of repeating something I had already done. Jim Henson had asked me to produce The Dark Crystal, something he had been working on for about ten years. The idea of doing a film that had no human beings, it was all mechanical you couldn’t do anything artificially, I mean digitally or any other way except optical matte painting backgrounds, was an interesting idea because it had never been done before and hasn’t been done since. It’s the only film that I know of that’s ever been made that way and not likely to be done now since he’s died and the creature shop has changed gears a lot. In fact they’ve gone to a lot of digital stuff too.

There’s a lot of people in the fan community that tend to think that George worked better when he was in collaboration with yourself and his wife Marcia, that I think clearly when you look at the failure of Return of the Jedi and then The Phantom Menace. I just wanted to point out that you added a lot more to the films than has ever been acknowledged.
Well, thank you. Thank you for that. Film is always a collaborative effort. No film that I’ve ever made, when you sit down and see the finished film could we parcel out who did what. The cameraman contributes things, the writer, director, producer all contribute things, the actors contribute a lot. I directed along the second unit on Empire because John Ferry died the first day, I had hired him as the second unit director, and he died virtually the day after we started of infectious meningitis. He got sick in the morning and by the end of that day he was dead. It was real shock to all of us, but what happens with a lot of scenes, especially if you let the actors play with it, is that you get something different from what you think that you’re going to get. Sometimes it isn’t as good and you have to say, wait a minute, no, can’t do this, come back to what I want, but a lot of times you can let it go and say, “Yeah, this is actually pretty good, this is better than what I was planning on.”

That’s really what they contribute to any film. That it’s a matter of shaping it, making sure that it fits within the overall vision but letting it go in small ways so that they can kind of shape what they’re doing and contributing. I spoke at this convention in Dallas, a Star Wars convention and someone asked me about the Han Solo carbon-freezing scene. That’s a perfect example of where the director and actors work really well together. Because both Kersh and I were really worried about that scene on paper, as being incredibly sentimental and we wanted to have it work on the surface, but we also wanted to have it so that actually the audience cared, really worried about him. That’s really difficult to do with a scene like that because it’s so bizarre. I think it actually did work, I think it came off pretty well, actually.