PLUME: They needed a shop foreman?

KURTZ: Well, yes, that’s primarily it. We put together the team there from a variety of disparate elements. None of those people had worked together before. Some of them had worked on architectural model building, and some of them had worked on commercial effects houses who’d been doing titles and opticals, and they came from a lot of different backgrounds. So any time you encounter something like this, with a team working for the first time, it’s not easy.

PLUME: With all those special effects, was there ever a point in time where there was a fear that it wouldn’t come together?

KURTZ: Yes, we were worried about getting them done in time, and we had had a very difficult time trying to get explosions to look good. We had to bring in an outside person – a kind of pyrotechnics person, really – and try to find another location with high ceilings, because we needed to put the camera looking straight up to shoot these explosions so that, when you saw the explosion, it looked like a space explosion rather than having all this stuff fall toward the ground. The only way to do that was to shoot straight up, so you couldn’t tell. We did find a place like this, and they shot dozens of explosions – cheap. For us to use about eight, we must have shot two, three hundred, just for us to use eight or nine in the film. That was one of the weak things we were really worried about. There were a couple of other effects shot where we could never get them to fit together right, the various elements… there was always something wrong – one of the elements was wrong, or the color wasn’t right, or the matte line showed. I think there were two shots that we did over again at least ten times, and still didn’t get them right, and had to end up leaving them out of the show. And yet, some of the more difficult ones – what we perceived as more difficult ones – went through on the first composite, so they were fine, and very easy. You never can tell in advance.

PLUME: Especially with opticals in that period?

KURTZ: Yes … there are so many things that can go wrong. The whole process of shooting against blue screen so that you can extract female mattes, and make male mattes from that and then do hold-outs on the background – all of that stuff is fraught with potential errors. If the processing chemical temperature is one degree off, the film will shrink slightly and there’ll be a jiggle, possibly, in the matte line, or the color could be off and you can’t get the two parts to match color-wise without doing it over four, five times. You can’t see what the result is until you see it finished and processed. It takes two, three days each time you composite it, to see what the result is like. But the shift of the film elements, due to temperature or processing chemicals is the worst, and it always has been that way. You have to be REALLY meticulous on how you do all that, and even then you might have to do it over five, six times to do it right. All of that’s a thing of the past now, of course, since you’re doing it on computers, digital – not only can you see it instantly, you don’t have any of those photographic process problems. So, I seriously doubt if anyone would want to go back to that kind of technique for complicated shots. For simple shots it’s probably easier to do it photographically, and a lot cheaper. For complicated shots, it’s much, much easier to do them digitally if you’re careful.

PLUME: In assembling the film, were there any concerns in the editing room of pulling things together, as far as story-wise?

KURTZ: Yes, we had quite a few. One of the reasons we dropped out a big chunk of the story on Tatooine in the early part of the script was because we couldn’t get it to fit together. The original script called for the start of the film to be exactly the way it is in the film now, starting with the battle in space and the robots. Then in the middle of that, we cut away – we cut down to Tatooine where Luke Skywalker’s working, and he looks up with these electrical binoculars at this space battle and he muses to himself about how he’d love to be part of a big battle, go to the academy. Then he gets in his speeder and races into Anchorhead to tell his friends, who were hanging out at the Tatooine equivalent of a pool hall there, and they all tell him to go get lost, because they’re not interested in space ships. Then he talks to Biggs – who is at the academy, or has graduated from the academy and come back to see his parents – briefly about wanting to go. It’s all about longing to get away, really.

But we found we couldn’t insert that in the middle of the battle scene, because we didn’t know who any of these people were, and it was really difficult to follow, story-wise. We ended up doing what any good writer would have recommended in the first place, I suppose … stay with your key story elements. In this case, the robots were the first characters we introduced, really, and when they escape from the space ship, they land on a planet and they’re picked up by the Jawas, and the Jawas eventually go to Luke’s uncle’s homestead and sell the robots to Luke’s uncle. Therefore, we introduce Luke Skywalker through the robots, whom we already know. And it worked much better – we always do that in post-production. You edit it a variety of different ways, you see what it looks like.

We did screen the picture for a group of friends – it was a terrible mistake, because very few of the visual effects were finished, there was no music. Only Spielberg said he thought it could be a really exciting film. I think he could see into some of the scenes missing … but almost everybody else said it was difficult to follow, they couldn’t figure out what was going on …

PLUME: Which friends were the biggest detractors?

KURTZ: I can’t remember now, actually, I have to look it up. I have some notes about the evening. It wasn’t so much that they were detractors – we were asking for comments on something that was very, very difficult to follow. It’s never a good idea to show unfinished material to anyone outside of the working group anyway – I wouldn’t recommend it on ANY picture, whether you have visual effects or not, because there are just so many things that add to the resonance of the film, especially music and sound effects, and certainly visual effects in this case. If you’re using animatics, you can sometimes get around not having the visual effects because you have a drawing that kind of substitutes for that. But certainly the soundtrack is critical for a science fiction film, and we didn’t have the soundtrack – except for some dialogue – so I don’t blame them for scratching their heads.

PLUME: Were there any that considered it to be George’s folly?

KURTZ: Not really. I mean, everybody knew that it was unfinished, and most of the comments were fairly diplomatic about it being difficult to say, but it was slightly depressing to do that. It didn’t make any difference anyway; we didn’t change much at all, based on that. It came out pretty much the way the script indicated, except for those minor deletions.

PLUME: And overall, it looks like very little was deleted from the film, except for that subplot.

KURTZ: Yes, actually, that’s it. In the later part of the film, there’s not much at all except for time trimming. But, there’s no actual scenes that are missing.

PLUME: So basically just the Tattooine subplot and what, Jabba the Hutt at the time?

KURTZ: Yes. The Jabba the Hutt thing was…

PLUME: I’ve heard different stories. One was that it was never intended to be in the film, that it was just a let’s see if we can do this, and replace it later. The other school of thought was, it was always supposed to be there.

KURTZ: Well, the original idea was that it was supposed to be there. It is in the script … but it was a guy, a human being, this sort of fat guy… looked a bit like Sydney Greenstreet… and the scene is pretty much, I mean dialogue wise, it’s exactly what you see in the Special Edition. But it was a person that was there, and we had technical difficulties with that scene. We shot it over three times for camera problems, focus problems, and film stock problem, and then abandoned it because we ran out of time. We just said, “Well, the bulk of the information that comes across in that scene, about Jabba threatening Han Solo and wanting his money and all of that, we could get across in the scene in the Cantina, with Greedo.” It’s basically the same kind of information. So we just added some bits to the Greedo scene to make it a little bit longer that gets across that information, and then jettisoned that other scene. This all happened while we were shooting. It wasn’t done in the cutting room.

PLUME: So it was made at the time of shooting, that the decision was basically made that that scene would be excised.

KURTZ: Yes, because of the focus problems, and it was slightly redundant anyway because some of the information was already in the Greedo scene – so why not make all the information in the Greedo scene and eliminate the Jabba scene altogether? That’s what happened.

PLUME: Now as far as the marketing of the film, whose idea was it to market it to the sci-fi and comic convention circuit?

KURTZ: We had always thought, from the very beginning before we even started shooting, that it would have to be a word of mouth picture, and it would have to go out to the sci-fi people. Charlie Lippincott was our marketing person, for a while there during the marketing of Star Wars, and he had a lot of contacts with the comic people, and we decided to go to the WorldCon. I can’t remember where it was that year. Kansas City, I think, in ’76 – the year before the film came out. We had just finished shooting in June, – May or June – and we were editing. The WorldCon was in September – it’s over the Labor Day weekend, I guess, the first week in September. So we decided to go. I went to speak to the people with a slide presentation. Mark Hamill went, and Charlie Lippincott went, and we had a little room with a display – we had some costumes, some of Ralph McQuarrie’s artwork. That was it, basically. That was to get an initial look at what the picture was like …We were there for three or four days, and walked around the convention talking to people, just to build up word of mouth as much as we could.

PLUME: And how would you describe the response it received?

KURTZ: The response was very positive. Everybody really liked the idea, and they couldn’t wait to see the film. So on the strength of that, we went to several other groups and did the same thing in that ensuing period – between that September and the following March. And the comic book came out in February, I think. Yes, February or March. So, we convinced Fox that all of this was worth supporting. We even sold the film to a group of booksellers, because of the novelization from the book convention in April, I think, just before the film opened, really. But it was just another word of mouth screening – just to kind of generate some talk about it. All of those things seemed to work quite successfully for the film. We spent a lot of effort on marketing, and we did a lot of it ourselves. Fox supported some of it, in other parts of it they were less inclined to, because they didn’t normally do things like that. In the end, it all proved to be quite useful.

PLUME: What was Fox’s general feeling about the film, just prior to its release?

KURTZ: Well, by that time, they thought it played well for the audience. Laddy and three or four of the Fox executives, marketing people and some of the distribution people, came up to San Francisco when we ran the film at a preview screening on a Sunday morning at the North Point Cinema in San Francisco for a very wide cross section demographic of people. Everything from five-year-old kids to sixty-, seventy-year-old retired people and everything in between. It played quite well. We had preview cards, but they were a waste of time, really. I don’t think preview cards ever work really well, anyway. I think you’re asking people to codify and make intellectual an emotional response. So they either agonize it over a long time or they come up with the weirdest comments.

PLUME: Just to come up with comments?

KURTZ: Just to come up with something. Where as if you just sit and listen to the audience during the screening, you get a pretty good idea of whether they like it or not and what they’re responding to. You can tell if scenes are slow, if they get restless; you can tell if things work well. When we had a screening like this for American Graffiti, we found that we weren’t leaving enough time in some cases after jokes, because the laughter would carry over and block out dialogue, that the audience missed. So we had to actually lengthen a few, not many, but about three or four shots, so that the dialogue didn’t get missed in the cinema. And that’s something you really don’t know unless you play it for a fairly large audience. We didn’t have that kind of problem with Star Wars, but it’s very easy with an audience reaction to get a feeling for how they’re reacting to each of the scenes, and seeing whether they’re playing as you intended.

PLUME: So overall, you’re very much a proponent of screenings for an audience.

KURTZ: Oh yes. I think word of mouth screenings are critical, even if you’re not looking for feedback on how the film plays – if all you want to do is get people talking about it – I think it’s well worth it.

PLUME: I have to ask, at the point which Star Wars was finished, was it always George’s intention that his next film, should Star Wars be a success – or should he make another film after that – was it always going to be a sequel, or did he have other plans?

KURTZ: No, originally we were going to do Apocalypse Now, as I said before, after Star Wars. At the very tail-end of the shooting of Star Wars, when Laddy had seen more of the footage, they started to come back with saying – “Well, how much would it be to just to maybe save these sets or shoot part of another movie and make a sequel which could be done kind of on the cheap.” And we said there was no way we could do that, because we didn’t have a script, and there was no time to write a script, and anyway it would probably be quite different, and if they wanted a sequel we had to do it properly. The idea kind of faded away at that time, because we were just interested in getting the film made.

When it opened, and it was quite popular, the idea of doing a sequel came back. So immediately, the idea was – all right, let’s sit down, find a writer, and do a proper job on this treatment material and odd notes and things that we already had extracted from the first time around. Because George originally wrote a lot of different – well, you’ve probably read some of the different versions of the screenplay. The story shifted back and forth a great deal. But in some original notes that were actually before the treatment, before the first screenplay, there was a lot more material – a lot more convoluted story structure and stuff about the long history. In the end, we opted to pick what we thought was a good, rousing adventure story out of the middle of all this material. That’s why, in a way, Star Wars looks like it’s, as a lot of people said, Chapter 10 of the Flash Gordon serial.

So doing a sequel was fairly easy to structure out, and then it became clear that Fox wanted it right away. The idea was to abandon the idea of doing Apocalypse until after the sequel of Star Wars was done. At the time that the screenplay was finished on Empire, it was clear that they wanted to do two sequels, and sort of planned for that. Not to shoot at the same time – it might have been actually better to do that, but in the long run it was better to finish the second one then plan for the third one. But we kept a lot of props, some set pieces and things – design things – around the idea of being able to use them for two films.

PLUME: Now, also the story has arisen that George had always intended prequels, but had never intended sequels to that initial three films.

KURTZ: After this idea of more films came up, he did several interviews where he said he had story material to do nine films – three prequels and three sequels. That was the accepted story, basically, and there was quite a bit of material both before and after the Star Wars lump. So there was no decision to do either one… it was kind of a red herring in a way, because there was no immediate thought to make any other films right away. In a sense, through a business point of view, it probably would have been better to do so, like they did with Star Trek, rather than wait all this time, because the audience interest dissipated somewhat. I mean, it didn’t seem to affect the box office on Phantom Menace too much, but …

PLUME: It didn’t exactly leave a good taste in people’s mouths, either.

KURTZ: Well, regardless of the value of the film as a film, artistically, there is a kind of energy around some things where if it had come out say three, four years later after Jedi, and then another one three or four years later after that, that kind of cycle would have probably been better for the audience and for the merchandising than what happened. But that’s hindsight. At that time, he always said that he had enough material for three earlier films and three later films, to make a total of nine, and there were outlined materials certainly for a later three that culminated with this big clash with the Emperor in Episode IX. So, we’ll never see any of those, based on what he’s said now.

PLUME: Well what were the original outlines for the prequels? Since they can be compared and contrasted now that the first one’s out there, and the second one’s soon to be out there. Were there major differences from what you saw, from the original outlines of prequel ideas?

KURTZ: Well a lot of the prequel ideas were very, very vague. It’s really difficult to say. I can’t remember much about that at all, except dealing with the Clone Wars and the formation of the Jedi Knights in the first place – that was supposed to be one of the keys of Episode I, was going to be how the Jedi Knights came to be. But all of those notes were abandoned completely. One of the reasons Jedi came out the way it did was because the story outline of how Jedi was going to be seemed to get tossed out, and one of the reasons I was really unhappy was the fact that all of the carefully constructed story structure of characters and things that we did in Empire was going to carry over into Jedi. The resolution of that film was going to be quite bittersweet, with Han Solo being killed, and the princess having to take over as queen of what remained of her people, leaving everybody else. In effect, Luke was left on his own. None of that happened, of course.

PLUME: So it would have been less of a fairy-tale ending?

KURTZ: Much, much less. It would have been quite sad, and poignant and upbeat at the same time, because they would have won a battle. But the idea of another attack on another Death Star wasn’t there at all … it was a rehash of Star Wars, with better visual effects. And there were no Ewoks … it was just entirely different. It was much more adult and straightforward, the story. This idea that the roller-coaster ride was all the audience was interested in, and the story doesn’t have to be very adult or interesting, seemed to come up because of what happened with Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Indiana Jones films – and the fact that that seemed to make a lot of money and it didn’t matter whether there was a really good story or not – that wasn’t what this kind of film was about. We had serious differences about a lot of that.

PLUME: Well it’s ironic to me … I was talking to somebody who has a lot of good friends at ILM, especially in the conceptual department, and he said that George has basically a new catch phrase in the development process. His new catch phrase is “It’s good enough,” and they say he uses it all the time now. When you’re talking about that idea of only going to a certain depth because the audience only wants the quick and easy impact, and then move along…. That somehow the audience isn’t observant, so why should we be overly detailed… it’s just fascinating to compare that with the observations you made.

KURTZ: Well, there is a balance that has to be struck there, because if you want to go to the other extreme, as we were talking about with Stanley Kubrick who was very, very aware and almost paranoid of every detail of his films, it didn’t always make any difference in the sense that – as I said – his later films weren’t very good, I didn’t think. You can go overboard on that and spend too much energy. I think you have to make the film for yourself as the primary audience, and also look at it with a fairly discerning eye – “This works for me, this is good, I like this.”

Yes, there are a lot of things that you can get away with … Roger Corman taught me a lot about things being “good enough.” When you’ve used that phrase, good enough usually means it is working for the audience. If it worked for the audience to throw the model through the frame to have the emotional impact that you need, then you do it that way – because it’s the cheapest, simplest option. You’re not doing it necessarily because it’s the cheapest option, but if it works and it only takes 15 minutes, then you have time to work on other things.

The catch phrase there is “if it works for the audience.” It isn’t what the cost is. If it doesn’t work for the audience, then it doesn’t matter how much time and energy you take on it. Look at Pearl Harbor and you get a good example of that. There’s a lot of brilliant effects shots in there that don’t mean anything. So you have to look at, I think, the emotional response of the audience to the characters as the crucial thing. Visual effects are nothing – they’re just a way of helping you tell your story. The fact that they’re easier to do now than they ever were before is advantageous to filmmakers, but it doesn’t mean you want to use more, or that you want to use them when they’re not appropriate.

You still have to use the same judgment that we always used, going way back to D.W. Griffith’s time. You do what you think works for the story, and if that’s elaborate and expensive with thousands of extras like DeMille did in the Ten Commandments, fine – that’s what you do. If it’s not, if you’ve got two people in a room – then that’s fine. It’s whatever sells the scene. “What is the emotional heart of the scene” is the key question always, and how do you sell that visually. If it does require a lot of action to do that, then you have to explore how best to do that action. But it doesn’t always, and sometimes you can do it in a very, very simple way. There definitely is a balance there, because there is no perfect. There’s never going to be a perfect way to do a scene… more extras, or more visual effects, or more explosions doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s better.

(continued below…)

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Comments: 1 Comment