![]() “I had taken precautions earlier on to control the sequels so that I could continue to make the movies,” Lucas says. Try to make the movie without it.’” Ultimately, Lucas and the crew worked long hours on A New Hope to capture what they could in the final push to their deadline.Īs he sat down to plan the production for Empire, Lucas knew he would need more creative control than he’d been granted previously. “I said, ‘Well, I haven’t shot the beginning of the movie.’ You know, where Darth Vader comes in and there’s that battle and Princess Leia has a conversation with him. ![]() ![]() But we just didn’t get to finish the film….We were going a week over or two weeks over and they said, ‘Well, we’re just going to cut you off.’” At the time, the movie was still missing its opening scene. “There was a lot of stuff that we didn’t do that I wanted to do. “The studio on A New Hope, they just cut us off,” he says. Part of his decision to approach The Empire Strikes Back in this way stemmed from his experience working with a big studio, 20 th Century Fox, on the first film in the saga. At the same time, he was building a legacy in the form of his company, Lucasfilm in Marin County, and making a permanent home just north of San Francisco for the special effects team at Industrial Light & Magic. To ensure he would get the chance to make the follow-ups to the breakout sensation of Star Wars on his own terms, he took on the burden of financing the production himself. In the early 1970s, Lucas was a rebel in the film industry he moved to Northern California in 1969 and made two low-budget films, THX 1138 and American Graffiti. “Something my father told me never to do” To celebrate the 40 th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back, which made its debut on May 21, 1980, Lucas recently sat down for an exclusive interview with to reflect on the financial and creative gamble that he made all those years ago to bring the second part of his original trilogy to the screen. And I don’t think you could do it today.” “I think, in this era now with the internet the way it is, it’s very hard to have surprises in a movie. Even with just a dozen people, it would be hard to keep such a thing contained in today’s world, he says. “But there were very, very few people who knew about it until it was shown for the first time….By the end, with the actors, about 12 people knew what that line was.” Then Lucas reconsiders his initial optimism. ![]() …They weren’t going to tell anybody,” Lucas says confidently. “The mixers, those guys were all dedicated to being quiet. Weeks later, as Lucas sat outside a recording booth with James Earl Jones reciting the line, “No, I am your father,” the circle widened to include sound designer Ben Burtt and the sound mixers. “’But that means, that’s only three people. And when I tell you, you’ll know it.,’” Hamill recalls. And it really wasn’t until the day we shot that we told Mark so he could react appropriately.”Īs Hamill tells it, the actor who played Luke Skywalker was only the third person to carry the secret, after director Irvin Kershner pulled him aside and said: “’I know it. I kept that aspect of it secret and I was the only one that knew about it. “Because the thing about it is I didn’t tell anybody - anybody - about it. There is a note of hope in George Lucas’s voice as he considers whether or not Darth Vader’s surprising reveal in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back could have been kept under wraps in the age of the internet. To celebrate the classic film’s landmark 40th anniversary, presents “ Empire at 40,” a special series of interviews, editorial features, and listicles. On May 21, 1980, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back made its theatrical debut.
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