MEMORIES OF CAST MEMBERS OF STAR WARS
NEON FILM MAGAZINE
FEBRUARY 1997

NOT VADER AWAY

Everyone from Sir Alec Guinness to Bill Hootkins remembers the greatest movie ever made

MARK HAMILL (Luke Skywalker)

I didn´t even read the script until after I got the part, but I loved it immediately. People find that hard to believe, because they see the film and all the special effects and they can´t imagine that you couldn´t get a feeling for it on the printed page. But it was all there: the humour, the romance. I was delighted. It smacked much more of the Brothers Grimm than it did of Isaac Asimov.

For the whole thing my eyes were just so wide open. I lived seeing all the different departments at work - the art department, the model-makers. Even after the live action was finished, they´d call me and say, "Hey, we´re going to blow up the Death Star today, if you want to come and watch!" When I got the chance I´d go along.

When Carrie and I did the swing across the chasm on the Death Star I was disappointed that they had so many cameras going that we only had to do it once. We were both on harnesses, and after they unhooked Carrie I said I´d like to have done a few more takes. Of course, that was the cue for the wire guy to haul me up and fly me around the sound stage. Then they called "Lunch" and left me hanging 30ft in the air.

Harrison, Carrie and I were closest on the first film. By the time we did the second and third there were various wifes and boyfriends and managers and separate cars, whereas on Star Wars we were all footloose and fancy-free. We still got on during the shooting of the other movies, we just didn´t see each other as much. I haven´t seen Harrison or Carrie for a while. I still send Sir Alec a Christmas card and he always writes back, and if I´m in London I´ll go and see any play he´s in.

Some Star Wars fans know way more about it than I do. They ask me questions about the hardware and I forget what certain things were called. When George told me he was going to do a technical upgrade to the movie, he said, "Do you remember the Dewbacks?" I remembered the word but I couldn´t remember what it was - it´s actually the lizard thing the Stromtroopers ride, and he was all excited because now, instead of just being a rubber thing whose head moves up and down, it was going to walk around and drink water out of a trough.

It was very strange to see little plastic figures of ourselves everywhere. It still is. I still have the Stormtrooper helmet that I rescued the Princess in, and I´ve kept various bits of the costume as the series went on. And I think I´ve got a lightsabre somewhere around the house. If my son were here he´d know. He works part-time at a science-fiction toy shop, so he knows what I´ve got. By the way, those pants I wore were just bleached Levi´s with the tag still in them.

HARRISON FORD (Han Solo)

The only feeling I have about the re-release of Star Wars is a sense of dread of having 20-year old acting exposed again - having already been paid to humiliate myself and then having to see it again re-released. No, I think I haven´t seen the new one, although George wants to show it to me some time before it opens. From what I hear, the reaction to the trailer in the theatres is fantastic.

CARRIE FISHER (Princess Leia Organa)

It was fun. I was just a 19-year-old kid. I went into the first one thinking, "I´d like to have an affair, I´ve never really had one." I was the only chick, so I had a really good choice, but I´m keeping that one to myself.

There´s one shot of me bumbling along after we had been victorious with the Death Star, and my breasts were all very excited. They were tending to distract attention from the action. There were certain times when you´d see them behind the camera staring and it had to be my breasts... it was never the boys´ genitalia bouncing up and down. So they had to be taped to my chest. There are no bras in space. Ask George Lucas.

The worst thing was the Star Wars shampoo where they twist off your head and pour liquid out of your neck - "Lather up with Leia and feel like a princess yourself." I didn´t like some of the action figures much either. One of them makes me look like Eddie Munster.

ALEC GUINNESS (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Like all the best directors, Lucas had very little to say during the actual filming. He simply sensed when you were uncomfortable and just walked across and dropped a brief word in your ear. It was almost like being on stage. Good actors don´t like being told how to act, and they become worried if they are made to feel merely part of someone else´s work. In this total concentration, in his reliance on both his eye and his ear, he reminded me of the young David Lean. I always had the feeling that, like Lean, deep down he was totally involved in the action. Of course there was none of the Lean star-quality, the hush when the director is on set, but there was the sensation that life can only be a piece of celluloid.

ANTHONY DANIELS (C-3PO)

It was torture. My suit was made of thick plastic and heavy glass fibre. Working in that heat under those arc lights nearly finished me off. Every time I moved, that suit pinched me somewhere, and I rattled as I walked, which sent the sound technicians grazy. I could only walk stiffy and kept bumping into other actors because I could only see straight ahead. When I had the arms fixed on I couldn´t even scratch or feed myself. Even worse, it was impossible to go to the toilet. I just had to put my mind on higher things.

KENNY BAKER (R2-D2)

George Lucas came to London to do this film at Elstree. The´d made this robot, R2-D2, and they´d made it small because Carrie Fisher was only small and Mark Hamill was only small - well, relatively small. My agent sent me down, they looked at me and said, "He´ll do," and I was in. They just wanted to see if I was the right size. At the time I couldn´t just take off because I was part of a double act called The Mini-Tones and we were doing Hughie Green´s Opportunity Knocks on TV and I didn´t really want to be stuck in a robot. So I said, "I´ll help you out if I can," and turned it down, but they kept coming round my house, trying to persuade me to do it.

When we got to shooting I couldn´t understand what it was all about, to be honest. All these weird and wonderful names - Obi-Wan Kenobi and all that. I thought it was a load of rubbish at first. But then I thought, "Well, if Alec Guinness is in it he must know what´s going on."

It was very exciting. We went to Tunesia and Arizona and California. Harrison was a nice, quiet soft spoken kind of chap. George was a nice guy. Carrie Fisher was a bit spaced out most of the time. Very nice, though. People were dabbling around with drugs and things in those days. And smoking pot. Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing would never do anything like that.

I didn´t really see much of Anthony Daniels (C-3PO) off the set because it took him so long to get in and out of his costume. I was doing cabaret in the evening. Mark Hamill used to come to a couple of clubs and watch us when we were working around Stevenage. He used to enjoy having a drink and watching the show. They had a big end-of-show party and we did the cabaret, me and Jack my partner. At the end we did a cowboy and Indian mime routine. I think George Lucas liked it.

PETER MAYHEW (Chewbacca)

The previous film I´d done was Sinbad and The Eye Of The Tiger. I´d played the Minotaur, a man´s body with a bull´s head, which was about 8ft tall, all made out of fibreglass. After that, wearing costumes was relatively easy. It was really my height that got me the Chewbacca job, and the fact that I´m fairly agile for a big guy. I´m 7ft3in tall, and Chewbacca was 8ft. The rest was made up by a couple of inches on the shoes, and the headgear, which was probably three or four inches above my head.

We talked about what the character could and couldn´t do, it was about a 20-minute interview and that was it. The only thing what was laid down was that Chewie couldn´t talk. He could react to people, he could understand, but he couldn´t talk. Most of his voice was redubbed after shooting, although I had to make noises at the time to get reactions from the other actors. It all went back to California and was redubbed. If you think about it, he´s half-monkey, half-bear, so his higher notes are pleasure notes and the lower notes are anger.

I remember the trash-masher scene. It was basically a pit with loads of polystyrene, oil, muck and water, and it stunk. The costume was mohair, and if you got it wet it made it worse to wear. I found myself in a 4in plank at the back of the set, stood on that, did my bit and everybody seemed perfectly satisfied. Mark and the rest were getting covered in water, and I just stood at the back laughing.

I don´t know if Chewie´s in the next three films or not. When you think that he´s something like two or three hundred years old, depending on how far back they go, he could be around. I guess he´d be similar to the old Chewie. But smaller.

DAVE PROWSE (Darth Vader, Lord of the Sith)

I met George Lucas in Fox´s offices in Soho Square. I thought he looked like a bit of a student. Anyway, he said, "I´m doing this film called Star Wars and I´d like to offer you one of two parts." Which was all right, two parts straight away without even having to read or act or anything.

I asked him how he knew me and he said, "I saw you in A Clockwork Orange, if you´re good enough for Stanley Kubrick, you´re good enough for me." When I asked him what the two parts were he said, "One´s called Chewbacca, which is like a hairy gorilla who goes through the film on the side of the goodies." I thought, sod that; three months in a gorilla suit. He said the other was the big villan of the film. So I said, "Right, I´ll have that, thank you very much." To which he said, "You´ve made a wise choice. No-one will ever forget Darth Vader." Without a doubt, Darth Vader became the cult figure of the film. Now he´s regarded as the ultimate screen villain of all time. And that was me!

At the time, there was no indication that it was going to be a major film. The only thing you could say was there was loads of money being spent. Elstree was a ten- or 12-studio lot, and it was all taken up with Star Wars. They built a full-size Millennium Falcon and everything.

The filming was fraught with problems. I kept asking George about Darth Vader´s voice. Obviously, everything I was saying was coming through the mask and was therefore no good for reproduction purposes. George kept saying, "Don´t worry, we´ll re-record all your lines at the end of the film."

Anyway, Star Wars came out in America in May 1977 in a huge blaze of publicity. We hadn´t seen any rushes or anything. Out of the blue I got a cable from Russ Meyer, the film director, and he´d written, "Congratulations, you´re in the biggest film of all time. And, by the way, did you know they overdubbed your voice?" I was very disappointed. Of course, when the film was finished they´d raced back to America and decided that they couldn´t play Darth Vader with an English accent. Perhaps it was my British accent. They probably didn´t want Darth Vader walking into a scene and going, "All right, moi dears."

DON HENDERSON (General Toggi)

One day Peter Cushing had the wrong boots sent to the set and the only thing that would fit him were these red pom-pom slippers. It was like playing a scene with a bare-breasted woman - you try and look her in the eye but you can still see her chest. So he was storming around in his fascist costume being horrible and nasty, while we had enormous difficulty keeping a straight face.

It was a shame that Dave Prowse was dubbed over, but you can´t really be an intergalatic space tyrant with a soft Bristol accent. Whenever he spoke, the helmet muffled his voice, and in fact the only thing you could hear clearly was, "Fook it. Oi´ve droyed", when he forgot his lines. You could see Lucas chewing his nails, but he never told Dave not to bother because he´d have just lost interest. Four years after shooting finished, I took my son to see it, by which time I´d forgotten that I´d done it. When my first scene appeared, he stood up and shouted, "That´s my Daddy!" He was so cross I hadn´t told him I was in Star Wars that I had to say I´d been keeping it as a special surprise.