At NYCC on Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure of sitting through J. W. Rinzler's panel on his new "The Making Of The Return Of The Jedi" book. J.W. Rinzler told many anecdotes about not only the making of the iconic film, but about the process of collating all of the material he had at hand into a remarkable new look at how the film came together.
While many of the anecdotes about the film's production were old and well known to the majority of the audience, there were a few new tidbits of information shared with those in attendance.
Here are a few of the highlights:
1 ) George Lucas likes to film with a minimum of 2 cameras (but usually prefers 3 or more) at all times to ensure that he has ample footage to work with in the editing room (Lucas went to film school to be a film editor and that is his first love when it comes to filmmaking).
2 ) The fact above lead to many arguments between Lucas and Irvin Kershner, the director of "The Empire Strikes Back", who preferred to shoot just what he felt he needed to tell the story leaving Lucas very little extra film to work with.
3 ) During the preproduction phase of ROTJ, Lucas was looking for a director that would be more willing to work with additional cameras and provide more coverage of all scenes being shot.
4 ) Although Richard Marquand agreed to film as much as Lucas wanted, he would often be frustrated when he showed up on set and Lucas had brought in additional cameras and camera crews to shoot alongside those already employed by Marquand to shoot scenes.
5 ) During the post production phase of ROTJ, there was an even known as "Black Friday" in which Lucas threw out hundreds of effects shots that ILM had produced that did not meet his expectations. ILM spent the next 3 months redoing shots exactly as they were storyboarded.
6 ) When compiling information for this book, Rinzler was surprised to find that there was far less archival interviews for ROTJ than for the other films in the Original Trilogy due to ROTJ being the last film (at the time anyway) in the series and the large number of heavily guarded reveals that were not allowed to be talked about to the press.
7 ) Rinzler had to do many new interviews for the book as several principal participants didn't have any interviews held in the archives.
8 ) Rinzler interviewed Marquand's wife and son for the book as Marquand had tragically passed away only a few short years after ROTJ came out. Marquand was considered to be "difficult" to work with by many on the set but was actually frustrated with the constant rewrites and changes that Lucas was doing on an almost daily basis.
9 ) The Rancor was initially to have been realized with an actor in a large rubber suit Godzilla-style, but the finished effect "looked stupid" to Lucas and ILM. The rancor suit was described as looking like "a giant deformed potatoe".
10 ) The famous and highly sought after McQuarrie portfolio that was released alongside ROTJ has several images that McQuarrie painted AFTER the film was finished which explains why a few of the images look just like their on screen counterparts instead of stylized like McQuarrie's initial designs.
11 ) The Ewoks were initially designed to be far more aggressive and creepy looking than their final teddy bear-like appearance. Initially, they didn't have visible ears either. Eventually Lucas demanded that they be "cuter" so as to sell more toys.
12 ) Rinzler will be releasing eBook versions of his "Making Of..." trilogy of books next year. Each eBook will contain, in addition to the entire text of the hardcopy books, up to 30 minutes of video and up to 30 minutes of audio. The audios and videos will be extremely rare behind the scenes looks at the 3 films. Some of the audio is expected to be very interesting (1 example was a discussion on the set between Lucas and Sir Alec Guinness regarding the proper way to deliver the famous "May the force be with you." line).
2 of the videos that will be included with the eBooks were shown:
1 ) Speederbike chase test footage shot using modified Kenner 12" figures on hand-built Speederbikes (different design from final film) doing basically the whole sequence from the film (with some differences in dialogue and shots/events). All of the characters' voices were provided by Ben Burrit. The miniature forest used for the sequence contained scenery created for the miniature VFX shots for "E.T." which ILM was still working on at the time.
2 ) Rebel briefing scene where Lando announces to Han that that he's a general. Lots of improvised banter between Ford and Williams before they go through the actual dialogue from the script.
An additional video was shown from the filming of the scene where Luke surrenders himself to Vader on Endor. The video features the voice of Marquand both directing the actors and providing Vader's dialogue. This video was really funny, not only for hearing Marquand speaking Vader's lines in his own voice, but for Marquand's stage directions ("Annnnnd...ZING!" when Luke tries to reach Vader's "good side"). Sadly, this video will not be included in the eBook and was going back into the vault after the panel.
