I regard myself as being very lucky, because Star Wars arrived in my life at an absolutely perfect time. I was sixteen years old. I loved visual effects, loved fantasy—and ever since the age of eight or nine had been harboring ambitions to make films. I was also a movie buff. I used to read Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and I remember Starlog magazine had started about a year earlier. I was just a fan like any other kid. But I was becoming a little bit disillusioned with science-fiction films around that time. There were films like Logan’s Run and the remake of King Kong, and I remember feeling that the miniature shots looked just like miniatures, and the special effects looked like model work with dodgy bluescreen compositing. Nothing was really that impressive; certainly not since 2001 had anyone done anything really amazing in special effects. That was the frame of mind I was in.
Then Star Wars was released in the United States in May 1977. Can you imagine being a science-fiction fan, reading those magazines, reading all about Star Wars, reading about the phenomenon, about the queues around the block, how everyone was raving about it—but not being able to see it? Because the distribution thinking in those days was that they should hold the American summer movies until New Zealand had its summer. So Star Wars wasn’t going to open here until our summer— December! And there weren’t any entertainment channels on TV back then, no Internet; there really wasn’t any way of hooking into it. You would just hear gossip about it—and it was immensely frustrating. It was a slow-brewing phenomenon that took months and months to make its way down here.
Once Star Wars came out in the United States, however, there was a whole new flood—a new culture—of science-fiction film magazines. I used to buy all of those that were packed with Star Wars photographs. All my friends and I could ever do was look at the still photos. I would look at the photos lying in bed at night, dreaming about what the actual film would be like. I remember being utterly familiar with the images of Star Wars months before I ever saw the film. I got the soundtrack album, too, so I heard the music a long time before I saw it.
Finally the summer came. Three or four school friends and I had bought tickets in advance for the first day, but we still had to queue up outside the Cinerama theater in Wellington. Inside the cinema had been equipped with Sensurround for films like Earthquake and Rollercoaster. It was all decked out with subwoofers. It had a good picture, a huge nice screen.
And as I watched the film, amazingly enough—even with all the hype and the expectations that I’d built up in my mind over the previous seven months—Star Wars delivered. My dreams didn’t actually surpass the film. I remember standing and cheering and waving my arms around when Luke was flying toward the Death Star. I remember being incredibly overwrought at the excitement of it all. That sort of stuff didn’t happen in films back then. It was probably the first time in my life I’d ever become that heavily engaged in a movie to the point of wanting to jump up and down and yell for the hero.
It connected. It was a movie that was incredibly successful at engaging us. Luke really was us. That was Luke’s great contribution to the story of Star Wars. He was the character who you felt you could relate to—he wasn’t outside of your reach. Luke was just a kid like us who was swept away in this adventure—and though incredible things were asked of him, he managed to find it within himself to deliver in the way that we all hoped, if we were flying that X-wing toward the Death Star. Certainly at the time, I don’t think I’d ever seen a movie that was as successful at picking you up out of your seat and plunking you right down in the film.
Another real feature of its success was that Star Wars spoke to you in a truthful way. We were a generation used to seeing slightly removed, remote films that were made by an older generation of filmmakers who were slightly disconnected and old-fashioned in their relation to the genre. They weren’t tapping into the youth culture and what it was like to be young in those days—but Star Wars did all that.
Obviously, the directing was a big part of this. The film felt like it was a world that didn’t have anything to hide; it had a sense of its own reality; and it was very confident in the alternate reality it was showing. This was not 1977—it really was a place in a galaxy far, far away, a long, long time ago. Star Wars didn’t feel self-conscious; it didn’t feel gimmicky. I know what George means by “documentary camera,” because the film had a truthfulness to it that was a big factor in helping you engage with the characters and forget the filmmaking very quickly. I think a lot of filmmakers fall into the trap of thinking, Well, if it’s fantasy I can be more flamboyant. But the opposite is true. If you are bombarding the audience with images they’ve never seen before, you want to keep the camera as real and truthful as you can, as well as the performances of the actors. And George directed the actors in fairly naturalistic performances, considering the outrageous things that were happening on-screen. They all behaved and acted in ways that felt believable.
I think all of that came together to create an atmosphere in which the audience felt totally safe and familiar, and was able to empathize, while at the same time being totally blown away with the images on-screen.
I saw Star Wars several times that summer over Christmas and New Year’s. I remember we went to a town called Hamilton, a couple of hundred miles north, to see relations, and Star Wars was screening in a little cinema, so I saw it there for the third or fourth time. I seemed to follow it around the country that summer as we went on our vacations. I remember buying a T-shirt with the photo of Han Solo and Chewbacca aiming their guns. I remember getting a poster of the Hildebrandt artwork, which went up on my bedroom wall. I definitely saw The Making of Star Wars on television, a week or two after it opened, so all sorts of new things were flooding into my brain—words that I’d never heard before, like motion control. Watching the TV documentary was in fact my first chance to glimpse the motion-control camera actually working, going over the surface of the Death Star. I also remember that it was incredibly frustrating because there was no way of recordings shows. I could only watch it once. That was my one shot to study how things were done.
I had my parents’ Super-8 camera, and I’d been making little stop-motion animation films, little horror movies—but I remember after I saw Star Wars that I furiously started experimenting with spaceships. I read all the articles about how they kit-bashed them out of plastic model kits, so I went out to the hobby store and got some various trucks and things, and I built the basic spaceship shape out of cardboard and tubes and pipes. Then I glued on all these model bits, and I put all the aging on them. I couldn’t do motion control, obviously, but I set up a little dolly track and hung the spaceships in front of a black cloth in our living room. I tracked my camera toward and past the spaceships. I also figured out a way to rewind the Super-8 cartridge, so I could do a second pass where I superimposed a starfield on the background.
In New Zealand it wasn’t really easy because there wasn’t a film industry there, and no one really made films at that time. But concurrently with Star Wars coming out there were a couple of New Zealand feature films; Roger Donaldson made a movie called Sleeping Dogs. Certainly, I felt like everything that I wanted to do was just a little bit closer to being able to happen.
What Star Wars also did, which was terrific, and which definitely led into The Lord of the Rings much later on, was create a science-fiction/fantasy world that felt lived in, used. Things were scratched; there were oil marks, things broke down. That was a lesson I learned along with the whole world back in 1977. When you think of all the movies that have come out since that have created similarly used worlds, it seems to be so natural to everyone, and The Lord of the Rings falls into that category. We broke down all the costumes and made sure that the castles looked like they’d been repaired and patched up.
All of that work was done with the Weta Workshop, which I started partly through circumstance and partly because there weren’t any of those sorts of facilities in New Zealand. I met other people who were interested in effects like I was, but we wanted to stay in New Zealand making films, so we had no choice but to set up our company—which in a sense is what happened to George as well. He had no choice really but to set up Industrial Light & Magic himself; they were inventing the technology as they were making the film. It’s similar in that you’re doing things that no one else is doing, so there is no alternative but to set it all up yourself. I’ve often thought that a lot of the stuff we’ve created in New Zealand—our own special effects company and our own mixing stages—all that down here, is almost like a Skywalker South.
When I met George many years later, I was not sure what to expect. I didn’t know what to think because he’d spent a lot of time out of the limelight. The fact that he didn’t direct a movie for twenty years after Star Wars meant that he wasn’t doing a lot of publicity for the other films he was involved with. So he was a slightly mysterious figure, almost a mythic figure. But I was really delighted to find out just how friendly and funny he is. I wasn’t expecting him to be as laid-back. George also has a great, healthy point of view about the world and filmmaking. He’s got a very clever understanding of the entertainment industry, of both the pros and cons of the studio system. He’s fantastic to talk to, and I just find that a lot of the things that he believes in, and a lot of the things that he says, I agree with a hundred percent. We both prize our independence, and we share a kindred spirit in that I’ve never had a desire to go to Hollywood and work there.
In the end, I just marvel at the way George used Star Wars to revolutionize the way films are made. Not only do I admire the way he used profits from the movie to fuel the technology of making films, which obviously benefits everybody who comes after George, but he actually had this vision of what the technology should be. He wanted to edit movies on computers, which no one else was even thinking of in those days. He wanted to have digital sound; he wanted to push computers to a point where dinosaurs could be realistically rendered on them. The sheer vision! It’s so easy, like everyone else, to say, Well, this is the technology that we have; this is the toolbox we have to work with, so we’ll make the best film that we can with the tools that we have. But George throws away the toolbox and invents a new toolbox before he even starts making his film. So it’s pretty extraordinary.
If you were to take Star Wars away, out of film history for a moment, and therefore all the technology that was generated by Star Wars, you would just be seeing a whole different landscape of entertainment over the last thirty years. Nowhere near as exciting. We’d all be in cinemas with terribly scratchy optical soundtracks watching celluloid disintegrate before our eyes.…
Wellington, New Zealand
Peter Jackson and George Lucas at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in 2006. Photo by Morgan Schmidt-Fen.