I Am C-3PO--The Inside Story Read online

  George and I talked. An hour passed. Surely we both had things to do.

  There was a silence.

  Nervously.

  “Please, may I play the part?”

  George paused.

  Then quietly,

  “Shurr.”

  Not even a word. Hardly a syllable. A sound. A small sound above the London traffic.

  It changed my life.

  3 plastered

  A chilly day.

  Elstree Studios in North London. I parked outside the rather anonymous admin building.

  I’d never been to a film studio before. Not sure what I’d expected but I was slightly disappointed. If I thought the admin offices lacked theatrical glamour, they were the London Palladium, Radio City Music Hall compared to the dressing room where they sent me. A bleak, cold cell of a room.

  Two plasterers in workers’ overalls had laid out an assortment of plastic sheets and buckets and bags of plaster. They greeted me cheerily and suggested I took off my clothes. Ah. Mr Lucas’s secretary had been right – her quizzical glance explained. Now I really was going to be cast.

  After a discussion about the uncomfortable and adhesive nature of plaster and body hair combined, they wrapped me in kitchen film. Another first. I stood there, inelegant and self-conscious, like some long-forgotten leftovers mouldering at the back of a fridge. My sense of humour was trying to win the battle over my feelings of humiliation as they stuck strips of rubber down my sides. I would be cast in two halves, my back first.

  Two posts were fixed to the floor. I watched them enthusiastically mixing powder and water. They moved faster as the chemical process began to work. When the mix reached critical point, they began to slap it on me. Slap. Smooth. Slap. Smooth. I hung on to the posts, trying to stay still, as the heavy, wet plaster clung to me, dragging me down. To make the whole thing more sturdy, they slathered lengths of timber and attached them to me with pieces of hessian. I began to feel like a construction site. And then we stopped. And waited. It got hotter. The windows steamed up.

  Eventually, they decided I could safely wiggle free. I remember making an embarrassing sucking noise as I peeled my body away from the demi-sarcophagus they had just created. And so, on to the other half.

  I lay down in the now cold and damp impression of my back. I wondered how bad this could get. Slap. Slap. Smooth. With just my head sticking out, I had an even better view of the process as they slathered plaster up and down my front. It was like being in a one-man Turkish bath. As the chemicals heated up again, I saw a jet of steam shoot out from a gap at my neck. It was one of the most undignified experiences of my life.

  It got worse.

  They stuck straws up my nose and encased my head in a ball of mortician’s wax and gunk. That bit worked. The rest didn’t. We had to do it again.

  I drove back to Elstree a week later. I knew the form and was slightly dreading it. This time, a comfortable, blue-carpeted dressing room, where Liz Moore was waiting for me – the loveliest and, as I would learn, most talented sculptor. She was charged with making a casting that was a little more accurate. No more chucking plaster at me. She gave me a pair of woman’s tights to wear. Then she carefully stuck strips of rubber down either side. She would make the mould in two halves, as before. I lay on a couch. We talked and relaxed. She gently smoothed face cream over most of my body. And then a layer of plaster. She made me feel like a cake being iced. I began to think I was becoming a work of art. It was all strangely serene – and funny.

  And what a sweet coincidence – Liz had created the Star Child for the last scene of 2001. If I’d known, I would have stayed to the end.

  Days later, I returned to see the results of her efforts. More embarrassment. A dreadfully accurate, albino plaster replica of my rather unappealing body stood on display in the workshop. But Liz soon hid my nakedness with grey modelling clay. Gradually, she carefully achieved what George had in mind for the “look”. She turned Ralph’s painting into three-dimensional reality.

  With Liz’s sculpture as the bible, the Art Department worked to make a viable suit. Over the next six months, I regularly appeared at Elstree to try on a leg, an arm, a chest, a foot – prototypes – cardboard and plastic mock ups. George was often kneeling on the floor in front of me, while he tried to fathom the engineering of Threepio’s knee. When it came to the slightly bulging codpiece, he okayed it as an example of “space eroticism”.

  Most of the pieces were formed out of fibreglass. The chemical smell and the itchiness haunted me on stage every night, where I was wearing a more traditional costume – doublet and hose. I avoid loft insulation to this day. They prototyped a rubber arm. I tried it on. It felt like being trapped inside a giant squid. Disgusting.

  In the days that followed, I was merely a mannequin. I stood there for ages, as the team studied my anatomy and pondered how to create a sort of exoskeleton carapace around it. Dr Who’s enemy, the Cybermen, were a doddle compared with what they were trying to produce. Apart from Fritz Lang’s Maria, in his dystopian film, Metropolis, made some fifty years earlier, nobody had ever really attempted this sort of thing. Maria was Threepio’s pin-up, at least for the designers. Photos of the rather haunting figure were stuck on the office walls. George wanted the Art Department to give his robot that same Art Deco look that had made Maria so striking. And they needed me there as the mechanism that would animate their work. It didn’t cost much to have me around.

  At some point, George organised for me to see 2001. He wanted me to watch the whole thing so I could hear the voice of HAL again. It might help me come up with a voice for his robot. I sat alone in the screening room at Fox. As the wide, pizza-like plates of 35mm celluloid passed through the projector, I realised that I had been too young to enjoy it before. There were parts that I still can’t fathom, even today. But what a marvellous film. I did sit through the whole thing – shocked at my earlier naiveté. I loved it. Especially the voice of the rogue computer. But those wonderfully calm tones would never do for Threepio.

  Back at Elstree, standing there in a huddle of designers, I entertained myself by reading fresh redrafts of the script. Threepio’s role was becoming more and more prominent in each new iteration. I began to feel involved – and quite special, since I was the only actor on the studio lot at this time. The team was so highly qualified and skilled that their attention made me feel important. Of course their attention was to the suit. But they did seem to care about me. So I was rather shocked when I heard them discussing the heat of the Tunisian desert and the melting point of plastic. I wondered what I had let myself in for.

  Now, I wasn’t the only actor on the block. How exciting to finally meet my new master – so prominent in the scripts I was studying. Mark Hamill had flown in from fabled California. That alone gave him a sort of special status in my eyes. I had never been to America. Mark instantly charmed everyone he encountered. His full-on, happy personality was a revelation to me. Words just seemed to tumble out of him, in contrast to my slightly reserved nature. His enthusiasm for the project encouraged me every time we met around the studio. And he seemed to like being in England, in spite of the weather. I liked knowing he was around. It gave me a sense of a team growing around me. He was having costume fittings, too. A costume very different from mine.

  Air conditioning would be essential. A technician arrived with a miniature system. He stared at me, standing there in the nearly complete tight-fitting suit. He went away. He didn’t come back. It would be four decades before they found a solution, of sorts. But for now, my air-con cooling was the tiny letterbox that is Threepio’s mouth. Later, I would learn the art of sucking air into the face through the eyeholes and mouth, and blowing it out with my lips fixed to the inside of the letterbox.

  Liz had created a number of designs for the head. They sat on a shelf, like the aftermath of a medieval battle. Alien, blank, flat, strange, their clay faces star
ed out impassively. I liked them all – except the one at the end. Of course, that was the one George had chosen. In my defence, Liz’s creation looked very different in its dark, monochrome clay with black gas-mask eyes. When the finished, gilded version eventually arrived, I was enchanted. Liz had created something magical. Lovely in repose, yet blank enough for me to add life and emotion.

  Threepio was beautiful.

  4 promises

  I was intrigued by Threepio’s eyes.

  As with humans, his photoreceptors were fundamental to his expressive face. Brilliantly engineered, the honeycombed reflectors were stuck on a mirrored surface. There were tiny light bulbs drilled into them. A layer of black plastic shielded their light from the inside. Thin wires led to a plug that attached to its counterpart, wired to a battery pack on Threepio’s back. My head encased, I could peer through the centre holes but was completely blinkered – seeing nothing except straight ahead. Above, below, sideways were all unknowns, unless I adjusted my position and turned to look. I had never appreciated my peripheral vision before.

  Of course, they would now provide a mirrored studio and playback facilities, so I could rehearse in the suit. Obviously, I wanted to know how to work around its restrictions. George had guessed that it would need an actor with mime experience to get a character performance through sixty pounds of assorted metal, rubber and plastic. Naturally, it was going to take me some time to get the best results. They promised – I would have days to see what degrees of motion were available to create reactions and emotions. Now, finally, the suit was fit for a first try-out. We moved to the cluttered Special Effects unit where Phil McDonald, “Maxi”, my dresser, helper and guardian, had laid all the bits out on a table, very neatly. It did strike me as interesting that, whereas most actors have an assistant from Wardrobe, Maxi was from Props – as if I were a “thing”. There were nineteen pieces that would go together to make the complete Threepio. I stood like an Arthurian knight in my black cotton under-suit as Maxi and friends gradually fitted each section around me. At last, for the first time, I was wearing the whole, magnificent outfit.

  It felt ghastly.

  It was as if I had lost my own body – lost contact with my world. I blundered around the workshop, lightly crashing into various objects. What a relief to take it all off. It had been about fifteen minutes. It seemed longer – a lot longer. But anyway, now please could I take the suit away and rehearse?

  No.

  It had to be air freighted. At once. I would only see it again, weeks later, in the alien sands of Tunisia.

  5 ladies

  It was like an exciting school outing – touring theatre from my past.

  We were flying to Sousse, Tunisia on our own charter flight. It felt quite special. More special, I was sitting across the aisle from Sir Alec Guinness and, I presumed, his wife. How many years had I watched this man on screen? My favourite, The Ladykillers – his goofy-toothed, gentleman bank robber. But there were so many other charming, funny, dramatic roles. And Prince Feisal. How could either of us have predicted that, in forty-plus years, filming the ninth variation on the Star Wars theme, I would be treading the same shifting sands of Wadi Rum as he did when filming that role in Lawrence of Arabia? But now I realised, he was the first famous person I had ever actually encountered. I was in respectful awe – and within arm’s reach. Should I say hello? Would that be an impertinent intrusion on his privacy?

  It was a long flight. As he folded his copy of The Times newspaper, I finally got up the courage to lean across the aisle and introduce myself. He was immediately friendly and charming. In his instantly recognisable rich tones, he introduced me to his wife. Not “Lady Guinness”, just Merula. She was, quite simply, lovely – a real lady – no need for a title. Sir Alec – days later, “Please call me Alec” – was most interested that I was playing the part of the robot. We chatted in bursts, with the service trolley zooming between us – interrupting.

  But now we had arrived.

  The customs officers were rather suspicious of the box of assorted greeblies that Maxi had packed at the last minute. He explained that this strange assortment of knobs and finials were parts of my costume. A “greebly” being something that looked interesting but actually had no real purpose. The officers nodded, as if they had completely understood. They let Maxi carry on through with his precious luggage.

  But now, everything stopped.

  The officers were horrified at a copy of Playboy magazine, brought along by one of the Sparks – a member of the lighting crew. Some of the officials were most offended by the centrefold. Others, after some study, picked the young lady on page nine, as being a true affront to public decency. I think they retained the offensive item so they could debate each page in detail, at leisure.

  A minor delay. Leaving the air-conditioned arrivals hall, we were suddenly exposed on the sun-blasted concrete, in the fearsome heat. The crew bus was close by – nearer was a black limousine. I knew it wasn’t for me, even before I saw Sir Alec and his wife getting in. Ducking his head through the car door, he turned back towards me, his hand reaching into his inside pocket.

  “Pardon me. But have they given you your per diem yet?”

  I was taken aback. I clearly didn’t know what he was talking about. I had never been in a film before.

  “Your pocket money,” he explained gently. “Because they seem to have given me rather a lot and I think you should have some.”

  6 dogs

  I didn’t imagine I would ever want to return to this arid land – though, of course, I would.

  Hot, fly-blown, sand-blown. Just this side of primitive. But that was long ago. Who could have guessed that it would become a major destination, curiously because we filmed there? Now the infrastructure is much improved. But in 1976…

  Maxi and I drove for hours across the Tunisian landscape. He had been tending to the costume pieces, and me, since those early fittings at Elstree. Being from the Props Department, his ingenuity, dedication and patience were to be essential in getting me through this undertaking – not that I knew it at the time.

  Now we were rattling along together in the back seat. Barely wide enough for the car, the tarmac strip edged and crumbled away into sand and stones. Our driver constantly played chicken with the oncoming trucks; tinny horns blaring from both parties. It was better not to look. But I did see, as if in slow motion, a rock whip up and into the windscreen. Crunch! The rest of the journey was somewhat draughty. Eventually we reached Tozeur. It was a relief to arrive, though it was hardly what they call “a destination”.

  The hotel was basic, cheerful and clearly, very cheap. The best they had it seemed, though Sir Alec and Lady Guinness were housed at a distance – somewhere more suited to their status. My room was functionally small with a shower, all blue and white, with running hot and cold water and streaming ants. I would eventually divert them out into the corridor with a sachet of sugar, sprinkled judiciously away from my bed.

  Everything in this world was covered in the finest dusting of sand. I soon learned its persistent, insistent presence in this region. It seemed to get on and in everything – including the food. The dinner menu was: one day fish, next day chicken, next day fish, ad nauseam. Normally guests only stayed one night. We would be there for two weeks.

  Shooting was to start the next day but parts of my costume had yet to be finished – Threepio’s hands. Maxi and I sat on my single bed in the bleaching glare of the overhead light bulb. The box he brought along held some black cotton gloves, wires and weird metal shapes. I put on the gloves. Again using me as a living mannequin, Maxi pushed on the elements of each finger, knuckles and tips and thumbs, securing them with lavish squeezes of glue. It was a sniffer’s dream and rather messy, and late. But Maxi persisted – as the sky blackened to deep night outside.

  The gluing was finished. But now my hands and Threepio’s were as one. The adhesive had soaked throug
h the cotton gloves and attached the metal fingers to me. I sensed Maxi would have preferred me to sleep in them. Eventually he managed to peel them off my skin and took them with him. I got into bed and lay there, too exhausted and nervous to sleep.

  A dog howled in the distance. It was all rather surreal.

  Too few hours later, we were on the road again. Up well before dawn, we were directed to our vehicles and began our first journey to the set. Mark and I shared a car in the chill pre-dawn murk, staring sleepily but wide awake, at our new surroundings. We left the feebly lit streets of the village for the thin road, dusted with layers of sand. At the edges, small dunes and piles of palm leaves shifted as we passed. Eyes stared out, as we disturbed the sleepy inhabitants in their makeshift dwellings.

  A dead dog lay close by – gradually becoming another sand dune.

  We drove on.

  7 action

  So this is what a film set actually looked like.

  We had arrived pre-dawn at the salt-flat location of Lars Homestead – the desolate place where Luke was raised. It didn’t look like much. The sheer flatness of the surroundings was the most impressive thing about it. It went on for ever.

  In the foreground was a domed dwelling with steps leading down, some mechanical junk, a large crater about three feet deep, more junk in the distance, moisture vaporators, the sandcrawler close by – its hefty tank tracks reaching to a height of around thirty feet, then scaffolding. The rest being up to movie magic.