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

  14 escape

  I stood deep amongst the sand dunes, near the apparently crashed vessel – the escape pod.

  Props had shovelled my “footsteps” down, away from the pod into the depression below. Maxi and Co had dressed me up as usual. Then they abandoned me, brushing out their footprints as they backed away to the very distant camera. At my side, Props had placed an empty Artoo shell on skis, attached to a long piano wire which disappeared into the haze, towards the crew.

  I was alone. Except I had to believe I wasn’t by myself. I had to believe in the relationship that I was improvising with my counterpart beside me. If I didn’t believe, neither would the audience. Time passed. My eyes wandered away from the crew, still fiddling with their camera. I turned to survey this truly desolate environment that stretched to infinity. A slight breeze whistled soullessly around me. I felt somehow isolated, forsaken.

  Suddenly. Close by.

  A ragged robed figure stared at me. His sun-hardened face, rigid with disbelief. A local. A real sand person. I felt a momentary sting of panic. But now, he absorbed back into the dunes – he was gone. A startling encounter. For both of us. I turned back. They were waving at me from the camera. And shouting.

  EXT. TATOOINE – DESERT

  ACTION!

  Someone was pulling the piano wire. Artoo moved a little way, before the skis dug themselves into the soft sand surface. The wire snapped. He stopped. I trudged a few paces, wondering what my visitor must have thought. Perhaps, back with his people, he was telling of his encounter with a golden god. They would have thought he was mad.

  CUT!

  15 clunk

  EXT. TATOOINE – DESERT

  ACTION!

  “I’ve got to rest before I fall apart. I’m almost frozen.”

  It was only a slight exaggeration. But it had been a long time. Long. I’d expected the desert location to be sizzling. Today, it was witheringly cold. The chill wind found easy access to my body through the metal and fibreglass components of the suit. My underwear gave little protection. The crew in anoraks and goggles, me in tights and tin.

  The delay was due to the challenge of getting two tottering droids up into shot, from behind a pile of sand. I could almost do it – Artoo certainly couldn’t. Concealed floorboards now flattened the shifting surface. But still Artoo’s motors weren’t powerful enough to drive upwards. Its rubber wheels simply couldn’t get enough traction. They were also stuffed with sand, swirling around us, underfoot and in the air.

  We eventually got the scene, the problem solved with a length of ever-useful piano wire; me trudging up as they hauled Artoo alongside. Reaching the top, they had parked another unit over to my right; a little confusing for me but easier than trying to get one to move there on its own. And all the time, the dunes seemed alarmingly to shapeshift around us in the breeze – all grey skies and eerie and difficult. But not as difficult as talking to myself. In the script, Artoo and Threepio were always nattering to each other. But, apart from the whirring of its motors, the unit was silent. Speechless. Back there in the dunes, I admitted I was finding it challenging, to have a one-sided conversation with something supposed to be my best friend. Could George, or anyone, make a sound in response to my lines? A beep, or something, to make it more real for me – George?

  “Oh. Err. Shurr.”

  We began again.

  EXT. TATOOINE – DESERT

  ACTION!

  “Where are you going?”

  A long pause. George.

  “Oh. Err... BEEP.”

  I didn’t bother him again.

  From then on, I learned the dialogues in their entirety, writing in Artoo’s responses, as I imagined them. Eventually seeing the finished film a year later was a revelation, a rewriting of history, a changing of the facts, as I knew them. Artoo in full-on conversational repartee mode, beeping, whistling, groaning – blowing raspberries.

  I know Ben Burtt. He showed me the inexpensive electronic keyboard he played to create Artoo’s articulate sounds. Pure genius. But, genius on genius, he added his own whistling and his infant son’s sighs and gurgles to the mix. Those human sounds added so much to the belief that Artoo was a living thing, with a vibrant personality. How different from my on-set experience. I sat in the audience, entranced by the conversation that seemed so real. Movie magic – rightly winning Ben an Oscar.

  Back in the gritty, chill sand dunes, it had taken ages to set up the shot. It was really cold and my frustration was growing as the minutes passed. It was almost as though the scriptwriters had known this in advance. The kick that I eventually aimed at Artoo’s shins, was done with feeling. But it didn’t sound like anything. Ben later added a more satisfying Clunk. It felt good.

  A sadness.

  The next day, we received the terrible news that Liz Moore had been killed in a car crash. A senseless loss beyond words. It fills me with a real sadness that she died before ever seeing her creation come alive on film – to become such a beloved and iconic figure around the planet. We all leave this world eventually. Artists can only hope to retain a kind of immortality in the work they leave behind. The Star Child. Threepio. They are immortal.

  I will always remember Liz as a most beautiful and kind and creative soul.

  16 tensions

  We were leaving the uncompromising desert for the comparative normality of a British studio.

  Our Tunisian experience hadn’t been easy. For anyone. Not just me. So many things seemed to go awry. The weather had been an ever-changing factor. One day heat, next day cold, next windy. One time, as I stood there in costume, they held a large umbrella over me. I said thank you, but I wasn’t hot. They pointed out it was raining – hard to tell inside Threepio’s head.

  It got worse. I wasn’t there to see the Tunisian Army trying to haul our vehicles out of the mud. A once-in-thirty-years deluge got them stuck as well. And the sets were mangled by the rain and the wind.

  You had to tolerate the sand, since there was no escape. But it certainly messed with anything mechanical, especially the motorised droids. Frequently, a take had to be abandoned because of the erratic driving of some beautifully designed machine. Beautiful, but not made for this terrain. And the whole shoot had been jeopardised by unusual weather patterns, which were extremely unkind to the schedule. But there were other problems.

  I began to sense that there were communication issues. At heart, the crew didn’t seem to understand George’s vision. I was new to film making, so didn’t know what to expect. Anyway, once George had simply told me where to start and where to end up, he left me alone to do my own thing, as he stood next to the camera. But behind the camera there seemed to be growing tensions.

  Gil Taylor was the very British DOP, Director of Photography, an important person on set, directing the lighting and camera crews to give a film its visual quality, its look. Gil was hugely experienced in the film industry. He’d shot with Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick. He was extremely competent and immensely likeable – an old–fashioned gentleman. But there was something that clearly wasn’t working for him on this production. I was picking up a sort of tetchiness towards him from George. And I began to see, and indeed hear, discussions about the look of the whole film that bordered on argument. As far as I was concerned, George was the director and, in my book, it was what he wanted that mattered. Gil clearly thought otherwise.

  I watched as they set up the shot where the Jawas would suck Artoo up into the sandcrawler. I learned that they would actually drop the unit down and then reverse the film. I loved the ingenuity of it all. But standing below the crawler in the dusky light, the tensions were palpable. Suddenly Gil boiled over. He didn’t appreciate the direction and advice he was receiving from the much younger American, Gary Kurtz. The conversation escalated with him asking, who was lighting the film – him or Gary? If it was him, would the producer please go away. I discreetly
moved aside. The expletive-heavy exchange was unforgettable. I never imagined that you could talk to a producer like that. Years later, I would find that Gil wasn’t the only professional who didn’t like being told how to do his job by Gary.

  For the most part, other tensions were kept in check, often by the gentlemanly demeanour of the First Assistant Director, Anthony Way. He was rather like a Head Boy at a posh English school. But the British crew were clearly fazed by the way the film was being directed. The Americans were obviously used to doing things differently. I did things differently, too.

  I learned they often needed to adjust my height for various shots. They would bring me a small wooden box – a “quarter apple”, or higher, a “half apple” – to stand on. I quickly got the idea. Peering from the camera’s position, I could work out what was needed. One day, I picked up a quarter apple, stacked nearby where we were filming.

  Tony Way looked at me and smiled.

  “You work in the theatre, don’t you?”

  He explained that it simply wasn’t protocol for me to move my own apple box – quarter or not. That was the job of a union member of the crew. I suddenly recalled, as a stagehand cleaning half the enormous stage of the Drury Lane Theatre in London, being warned by a fellow union member not to mop so fast. I needed to slow down, my mopping union colleague pointed out, or we’d never go into overtime. But here, I was shocked again. I hadn’t wanted to bother anyone, by asking them to do something so simple, that I could do for myself. In the sort of shows I’d been in, we just got on with the small practicalities. Next time, I followed Tony’s advice. But I still have to suppress my DIY instincts.

  So far, we had all been on an alien shore. But now we were back to England – back at Elstree where Threepio was born. Glad to be away from the desert, I felt quite at home at the studio. But now there was another problem. It was the weather. Again.

  Newly returned from Tunisia, the chill air of England was quite refreshing and sand-free. Then, suddenly, everything changed. As filming continued inside the stages, outside began to boil. 1976 became the second-hottest year on record. Day after day the sun blazed down. With little air-conditioning, the buildings, already storing heat from the previous day’s onslaught, became ovens. The roads became tar pits. As reservoirs began to dry up, the authorities rationed water and put stand-pipes in the streets. And me – I was in a sound stage, no air-con, huge stage lamps competing to throw out more heat than the sun itself – and me – in a tight fibreglass suit. It was horrible.

  Less horrible – Wardrobe had remembered to give me back my dressing gown. The long, towelling robe was a pleasant creamy colour. I certainly didn’t need it to keep warm. But it was a more modest outfit in which to wander about than my black tights and wire patches, which it covered up.

  And at least I had somewhere to sit. Chairs are at a premium on a film set, unless you’re a producer or director or a star. But they gave me one anyway. You see them in films about films, normally set in Hollywood studios; simple cross-legged canvas affairs, the name in question painted on a sort of canvas sleeve that fits over the back. And there was one with my name. I was hugely impressed and surprised – such kudos! I sat in it and immediately saw a paradox. The mere act of sitting rendered me anonymous, as I covered my name behind me. Standing next to it rather defeated the original purpose. But it was all rather irrelevant. Once on set I would be quickly called to dress up – and remain so for much of the day. Now, wearing the gold armour, the chair was immaterial, an empty thing. But I still enjoyed seeing it. Then, suddenly, it was gone.

  I made enquiries of a stagehand. He willingly went off to solve the mystery. Back soon, he’d found out that Anthony Daniels had never shown up, so they’d assigned his chair to someone else. Subsequent enquiries revealed that the UK crew had not associated me, or my name, with the gold robot. Obviously, they couldn’t recognise me in the suit and, since my dressing gown looked slightly like Obi-Wan’s robe, they had assumed I was Sir Alec’s stand-in.

  Whereas Mark and I used to hang out together quite often in the desert locations, here there were other chairs – other names – Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in particular. Americans. I had no idea who they were. But they were very friendly and seemed to know what they were doing. In fact, I was rather awed by their ease in front of the camera. I was still learning. I had read their roles in the script and could see the dynamics of their characters coming to life on set, relating to each other, to me, to Threepio. And of course to Chewbacca.

  Here was Peter Mayhew joining the cast. His handmade, yak-hair costume looked comfortably floppy, but being brushed into a hair and latex headpiece can’t have been fun. His black eye-makeup needed to be waterproof, as he gently steamed inside.

  Inside my costume was like standing in a slow-running warm shower. Sweat cascaded in seeping dribbles down to my toes. Whenever they agreed to take off the face, I must have made an embarrassingly unattractive sight. How I envied the human cast in their costumes, made of more forgiving stuff than my own – Mark in his cotton tunic, Carrie in cooling white, Harrison in a shirt. And they were primped and coiffed to look good all day. I looked cooked.

  Hot or not, most of us were back on home turf.

  But some issues had returned with us on the charter flight from the desert.

  The crew had grown much larger. The tensions were there still, and mounting fast. I had heard the phrase, “pull the plug”. Now I saw it in action on the set. We usually wrapped – finished up – at five in the afternoon. It must have been hard to judge how long a scene would take to shoot, and sometimes we went over. This had to be with the agreement of the union-heavy crew. In the slightly negative atmosphere that was growing, they were not always predisposed to be helpful.

  I was shocked when the lights went out and we had to leave a scene that, but for a few more minutes’ work, was very nearly complete. The plug had been pulled. Of course, it reduced the heat output on set, but the evening air still stifled me on the way home. And I wasn’t even wearing the suit. Or my robe.

  17 doors

  INT. DEATH STAR – FORWARD BAY – COMMAND OFFICE

  As per the script, the door flew up and Obi-Wan, Luke, Han, Artoo and I quickly entered the room, which was painted, in my opinion, a rather nasty shade of cerise. Apart from that, it was quite impressive – consoles, and knobs, and switches, and a cupboard. That would come in useful later as a hidey-hole for the two droids. But before that, there was a little accident.

  Unfortunately, when the door flew up, my astromech counterpart raced across the room and belted the console. He was scripted to interface with a computer terminal, not bash the thing up. But the control desk was made of sturdy plywood and easily withstood this unprovoked frontal assault. Artoo definitely came off second best.

  I assumed his new-found energy was due to overcharged batteries. Whatever the reason, this unit was not going anywhere today. His severely dented front panels meant that they had to search out a replacement model. So we relaxed while Oscar-winning special effects supremo John Stears and crew got one up to speed – actually less speedy, perhaps, than the one that had just limped off set. But John knew exactly what he was doing. He’d invented Artoo in the first place and this wasn’t the first time there had been technical hitches. To be fair, I’d had a go with Artoo’s remote controls and nearly crashed it myself. It was not easy.

  Time passed and we waded through the scene before it suddenly got interesting. Obi-Wan was leaving on his heroic mission – he needed to open the door again. “The door flew up,” was a bit of an exaggeration. But what is the thing with doors and Star Wars? I have never actually counted the number of door designs in the Saga. Some go up, some down, others sideways. On occasion, they move in a four-piece scissor attack. But I think that, in all those miles of film, there is not one single, simple door that opens inward or outward merely at the turn of a knob.

  INT. DEATH STAR �
� FORWARD BAY – COMMAND OFFICE

  ACTION!

  The silver-grey surface of the door shuddered. Then it trudged reluctantly upward.

  CUT!

  A peek round the back of the set showed that the door-drive was Charlie. He was holding the end of a rope which ran over a pulley. On the other end was the piece of silver ply that was the door. A hefty chap, Charlie’s strength still couldn’t raise the lump of wood fast enough to satisfy George’s vision. So George considered. His master plan is best observed as Obi-Wan finally left the scene.

  ACTION!

  Obi-Wan approached the door. He put his finger on the door-opener button.

  FREEZE!

  The Jedi Master didn’t move.

  DOOR!

  The door slowly rose up and finally socketed into the ceiling.

  ACTION!

  Obi-Wan removed his finger, turned and walked through the resulting gap in the wall.

  DOOR!

  The door fell back into place – greatly assisted by the gravitational forces at Elstree. I would eventually learn what happened next. Real movie magic. There are 24 frames in each second of standard film stock. Months later, George’s team carefully removed every other frame from the exposed footage. This left just 12 pictures, out of the original 24, thereby making the filmed door, when projected at normal speed, appear to move at twice the original. Really clever. But not perfect. Something unexpected happened.

  The clue to George’s trick is seen in Obi-Wan’s face. As the door slides swiftly upwards, he remains completely still – except for his eyes. During that sequence, one of England’s greatest actors, blinks. Fine. Except that, in the speeding-up process, half his blink was cut out! This suddenly makes for a very surprised expression on those venerable features. As though he had just been invisibly goosed. You don’t get that with a door knob. Unless you back into one.