I Am C-3PO--The Inside Story Page 6

  18 embarrassments

  INT. LARS HOMESTEAD – GARAGE AREA – LATE AFTERNOON

  I nervously stood on a small elevator platform, weighted down by my whole costume. It felt rather peculiar, to be lowered into the vat of green-coloured vegetable oil beneath me. Being early in the year and chill in Elstree studios, the crew had thoughtfully warmed it slightly. The effect was not unpleasant as I descended further into the liquid and it slowly, warmly permeated the intimate spaces inside the suit.

  The steam rising was not so much the temperature of the oil but the effect of two concealed electric kettles, boiling away behind me. A careful viewer would notice that, after a quick dip, Threepio’s left leg was strangely detached from his pants as he rises, Venus-like from the fluid. The sticky tape that was binding the front to the back, had unstuck in the oil. Everything was coming apart. Embarrassing – but not the main embarrassment.

  Many years later, a rather unexpected collector’s item would appear for sale. The baseball-type card showed Threepio rising from the oil in an unusual state. It transpired that a mischievous employee noticed a fold in the plastic part of the costume, just above where the top of the leg should have been. It was caused by the failure of the tape, allowing my leg to drop down. Very cleverly, if tastelessly, he painted in a quite credible extension. Threepio had never looked so excited.

  I have always disapproved of the altered version, which somehow did go into circulation – though it was quickly withdrawn once the offence was discovered. I care less about the poor taste. It’s more that it insults and demeans a good friend of mine, who can’t speak for himself in this galaxy.

  Meanwhile, back in the garage, that same careful viewer might notice the effect on my performance of having no peripheral vision. As the dust contamination slowly eased, I continued the dialogue, a real live dialogue, with my fellow actor, Mark, who was standing to my right. But at some point, I clearly hadn’t noticed that he’d moved across the set. He suddenly wasn’t there. I was confused. I wondered where he’d gone, as I found myself speaking to a blank wall. I soon found him again over to my left – it wasn’t a large set. An unsettling moment, though still not the main embarrassment.

  Safely risen from the bath, oil pouring out of my arms, I made the transition out and down to floor level, during an edit cutaway to Luke. Now came the unintentional moment. I had magically acquired a piece of towelling from somewhere. I held it tight and did drying-oneself-after-a-warm-oil-bath acting. I wouldn’t see the full effect till later. Understandably, given my sensory deprivation, it was not quite the effect I had intended. That same devoted viewer would notice that Threepio seems to be doing something not normally considered acceptable in polite society. As he courteously talks with his new master, he nonchalantly rubs the towel up and down his “space eroticism”.

  19 magic

  At least I was sitting down.

  You never see that happening in shot. It can’t happen. The suit won’t let me. So it’s always a gesture, as to what I am about to do – then a cutaway – and the camera returns to see me settling into a seat. The audience’s imagination provides the in-betweens.

  It felt good for a change not to be carrying Threepio’s body weight, as well as my own. Maxi had dressed me in the top half of the suit. I sat down. He had a collection of body parts, made of flimsier stuff than the usual bits. He also had a pair of scissors, and some gold and gaffer tape – the latter being the essential glue and cure-all on any film production. He carefully cut and pasted sections of gold around my middle and legs. Ever eager to help, Mark got involved, tearing off pieces of tape and handing them over to Maxi. It was like a congenial sewing bee. There wasn’t much I could do but sit there. The results looked convincing, from the camera’s point of view. That’s all that mattered.

  INT. TATOOINE – KENOBI’S DWELLING

  ACTION!

  “Sir, if you’ll not be needing me, I’ll close down for a while.”

  Maxi flicked an external switch he’d rigged earlier. Threepio’s eyes went dark. It sounded as though I would have the morning off.

  “I seem to have found it.”

  They were looking into space. Moments before, Props had put a small oil can on the table. Sir Alec and Mark stared at it before it was whisked away. The actors kept gazing at the empty space as they said their lines. Eventually, George would superimpose the classic shot of Carrie’s hologram, and Obi-Wan and Luke would be looking right at it. But at the time, there wasn’t much to admire, except the strange objects on Obi-Wan’s coffee table – weird, trunked, upside-down cups. I asked. Of course – antique silver ear trumpets. Props are ever so inventive.

  But I did not get the morning off. I had to sit there while Sir Alec explained about the lightsaber. I remained motionless throughout. It would have been fairly easy were it not for the breathing. Droids don’t breathe. Humans do. To survive the numerous takes – it all took quite a while – I really had to give myself a crash course in shallow-breathing techniques.

  “Your father’s lightsaber.”

  Sir Alec handed Mark a sort of handle thing. Mark admired it and pressed a button.

  FREEZE!

  Mark stood very still as a Props person ran in. He slid a stick into the handle and ran out.

  ACTION!

  Mark waved the stick. It was covered with a reflective coating. Next to the camera was a spotlight. The light bounced off a half-silvered mirror, set at forty-five degrees in front of the lens, straight at the saber. The beam shone off the blade, sending itself straight down through the mirror, back through the lens and onto the film behind it. The lightsaber silently glowed. Movie magic. Until Mark waved it out of the spotlight’s beam. Then it was just a stick again.

  And all the time I sat there, breathing shallow. It would not be the last time I had to play “switched off”.

  20 steps

  I remembered Ahmed and his home in that dusty street, a few weeks before.

  I bet it didn’t look anything like this. I was surveying a particular den in the hive of scum and villainy, from the top of a flight of steps. There were five of them leading down to the bar. Threepio, you might recall, does not do steps. I had rehearsed and counted, counted and rehearsed. Now this was it.

  INT. TATOOINE – MOS EISLEY – CANTINA

  ACTION!

  Blindly staring ahead, I felt the top step under the sole of my deck shoes. Like a swimmer leaving the security of the pool edge, I allowed myself to fall forward onto the edge below, and below that, and below again. Counting – a miscount would smash Threepio’s joints into my kneecaps, breaking both. Counting – all the time, trying not to speed up, to keep control. Counting – until I reached the floor, three seconds later. It seemed an age. Now a relief.

  I didn’t want to risk it again but George wanted a second take – “for safety”.

  And there I was with Mark in front of an unlikely collection of bar flies. They’d asked me to recruit my drama-school friends, to perform as alien characters. They wouldn’t cost much. I started to phone around. I’d worked with Paul Blake on my first job on television. We’d got on well and he was happy to be involved – potentially. Production called me again. They couldn’t afford actors. Crowd artists in rubber heads would have to do. A shame, since there’s more to being an alien than wearing rubber. But Paul, I’m glad to say, did make it into the film, as the infamous Greedo. My student friends would have to build their careers from another starting block.

  In the end, it didn’t matter, since the scene would be partly reshot in California, months later. This time with music. George realised that an alien band number would add considerable dose of whackyness, not just new rubber creatures with crazy instruments, but John Williams’ beloved music was a glorious extra – once an additional budget had been found. It became an iconic moment in an iconic film – a moment that almost never was.

  And here was
the moment where the crew adopted another catchphrase. The arm of the pugnacious thug, who’d been nasty to Luke, lay on the floor, newly severed by the sweep of a Jedi Master’s lightsaber. Now the bartender’s voice bellowed out the words, which would subsequently be used to calm any escalating situation on set.

  “No blasters!”

  I still use the phrase occasionally. People give me a strange look. They weren’t there at the time.

  For moments, Threepio gazed around the Cantina with Master Luke, but not for long. A medium close-up of the belligerent and heavy-set bartender broke the mood. Like a pro, he had learned his lines.

  “We don’t serve their kind here. Your droids. They’ll have to wait outside.”

  How cruel – and how funny.

  The actor playing our barman friend was obviously not familiar with the sort of vocabulary we were using in this space fantasy. According to him, the kind they didn’t serve was, “Druids”.

  21 pyros

  Being in this sci-fi film was actually quite interesting.

  Being in any film would be interesting to me, at the time. It was my first. Whenever possible, I watched scenes that I wasn’t actually in. It helped pass the time and I learned a lot. Here I was observing from a safe spot, well behind the camera. We were staring at a doorway at the end of a squeaky clean white corridor. The crew were all holding plastic shields over their faces. It was already rather dramatic, even though they hadn’t started yet. Everyone seemed to be quite tense, especially the Special Effects crew with their pyros, because this was a “live set”.

  INT. REBEL BLOCKADE RUNNER

  ACTION!

  BANG!

  A really loud one – and I mean loud. At least I could see the cause of the loudness. But people waiting around the fringe of the stage were genuinely shocked, and not in a nice way. So much bang and too much smoke. The pyro charge was perhaps a little stronger than it needed to be. It was only meant to blow the door off. It terrified the bystanders. And the sound would be replaced in post anyway. I would later understand that a certain amount of noise is good – it helps actors react appropriately to explosions. Too silent, and they might not even notice. But this was overkill. Nor was the blast actually intended to mask the arrival of the arch villain, by wreathing him in clouds of dense smoke. It billowed up to the corridor ceiling and down again, rolling towards the camera.

  After this experience, it was understandable that I was a little apprehensive, as I stood on one side of a similar corridor. All I had to do was run across to the other side, following Artoo and dodging imaginary blaster fire. Easy. Except that the doorway through which I would run housed a fearsome-looking weapon. It was rather like a wok – a large metal dish pointing outward towards me. I watched them fill it with cork and Fuller’s Earth, and explosives. This was the team that nearly wiped out the Dark Lord, before he’d even wagged a finger. I was nervous. They were going to push the button on their bowl of pyros the second I’d gone by. Okay. But what if it were a second too soon? I’d be peppered and blasted, unless I was, for once, paradoxically, protected by my gold suit. It still didn’t sound too safe to me.

  INT. REBEL BLOCKADE RUNNER

  ACTION!

  I beetled across the corridor in around three seconds – an eternity of fear. Then the fourth second. I was passing the wok. Pssheeww… I heard the blast. I felt a warm draught. I had survived.

  As I write, there is no Oscar or Bafta award for Stunts. There should be. They’re often the unsung heroes of any action film. I was slightly heroic myself – once. As Luke and Han prepare to battle with the TIE fighters, Threepio scuttles down a corridor. Cut to the fight in space. Cut to laser fire. Cut to him walking and the explosion that painfully blasts him backwards against the wall.

  It wasn’t the explosion that hurled me against the wall. It was two hefty Stunts. They were on the other side of the corridor wall, on the far end of pulleys and ropes. These were attached to a wire, running through a hole in the wall and connected, at the back, to a large belt around my waist. They had laid the slack wire out backwards, along the edge of the corridor, to my start mark.

  INT. MILLENnIUM FALCON – CORrIDOR

  ACTION!

  Like a condemned man I walked forward – reluctantly. They gently gathered up the slack until I passed the hole in the wall. I took another step.

  Bvisssh!

  Cued by the explosion, they yanked the ropes, picking me up off my feet and smashing me hard against the wall, nearly pulling me through it.

  CUT! CUT!

  Voices yelled in panic. Quickly the crew rushed forward through the smoke. But thank The Maker – the wall was all right!

  22 trash

  Threepio was somewhere else on the Death Star at the time.

  That meant I could actually watch the scene being shot. I wanted to see it, because I’d been intrigued, as I walked from my dressing room to various sound stages at Elstree. I had regularly passed a rather fearsome… thing. A mucus-green, suckered tentacle, dressed around a long steel arm that pivoted on a stand. The whole beautifully crafted prop was quite intimidating and very long; something like a limb of the giant squid that menaced in the movie, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Fine for them – they’d had the whole ocean to play with there. Here, this thing was intended to wreak havoc inside a small and untidy room which, in due course, would get even smaller. There wouldn’t be nearly enough room to swing this sucker. So it stayed in the corridor, abandoned – weeks of work, wasted.

  Then came idea Number Two. Smaller, ovoid, brown. It wasn’t exactly steaming as we stared at it, but George precisely verbalised my own thoughts. This, too, would be abandoned.

  Finally, the Art Department came up with something less contentious – a snorkel eyeball thing. This was the dreaded dianoga. Not particularly terrifying, as it popped its eye above the water. But what followed was certainly more interesting.

  The crew had opened up the floor in the sound stage and filled it with water and assorted junk. This was the trash compactor. The walls were on tracks that were cleverly motivated by a forklift truck. It was rigged to a complicated series of wires and pulleys. As the truck slowly drove off, the system pulled the two surfaces together – fascinating to watch. Especially as I wasn’t getting my feet wet.

  INT. DEATH STAR – GARBAGE ROOM

  ACTION!

  Luke was dragged beneath the grimy surface by a tentacle of the fearsome dianoga. It was a rather smaller tentacle than the abandoned version but it did the job. It wound itself up Luke’s leg and yanked him down. Mark sank out of sight. This was actually more due to the efforts of a frogman, hiding beneath the surface. But the bit that most impressed me was the way the tentacle had slithered through the water and up Mark’s leg. Because, of course, it hadn’t. Mark had stood there, holding onto a nylon fishing line attached to the squid arm, already wound around his leg.

  ACTION!

  Mark let go of the invisible line and Props pulled on the sucker. It uncoiled and slipped back through the water. Later, George would reverse the shot. Movie magic. Again. I loved it.

  Less magically, Mark yelled so loudly that he ruptured a blood vessel in his eye. For several days, he could only be filmed from his best side.

  Revenge Of The Dianoga, perhaps.

  23 game

  The upholstery was not quite as soft as it looked.

  If the seats were always this hard, it’s no wonder Threepio hated space travel. But somehow I felt quite at home in the Falcon’s sitting area. It was all rather domestic. There was Mark, practising his new skills with a stick, under Sir Alec’s avuncular gaze. Peter Mayhew was playing some holographic match against Artoo, while I observed. We both stared at the table. The black and silver design was really quite smart. The pedestal helped to mask my fake legs, a little. Maxi had, once again, made a gold collage around my lower limbs so I could sit there, watching
the game. Except – there wasn’t one.

  It’s a favourite scene of mine but, on the day, the table was bare. Like so many elements in the finished film, those magical characters, clobbering each other across the chequered markings, would be added later by ILM, eventually coming as a complete surprise to the audience, and me. However, the scene became immediately iconic for another reason. Film crews tend to adopt an in-phrase or two. “No blasters” had already leavened the atmosphere on set. Now my “Let the Wookiee win”, became a general expression of kinship, for any occasion.

  INT. Millennium FALCON – CENTRAL HOLD AREA

  We were now under attack. Blaster fire raked the ship, so it was a bumpy take off. All the little knick–knacks skittered about on the shelf behind us. This was less due to the blaster fire, as to the Props behind the wall, bashing the underside of the shelf with broom handles. A neat effect but a bit noisy – like blaster fire, I suppose.

  I’m only occasionally sure of how my performance in the gold suit reads from the outside. I have to think mechanically. At the same time, I do have to use my humanity to give the pieces of plastic some sense of inner emotion. Then I act it a little larger than life, hoping it works. A moment that does get my approval is when Threepio is seated once more in the central hold. The joys and dangers of playing a board game with Chewie had been replaced by tragedy. Obi-Wan, that most noble of Jedi Knights, had sacrificed himself to allow his friends to escape. As always, context helps the audience feel the emotion of the moment but Threepio is clearly moved by Obi-Wan’s destruction.

  With very, very little movement from me, I can read the sadness on his face.

  24 fame

  “You’re not in this scene, so we wondered if you would do him,” said Props.

  I was loitering, watching the crew set up a shot. They put a plastic head in my hands.