Wow, good interview.  Nice to know he's not fond of the SEs.  Interesting how he was blatantly candid at some points but deeply reserved at others.

Awesomeness! Thanks, starwarsmania!

Great interview! Thanks for the link!

I've long believed that lightsaber building sequence was fully shot, or else why would ILM create a matte painting of the cave exterior?

The cave scene with Luke preparing his lightsaber while 3PO & R2 look on would have been an excellent bookend to the Star Wars scene where they're all introducing themselves to each other the day the droids were purchased from the Jawas. 

A cerebral passage, a reflection if you will, of all they'd been through together.  A sort of once more unto the breech moment as closure to that initial meeting all those years ago. 

Too bad it wasn't part of the film.  Lucas had long since lost his way telling the story of Star Wars anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter. That storyboard shot looks fantastic.  What a lost moment.

Something I've always wondered about including that scene, though, would have been pacing.  Where would it fit in the film?  As much crap as I give the rescue plan in this movie, it does give the characters INTERESTING introductions into the film.  Luke building his lightsaber, while being cool to see on its own, would probably ruin his introduction into that film.

Yeah, just like all the stuff on Tatooine with Luke and his friends.  I would LOVE to see all that... in a deleted scenes feature.  There were reasons these were cut out in the first place.

And yet Lucas puts the meeting up with Biggs on Yavin scene in the Special Edition, and everybody is supposed to know who the heck this guy is. ;)

I have to admit that, of all the shit added in for the SE, that one bothers me the least.  Sure, it doesn't have the context of the rest of the movie (unless you pay attention to the dialogue earlier in the film), and it's not really necessary, but it is a nice scene and helps establish that at least a little bit.

It doesn't bother me, either. Except for the obvious foreground guy walking though they added to cover the dialog about Luke's father that was cut. Nothing about what Red Leader said actually contradicts the prequels. (And it stands to reason Anakin was a popular "war hero" who simply vanished from average citizen's point of view.)

Of course, if the early Biggs scenes had been put in, we'd all be nitpicking about how he managed to find and join the Rebel Alliance in less than a week. ;)

Well, it DOES bother me, on the principle that it's a change to the film.  It's just one that I subjectively don't dislike because it's less invasive and serves more of a purpose than most of the other changes.  There's a subtle difference.  ^_~

Guess I should have said it doesn't bother me that much. It's original footage, and no CGI schenanigans in sight. ;)

Had the special edition simply been a cleaned up restored longer cut, things might be different now.

Interesting interview. I always believed that the lightsaber scene was shot, mainly because of the music that was composed for the scene.

SilverWook said:

Guess I should have said it doesn't bother me that much. It's original footage, and no CGI schenanigans in sight. ;)

 

Well, except for that guy that they digitally inserted to walk across the screen. ;-) I liked that addition very much (the ONLY thing I liked about the SEs), but I would have liked it a whole lot more if they'd left it uncut. :-/

It was Red Leader that talked about Luke's Dad (Biggs wouldn't have been old enough to have known Anakin), and that's the portion that was cut and replaced with the guy walking across the screen. Like SilverWook said, there's nothing that he said that contradicted anything so the cut was really unneccesary.

CO said:

Interesting to read that the reason Han was put in carbonite was because they didn't know if he would do the 3rd movie.  A great moment in the OT simply because Ford wasn't contractually obligated for another movie!

 Wow, I'm amazed you didn't know that, CO!  I thought that was extremely common knowledge in the fandom.

Well, check out the thread I just made about the '04 commentaries!  I posted a link to a page on zombie's site that has an awesome transcription of what was going on the day of filming the carbon freeze scene.  Simply amazing.

"Once Upon a Galaxy" has probably the best behind the scenes info on Empire. It was written journal style by the publicist on the set, literally from the beginning of production and into post production. Whether it ever gets reprinted is anyone's guess. If the recorded audio interviews still survive, they would make for great Blu Ray extras someday!

I've toyed with the idea of scanning the entire book, as I fear it would be edited to reflect George's current take on things.

There's also a video called "State of the Art, the SPFX: The Empire Strikes Back" that is pretty good and one of the only ESB focused docos. Available where ever you find the rest of that stuff.

On a completely different note, does anyone have a high quality picture of the birds eye shot of the Sail Barge set (as seen in the interview in the first post of this thread)? I hadn't seen that picture before and I would like to use it as wallpaper for a bit. Thanks

I was going to start a new topic, but it sort of related to this one so I'll just post it here......

Mark Hamill says he never shot lightsaber construction scene (he didn't say it wasn't shot, just that HE didn't shoot it):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XczClAxhCEM