Why would starfields have been shot on colour film stock?

I’ve just read one of American Cinematographer’s great collection of interviews about the making of the Star Wars films: (https://theasc.com/magazine/starwars/articles/starwars/mm/pg3.htm)

This one is about the motion-control model photography, and I’m a little confused by this statement.

the star-move is photographed directly onto color negative and set aside for laboratory delivery

We know they had black and white film stock on hand, because the same interview discusses them shooting motion-control elements on b/w to check they all line up.

So why would the monochrome star fields be shot on colour negative? Is there some inherent difficulty in optically compositing colour and b/w film together?

It’s hard to tell, but the starfields aren’t 100% monochrome, particularly ROTJ, in which the starfields are more blue-on-black than white-on-black.

Having tried to restore the 1981 version of the ANH title crawl, the stars are not B&W. There is color there. Plus, B&W film delivers a different type of black than color film. So they would not use B&W film for the stars.

That’s interesting, thank you both. I’ll have to have a closer look at some starfields some time.

Watch the starfield in the tilt-down to the star destroyer after the crawl finishes in ESB. There’s stars of multiple colors (including a rather prominent red one), as well as at least one (blue) planet.

Jedit: whoops, there’s also a big brown planet!

canofhumdingers said:

Jedit: whoops, there’s also a big brown planet!

Wouldn’t the planets have been shot as separate elements and composited in?