Richard Edlund Interview

The original Star Wars films would never have been possible without the talents of a small group of experimental visual effects artists; trailblazers whose eclectic skills in mechanics, optics, photography and filmmaking were—if you’ll pardon the pun—light-years ahead of established industry standards.

Lucas’ space saga called for a quality of photo-realism that was hitherto unachievable. Perhaps the closest film to Star Wars in overall look was the 1968 sci-fi classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lucas’ epic, however, would undertake a level of visual effects complexity that would astonish even Stanley Kubrick.

In 1975, after being hired as visual effects supervisor for Star Wars, John Dykstra set about putting together a team that could help him design and execute the complex effects. One of Dykstra’s first tasks was to find someone to head the critically important optical department. He chose Richard Edlund as chief miniature and optical cameraman. Richard possessed a diversified background in motion picture and special effects photography. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, his foray into visual arts began when he became a keen photographer in junior high school. He augmented his knowledge of photographic technology and technique during a four year hitch in the U.S. Navy—where he started up a movie department at the U.S. Naval Air Base in Atsugi, Japan—and later, at the University of Southern California. He spent four ensuing years working for his mentor, Joseph Westheimer, rotoscoping and hand-lettering titles for shows such as Star Trek, The Outer Limits and The Wild, Wild West.

After leaving Westheimer, he segued back into conventional photography for a while, shooting promotional stills and films for notable rock bands such as The Fifth Dimension. In 1974, he joined Robert Abel and Associates, and for about a year-and-a-half was shooting animated graphics for television commercials using complicated “motion-control” photography.

Richard was thus an ideal candidate to helm the optical department, and would be instrumental in advancing motion-control technology, and for resurrecting and refining bluescreen matte photography. Both these technologies would enable the visual effects that astounded moviegoers and changed the industry.

When John Dykstra did not return for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, Richard was asked by George Lucas to take charge as special effects supervisor, and in 1983 he returned to design special visual effects for Return of the Jedi.

Richard received a shared Oscar® for his innovative work on Star Wars, then went on to receive the same honor several more times for the rest of the Star Wars Trilogy, as well as other George Lucas projects, including Raiders of the Lost Ark. He has also received two BAFTA® awards for Poltergeist and Return of the Jedi, and an Emmy Award® for Battlestar Galactica.

Later, he created visual effects for many other notable films, including Ghostbusters, 2010, Die Hard, Alien3, Cliffhanger, Species, True Lies and Air Force One. Most recently, Richard’s talents have been employed on projects such as HBO’s miniseries, Angels in America and the remake of The Stepford Wives.

He is an eight-year governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences® and has been the chairman of the Visual Effects Branch since its inception in 1995. He is also chairman of its Scientific and Technical Awards Committee.

I recently sat down to talk with Richard about the groundbreaking techniques he employed to create the extraordinary visual effects in the Star Wars Trilogy.

Robert: What were the unique skills you possessed in 1976 that led to your association with Star Wars?

Richard Edlund: I think my value to Star Wars was owing to the fact that I had a very broad, general knowledge of all the disciplines that come into play with visual effects. I knew enough about photochemistry to set up a developing lab; I knew enough about optics to figure out what kind of lenses we would need to design for optical printers; I had an innate sense of mechanics—I’m a very good mechanical designer and had worked as a mechanical engineer with a truck body company when I was going to college, as well as working on hydraulic-powered refrigeration systems. I also had a strong art background, particularly in photography. I was part artist and part gear-head.

So I had all of these talents, and additionally, just before Star Wars began, had become steeped in high-tech photography, working with Robert Abel, who had an effects studio. We had been building early, low budget motion-control systems to shoot animated graphics for television commercials, like 1975’s big “7UP UNCOLA” campaign, which went head-to-head with Coke. There was so much going on in these animated graphics that you couldn’t possibly see everything in the commercial at once. You could literally watch the commercial over and over again and see something new each time.

In any event, I happened to have a potpourri of abilities that made me uniquely qualified for Star Wars. If I needed to come up with some gadget, like a special lens adapter or extender, I could readily build it in an afternoon.

Robert: I take it then that John Dykstra was well aware of your abilities?

Richard Edlund: There was a kind of brotherhood that was involved in this sort of experimental photography, including Doug Trumbull, John Dykstra, Matthew Yuricich, Bill Shourt, Dick Alexander and Robby Blalack…and we all knew each other. We were, at times, competing with one another and were always aware of what each other were doing.

Plus, I already had lots of connections into the industry itself. I had gone out and interviewed a lot of the old masters who were all in retirement. They’d worked on the movies of the ‘50s, the kinds of FX heavy films that had by-and-large petered out for almost two decades until Star Wars came along; films like The War of the Worlds and Forbidden Planet. Exceptions were 2001, though it still used rather primitive—albeit high quality 65mm—techniques, and The Birds, which was a really complicated visual effects movie. So I was very aware of these individuals and savvy about their work.

Robert: Had Ralph McQuarrie’s conceptual art been completed by the time you came onboard?

Richard Edlund: Oh yeah. George had met with Ralph already. Ralph had worked as a conceptual artist for Boeing. The engineers would come up with some fancy idea for an airplane, and then Ralph would do a painting of it.

Robert: When you saw Ralph’s designs, what was your reaction from a visual effects standpoint? Did it inspire excitement in you, or did you think, “How the hell are we going to pull this off?”

Richard Edlund: Both. If you look at those paintings, you can really see how Ralph art-directed the entire Trilogy. The sense of design in his paintings is evident all throughout. He doesn’t get enough credit in my estimation for what he contributed to the Star Wars films.

Robert: In terms of visual effects, what were the unique challenges that needed to be overcome to realize these films?

Richard Edlund: Normal visual effects technology before Star Wars would not have been successful, because what we had to do is create dogfights and spaceships flying around in such a way as to make them look agile and maneuverable. The ships needed to have that kind of animated dynamic, whereas the photographic techniques that were available at the time were basically stop-motion. In other words, you’d shoot a frame, move the object, then shoot another frame, etc, etc. And each time you’d shoot a frame, that frame would be crisp and sharp. But when you project something that’s moving quickly—where each frame is crisp and sharp—it strobes and doesn’t look natural.

For example, if a ship flies towards you, heels around and slides into a turn, what you would see on a frame-by-frame basis is a lot of motion blur, because each frame gets about a 1/50th of a second exposure, and 1/50th is not fast enough to freeze each frame. And after seeing hundreds or thousands of movies, the audience’s mind is conditioned to certain artifacts and won’t accept it as real.

So what we needed to do was create a robotic camera system for shooting miniatures that would enable us to mimic what a 24 fps movie camera would do if you were actually shooting a full-sized ship that was really flying. This was called “motion-control.” With the motion-control rig, we were actually shooting at a very slow rate. Because of the dynamics of our enormous boom-mounted camera, which was moving down a forty-foot track, in order to achieve the sequences we were actually shooting at 1 fps or slower. So we were slowing the action down to where it was a 1/25th or 1/50th of its actual speed in real life.

The basic premise is that by shooting a programmed sequence where the camera is moving, and the model’s yaw and pitch is simultaneously articulating on a pylon, the net effect is the same because the two are shot in ratio to one another to create natural looking motion. Of course, for linear shots, one moves the camera to the model rather than the other way around, because it’s easier to shoot that way than to try to move a model down a long path. Sometimes we would also shoot upside down or tilt the camera on its side and use gravity to our advantage.

Motion-control also enables one to shoot multiple passes used to record different elements that can later be composited into the same shot. For example, for an image of an Imperial Star Destroyer passing by us, we would require the beauty shot of the ship itself, occasionally a separate matte shot to allow backgrounds and stars to be added later, and a shot of the rocket engines at a radically different exposure using diffusion filters. The technique was crucial for special shots, like the stars streaking and disappearing for the hyperspace effect.

Robert: Can you elaborate a little more on the actual camera system you developed, and how you were able to attain such finite control?

Richard Edlund: Essentially, the invention here was a robotic camera system that would precisely repeat its moves, shoot continuously, and get very close to the models we used, which were very small. With 365 shots to accomplish, it was easier and quicker, for example, to move small models around than make big models. All these considerations had to be factored into the equation, and all came to bear in the designing of the camera system.

When we began Star Wars, the stage we used in Van Nuys only contained a card table and a phone. We literally started with nothing, and built the entire system from the ground up over a nine-month period. The motion control system we built was ironically put together using technology that had been developed for the space race, which was solid-state circuitry. With this solid-state circuitry, with motors called stepping motors—which could step 200 times per revolution—and with digital clocks, we could then create a robotic camera system that enabled us to shoot a space movie…utilizing space technology! In fact, we even bought actual NASA surplus equipment from which to rob parts to build our photographic system.

I remember a few years later I met Buzz Aldrin, who told me that the film had knocked his socks off. He said he was ripping the armrests off his seat when he first saw Star Wars. And here was a guy who had actually been to space!

Robert: High praise, indeed.

Richard Edlund: It certainly was.

Robert: I understand the other technique that you re-introduced, and greatly advanced for Star Wars, was bluescreen matte photography.

Richard Edlund: Yeah, that was the other big advance that enabled us to do what we did.

There was some argument amongst us at the beginning as to how we were going to matte these models. I immediately leaned towards using bluescreen. John [Dykstra] was arguing against it, because he wanted to shoot what they call “front-light, back-light,” where you shoot the beauty pass of a model, then drape black over the mounting apparatus and shoot it against black. You then take the black velvet down behind the model and substitute a white background, and then you light that background and shoot the model in silhouette.

I didn’t like that idea for a number of reasons. The main reason was because you end up shooting two different kinds of exposures, so that the blur of the edge of the matte—if it were in silhouette—would have different edge characteristics than the edge of a ship in key-light. So the matte wouldn’t really match the model properly. Secondly, you would get reflections off the model that would put holes in the matte, creating yet another problem. Thirdly, there were a number of shots where it wouldn’t work for us to use backlight because those shots would have to be undertaken with a high-speed camera.

In order to come up with a “one size fits all” technique that would facilitate the high-speed production line we needed to complete the shots in a timely fashion, I thus argued for the bluescreen technique. I’d done some tests using bluescreen with Joe Westheimer—a Hollywood visual effects legend who was my mentor in the 1960s—and was confident that the process would serve us well on Star Wars.

Fortunately, my argument won out. We built this large 13 by 20 foot bluescreen with a DC power supply to eliminate any of the flicker one normally associates with fluorescent lights. The lights themselves were special tubes made for us by Duraflex that spiked in the blue spectrum and created this really perfect blue. In fact it was so blue that when you looked at it any floaters in your eyes looked like spermazoa swimming around! It was very strange and sometimes we would wear yellow glasses to cut down the glare.

So our bluescreen was basically a big light box with a blue translucent screen, against which we could shoot the models and create perfectly fitting mattes. We also had special mounting pylons constructed for us to support the models. They contained special gas-filled neon tubes that matched the bluescreen.

Naturally, our philosophy with all of the shots was to make the models look as good as possible, even if it meant forgetting where the light source in space would naturally be…like a star for example. We needed to be certain that the models were evenly and highly illuminated to avoid any possibility of spills from any of the blue light sources, which would create holes in our mattes.

Robert: I take it then that the artistic lighting, motion and composition of the sequences were often dictated by how best to technically achieve a photo-realistic shot.

Richard Edlund: That’s right. Also, by the time we got to The Empire Strikes Back we had perfected all of this technology to the point where we could completely eliminate any trace of matte edges around the models.

Robert: Speaking of the models, had model-building technology advanced by the time Star Wars came along?

Richard Edlund: Oh yeah. We had incredibly talented model-makers who were artists in every sense of the word. They used all sorts of special materials: plexiglas, special woods, etc. We would also go down and buy lots of tank parts and automobile engine parts. For example, on the very forefront of the twin tongs that stick out from the front of the Millennium Falcon were two cylinder heads from a Maserati automobile. There were also other engine parts that were glued on the Falcon in different configurations, particularly around the lateral edge of the ship. You could never identify any of these parts because the model makers would modify them slightly.

Those parts gave you all sorts of complex shapes that you could alter with a file and a jigsaw to make antenna structures and other assorted features. Plus we had fiber optic tubes to illuminate the interior of the large ships like the Star Destroyers. We had an incredibly talented model group under Grant McCune. And of course our effects designer Joe Johnston was always watching over us because Joe was a kind of uber-designer.

Robert: Joe Johnston had this to say on the original ship designs: “The Y-Wing and most of the ships originally had a bubble canopy like one sees on jet fighters. They were also delicate; they had very thin support and weaponry that would have completely disappeared in front of a blue screen.” Tell us a little about that.

Richard Edlund: Yeah, we wound up using flat-paneled canopies, largely because of the reflection problems we had in trying to shoot rounded canopies. In those cases I would come in and say, “This is going to be a problem,” or “That is going to be a problem.” Everything had to be carefully designed, and as you alluded to before, we got involved in those designs from a practical VFX shooting standpoint. Joe was the aesthetic eye on the film, but necessity dictated that it be a collaborative process. It was a democratic group, and ideas were welcome to come from wherever, but of course at some point someone would say “yes” or “no” on which way we were going to go.

But it was a lot of fun, because every other day we were doing something that had never been done before. We had to invent ourselves out of problems all the time.

Robert: Which visual effects shot do you believe was most significant to establishing the whole look and feel of Star Wars?

Richard Edlund: The opening shot in Star Wars was, to my way of thinking, definitely the most important visual effects shot we were going to have to do. Because if we didn’t get the audience with that shot, and hook them into the fantasy and the action through it, we were in real trouble. The thing about that sequence is that we only had about 38 feet of track movement for the entire fly-over, which was very limiting in designing the shot.

The other related issue was: how do you know how big something is, especially if it’s a spaceship you’ve never seen before? How do you establish the scale? In the first film we only had one model of the Star Destroyer, and it was about 30 or 36 inches long. It had an opening in the bottom that was about 5 inches by 3 inches. So I asked Grant McCune to get his best guy to detail the hell out of that part of the model.

Then, for our visual effects test of this particular sequence, I asked the model makers to make a finely detailed, two-inch long model of the Rebel Blockade Runner, which I attached to a paper clip. I stuck it out on the nose of the Star Destroyer, and then attached a 24mm wide-angle lens to a tilting lens board on the camera—in order to hold focus and maintain depth-of-field—then shot the sequence upside down, with the camera under-swung and practically scraping the bottom of the underside of the Star Destroyer. I think there was maybe 1/30 of an inch clearance and oftentimes I’d hit the model and have to call the model shop and say, “You guys have gotta come and fix this!” So they’d come fix it and we’d carry on. Keep in mind too, that this was one of the later shots we did, about three-quarters into the production.

Anyway, when we looked at the test sequence the next day, it looked utterly fantastic; we were awestruck by it, with this little two-inch model. Everybody was just shocked that this actually worked. I sent it up to George, and George said, “Well, it looks like you solved our problem.” I did about four more test takes, though we ultimately didn’t use the two-inch Blockade Runner model. The actual Blockade Runner model we used was about four or five feet long.

Robert: So what we see is the four to five foot Blockade Runner being pulled up into the 30 inch Star Destroyer?

Richard Edlund: That’s right. Composited, of course.

Incidentally, the Blockade Runner model was originally supposed to be the Millennium Falcon. But George came in one day and felt that it looked just like the Eagles in Space: 1999. So Joe Johnston came up with the round version, which Grant McCune promptly referred to as the “pork burger,” which is how it came to be known in the model shop.

Robert: How big was the original Falcon model?

Richard Edlund: It was about three feet in diameter.

Robert: I know audiences were astounded by the tremendous detail on all of those models.

Richard Edlund: Well, keep in mind the next time you see the film’s opening sequence that the Star Destroyer was only finished on one side. Because of the tremendous detail that was required it made little sense to finish both sides of the model when you could just flop it and shoot it from the other side. So the top was finished on only one side, but the bottom—which was crucial to the opening shot—was finished on both sides. Plus the back end and the conning tower were finished.

Robert: George Lucas made the following remarks about the text scrolling that appears at the opening of the films: “The role-up came out of the serial concept, which was that this was a series of movies and not a single movie. At the beginning, it was pretty long and unwieldy, and I kept paring it down and paring it down.” What sort of technique did you use to achieve that now famous prologue to the films, and did it present any unique challenges?

Richard Edlund: George wanted the titles to go off into infinity. That’s kind of a classic look from the ‘40s; I’d remembered seeing a title like that somewhere else. I set up a light box lit with fluorescent tubes on the track on the floor running parallel to the lightbox, tilted the lens forward to get the depth-of-field, and shot it at a very slow ASA 8 or 10 film. They were four to five second exposures as I recall. By tilting the camera at an angle we could create the illusion of the text disappearing on the horizon. Again, the camera was motion-controlled by computer to keep the scrolling speed constant. We optically added the star field later to complete the effect.

Robert: What sort of material was used for the text itself?

Richard Edlund: It was a black lithograph—essentially a high contrast film known as Kodalith—with transparent letters. Of course the light box made the transparent letters appear white. The whole trick was to get it lined up just right, and it was a nightmare to get perfect. Sometimes the heat from the light box would cause the Kodalith to buckle. With hundred of frames to shoot, it took hours to complete.

Robert: Did either George Lucas or Gary Kurtz fully understand all the new techniques you were developing to realize their vision?

Richard Edlund: George didn’t understand that much about it, though he learned as the three films progressed. George knew what he wanted on film, and what kinds of shots he wanted. But he wasn’t going to bother his mind with the technical problems.

Gary Kurtz, on the other hand, grasped what we were trying to do right away. He was probably the main reason that ILM was built. Gary was a gearhead. You could explain this complicated stuff to him and he understood why this lugubrious—I call it photo-masochistic—system had to be the way it was. He understood that there was not a simpler way to do this.

Robert: When you saw the first completed cut of Star Wars, what was your reaction?

Richard Edlund: I was stunned. I really was.

One of the difficulties with Star Wars was that since there were so many elements—with a jungle of incredibly complicated setup contraptions—it took hours to stage and shoot everything. I would shoot for twelve hours during the day, plus deal with other responsibilities, then Dennis Muren would come in at night. So every time you’d set up one of these complicated sequences you’d have to shoot it and know that it was right, because there wasn’t time to shoot tests of everything in color to see how it would turn out…otherwise you’d lose a whole day in the lab to check each setup.

Working on this film, and the subsequent sequels, was like exercising the brain to the max. Everyday there was pressure to do something that hadn’t been done before. So everything considered, the overall result was remarkable.

And it was an extraordinary experience. I remember being around the coffee machine with the guys and saying to them: “You know, guys, remember these days, cause these are the good old days.” It was an opportunity to do all the things that we wanted to do. I guess on some level we’d been hoping for something like Star Wars to come along to give us the opportunity to do some of these things that we knew we could do.

Robert: You’ve now moved into writing and producing as well. In addition to writing a screenplay entitled, Occupied—which I understand is a forbidden love story that takes place in occupied Japan in 1947—you’re also working to bring Joe Haldeman’s classic science fiction novel, The Forever War to the big screen. I’m going to ask you to take off your VFX hat for a moment, and put on your storytelling hat. In your estimation, what made the first Star Wars Trilogy so extraordinarily successful?

Richard Edlund: I think that George looked at America and the world with a real wide-angle lens, so to speak, and asked himself, “what is missing in the world of film?” And the answer was, fantasy. There had not been a good fantasy movie made for some time. He felt that the world was ripe for that. And George had a lot of respect for work like Joseph Campbell’s A Hero With a Thousand Faces. I think he realized that the heroic, fantasy-type movie was what was missing from the cinema at that time, and made a very smart decision in starting to work on it very assiduously.

He was also very adept at surrounding himself with a broad range of talented artists: conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie, sound effects specialist Ben Burtt, our visual effects team and, of course, composer John Williams…to name but a few.

Moreover, I think that George’s wife, Marcia had a real innate sense of romance and heart, and I think she brought a lot to Star Wars that people don’t see. She was an editor by training and an editor on Star Wars. She was in the cutting room all the time, and in fact won an Oscar for editing the first film. She was very talented and was there through all three of the films. Unfortunately, she and George split up after Jedi.

I believe all these factors blended together to in some part help make Star Wars the success that it was.

Robert: Richard, I’d like to thank you for giving us a glimpse inside the fascinating technologies and techniques you developed for these extraordinary films.

Richard Edlund: My pleasure. Thank you.

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