STAR WARS INSIDER / 39INTERVIEW: GARY KURTZHoth’s incredible look. “We had a
lot of snow and blizzard conditions
in Norway. We didn’t have enough
wind machines to fake a storm, so it
looked stormy because we just shot
in a real blizzard,” Kurtz said. “We
couldn’t shoot as fast as we wanted
to, so I directed part of the second
unit to help Kershner catch up.”An Equal Sequel
The Empire Strikes Back routinely
joins The Godfather: Part II (1974)
on lists of the best movie sequels,
which gave Kurtz a great sense
of pride. “I enjoy the fact that
something I made is really popular
and people really like it,” he said.
“The satisfaction of making a fi lm
that people enjoy and get a good
experience out of watching is really
the primary thing. It doesn’t have
to be top of the list to me or any
other fi lmmaker.
“I think it’s the best of the fi lms,”
he added. “It’s got a good story, the
characters are really good, and we
have the advantage of being the
second act of a three act play, in theWORKING
WITH
WAMPAS
Following the tragic death
of second unit director John
Barry in the fi rst week of
shooting The Empire Strikes
Back, Kurtz was sequestered
into directing some sequences
until a replacement could be
found, including the scene of
Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill)
escaping the wampa’s ice cave.
“We were falling behind
and we had to shoot with two
units for several days, just to
catch up,” Kurtz explained,
noting that they wanted to
strike terror into the hearts
of the audience through
suggestion, by showing as little
of the wampa as possible—a
technique pioneered in Edgar
Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1936).
“We wanted it to be a
little scary, and as the wampa
didn’t move so well, keeping
him in the shadows made you
imagine that he was much
scarier than we could possibly
actually show.
“The very last thing that I
and a small second unit crew
shot, after everyone else was
gone, was the tauntaun out
in the snow,” added Kurtz.
“I shot them cutting open
the dead tauntaun. The FX
department had to come
up with something for when
its guts poured out, which
they found at a meat market.
It really did smell terrible.
Han Solo’s hand holding the
lightsaber is me. That was the
very last shot.”sense that you already know the
characters. There’s no exposition of
where these characters came from,
or how they relate to each other.
In the fi rst act, you put your main
characters up in a tree; in the second
act, you set the tree on fi re; and in
the third, you get them out of it,” he
laughed. “The Empire Strikes Back
is the ‘tree on fi re’ act, so everybody
is in trouble. That made it more
believable and realistic.
“From a script point of view, we
were no longer in space opera-land
anymore,” noted the producer.
While Star Wars had the comic-book
feel of a Flash Gordon serial, “It“The satisfaction of making a
fi lm that people en oy and get a
good experience out of watching
is really the primary thing.”
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