We’re making a movie where the bad guys win, and everyone dies – it’s not destined to be the most successful movie of all time . . .
George Lucas
Approaching what was intended as the final Star Wars movie, George Lucas was well aware there was one vital scene fans expected to see. The confrontation between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker on the rim of a volcano that results in the creation of Darth Vader had long been a core fan legend. Now, with Episode III concluding the saga, they would finally get to see that moment. First, Lucas had to write it.
One scene for Episode III had already been shot during the making of Episode II. Lucas already had a road map for the final instalment, and he knew a return to shoot a single scene on location in Tunisia was impractical. However, he wanted to feature scenes where Obi-Wan Kenobi hands over the Skywalker twins for safekeeping: Leia to Senator Organa on Alderaan, and Luke to Owen and Beru on Tatooine. Shot in Tunisia without Ewan McGregor, a hooded body double was used for Kenobi while actor Joel Edgerton played Owen Lars. The scene as filmed would not ultimately be used, but it was the first indication of where Lucas felt his six-movie saga might conclude.
As had become the necessary habit at Lucasfilm, the preproduction process on Episode III started without a completed script. The art department began development (mainly on several new planetary environments) following the briefest of outlines from Lucas. The final movie jumped three years forward from the second, opening with one of the final battles of the clone wars that had begun at the end of Episode II. Lucas offered several hooks to designers Erik Tiemens and Ryan Church to kick-start their work. The film would feature battles on seven unique planets, all with their own species. Boba Fett might be seen once more, this time as an angry fifteen-year-old. Alderaan (Leia’s homeworld destroyed by Grand Moff Tarkin in A New Hope) would definitely appear in the movie, while the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk might also feature (fulfilling a long-held Lucas ambition). One vital design note the director offered was that as the galactic war had taken its toll, the equipment and vehicles used should be moving towards the ‘used universe’ look of the original Star Wars – the universe was no longer in the grand state it was in the final days of the Republic. From that meeting in April 2002, the team would have until the end of the year to create concept art ready for the costume, prop and set-builders to use.
In the meantime, Lucas would continue to work on the draft script. His shooting schedule was set in stone, with all the elements of main photography and later pick-up shooting sessions already planned, as had been the case on Episode II. By the time of Episode III, Lucasfilm had the production of the new Star Wars movies so fine-tuned it was like an efficient machine at work. ‘I’m shooting next summer [2003] for 60 days,’ said Lucas while writing. ‘I shoot the following March [2004] for 10 days, and I shoot that October for five days. It’s all in the actors’ contracts, it’s in the budget. It’s planned for. I started out as a documentary filmmaker, so I’m used to shooting, cutting material together, going out and shooting some more, [then] cutting it together. The actual story evolves.’
Although Lucas had a good idea of the outline of Episode III, many of the specific incidents had yet to be worked out. For his weekly meeting with the art department team, Lucas needed to have another aspect of his story fine-tuned to keep feeding them information so their work could continue. Some of their material was based on ideas discarded from previous films. Certain key elements of Episode III drew inspiration from original Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie’s work completed in 1976 (his design aesthetic, as well as unused ideas, would provide further inspiration for the second The Clone Wars TV series).
Since the 1970s, Lucas had in mind the confrontation between Kenobi and Skywalker on the volcano world of ‘Mufasta’ (to become Mustafar in Episode III). He had spoken of it in interviews in the 1980s, and early design concepts of Vader’s underground throne room had been published. At the time, Lucas had set the material aside, intending to use it at a later date. That time had now come and the new concepts for the volcano world were some of the first things the Episode III designers could work on in the sure knowledge that the scenes would be in the film.
The process of producing designs early fed back into the writing of this movie more than ever before. Ideas and concepts developed by the artists would inspire scenes or sequences in the evolving story, provide Lucas with characters and creatures to populate scenes he already had or give him new environments in which to set key moments. As always, the deadline for the production and the need for set building to begin in Sydney, Australia (where Episode III would shoot), loomed over both the writer-director and the concept artists. Many were also aware that as this was to be the final movie; it was their last chance to really push the limits of what Star Wars on the big screen could achieve.
Lucas’s problems with writing and his unique production methods gave him some leeway in delivering a finished script for Episode III, but they also contributed to his own prevarication. Reluctant to commit to anything definitive, Lucas preferred the creative, open environment of the pre-production design department than the cold reality of putting words of dialogue and scene descriptions on paper. A visual communicator, Lucas found writing (as compared to simply imagining) limiting rather than freeing. Nonetheless, others were depending upon his words – the actors of Episode III most of all.
‘The preliminary visuals serve as an inspiration for writing, more than anything else,’ admitted producer Rick McCallum, despite the fact that he had to exert almost constant pressure on Lucas to progress the script. The date for principal photography at Fox Studios was fixed as 25 June 2003, and that would be the deadline to which Lucas would inevitably work. ‘We’re trying to do this for a price, but we’re building backward, designing a twenty-five-floor skyscraper without foundations,’ admitted McCallum.
By October of 2002 a great deal of conceptual work on Episode III had been completed. Much of it had passed final approval from Lucas, so production designer Gavin Bocquet and costume designer Trisha Biggar could begin actual creation of sets and costumes. Lucas had fine-tuned some of his story ideas, settling on several specific planets and providing the artists with a list complete with their prime environmental characteristics. Alderaan, for instance, was described as a planet of gleaming, futuristic cities set amid snow-topped mountain peaks, such as those of Switzerland. Lucas was also able to describe the climax of the movie, which would see Yoda go into exile on Dagobah (where he is discovered by Luke in The Empire Strikes Back) and Kenobi hand over the new-born Skywalker children following the lengthy battle with Anakin on the volcano world of Mustafar. Lucas also settled on a spectacular opening in which Anakin and Obi-Wan are caught up in the final major battle of the clone wars, fleeing from one cliffhanger situation to another (recalling his original inspiration of 1930s movie serials) in an effort to rescue the kidnapped Senator Palpatine. The sequence would climax with a confrontation between Anakin and Count Dooku. Lucas also confirmed the film’s new villain would be a part-droid Separatist General, and that the long-awaited black-armoured form of Darth Vader would appear, albeit briefly, at the climax. The part-robot, part-organic Grievous was intended to prefigure the conversion of Anakin Skywalker into the ‘more machine than man’ Vader by the film’s climax.
The challenge Lucas was facing was threefold: he had to tie-up all the loose ends from the previous two films in a satisfactory manner, while he also had to ensure the film connected to 1977’s Episode IV to which it was essentially an immediate prequel. Finally, he also wanted to stay true to the original source material he had roughed out over thirty years before when he first conceived of ‘The Star Wars’. As the end of the year drew closer, the writing process intensified and Lucas paid more attention to each of these goals – his biggest problem was including all the outstanding characters from the previous two films and introducing enough new ones to make the final film fresh in its own right.
Despite the lack of a finished screenplay, January 2003 saw many of the sets for the movie under construction in Sydney, with Biggar also continuing work on the costumes. By the end of the month, McCallum had managed to prise a rough draft fifty-five-page script from Lucas, and although it was not in a fit state to be shared with department heads, it gave the producer enough information to be more communicative with them about the film’s actual requirements. The draft script gave a structure to the drama, confirmed the locations involved and offered a final list of significant characters. One major difference from the final film was the inclusion of a ten-year-old Han Solo who was to get involved with Yoda, an intriguing idea later abandoned. The draft also included an admission from Darth Sidious/Palpatine that he used his Sith powers to ‘arrange’ Anakin’s conception through the midi-chlorians. This was intended to set up Sidious as an evil father figure for Anakin in the same way that Vader had been for Luke.
This draft script and the scenes it contained proved to be enough for storyboard artists to spend much of February designing some of the major sequences, while Lucas worked on expanding the screenplay.
Essentially, Lucas was directing the film on paper, instructing the storyboard artists on the dynamic way some of the scenes needed to be presented and expanding upon his intentions. Alfred Hitchcock approached filmmaking in a similar way, storyboarding the entire film to such an extent that he often declared the actual process of principal photography to be boring. The process of storyboarding, especially in working out action sequences, would be one more element that would feed back into his writing. They also allowed pre-visualization supervisor Dan Gregoire to begin creating videomatics of the dramatic opening space battle.
Lucas welcomed the input of Steven Spielberg in the creation of videomatics for two key sequences of Episode III. Spielberg was keen to get to grips with the tools of digital production, and saw Lucas’s film as the ideal chance to get his feet wet. Spielberg ‘directed’ the sequence showing the pursuit and elimination of General Grievous by Obi-Wan Kenobi (although a much reduced version revised by Lucas was to make it into the film) and Yoda’s duel with the Emperor in the Imperial Senate. Both of Spielberg’s extensive animatics would feature on the complete Star Wars saga Blu-ray, allowing some comparison between his preliminary work and what Lucas eventually used in the movie.
In the weeks leading up to the start of principal photography, much of Episode III was created through pre-visualization. Entire sequences, mainly action-based, were put together (albeit crudely), subject to the input of Lucas. In this way, all involved had a solid idea of what much of the film would eventually look like, and enough of the story clearly to depict the emotional highs and lows of the saga’s concluding chapter. It appeared that Lucas felt the only people who couldn’t work without a complete script were the actors (who needed it for their dialogue), so he could put off committing to a final draft until everyone assembled in Australia.
Waiting patiently at Fox Studios in March 2003 was Rick McCallum, while work continued at the Skywalker Ranch. ‘I’m a man without a script,’ he told Jonathan Rinzler in The Making of Revenge of the Sith. ‘Usually you get a script a year before production begins, and it’s broken down, and storyboarded, costumes and sets are broken out; the actors are locked into dates – but we don’t have that.’ Nevertheless, construction on sets had begun at the start of the month, work on costumes was ongoing and creatures were being built.
Lucas showed a degree of self-knowledge of the frustration his script process caused others. ‘I sit there with a page in front of me . . . Inertia. Procrastination,’ he admitted. Despite keeping regular office hours for his writing (usually between 8.30 a.m. and 6 p.m.), he found the actual process as difficult as ever. ‘I can be chained to my desk and I still can’t write. I write five pages a day, but left to my own I’d probably write a page a day. I force myself – it becomes agonizing to get those other four pages . . .’
Lucas would finally finish his first draft script at the start of April. The story structure was in place along with many of the lines the actors would say, although as ever Lucas retained the right to change things. ‘The last thing that will be dealt with [in revisions] is the dialogue,’ the director admitted. ‘You can change that on the set, or even afterwards. I’m not known for my dialogue . . . I think of it as a sound effect, a rhythm, a vocal chorus. Mostly, everything is visual.’ At the end of that same month, Hayden Christensen arrived in Australia to begin physical training for his final turn as Anakin.
Around the same time, casting had begun for the new movie. Confirmed as reprising their roles alongside returning cast members Christensen, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman were Anthony Daniels and Kenny Baker as C-3PO and R2-D2, making them the only actors to feature in all six live-action Star Wars movies. For Episode III they would be joined by Peter Mayhew, returning as a younger version of Chewbacca, playing the character in a Star Wars movie for the first time since 1983.
Lucas arrived in Australia in mid-June 2003, just two weeks before the start of filming with a second draft screenplay in his hands. A non-stop schedule of seventy planned shooting days lay ahead, although Lucas was confident he could bring the film in faster, whittling the number of shooting days down to sixty-three by the end. The first shooting day, Monday, 30 June 2003, consisted of seven scenes featuring Anakin and Obi-Wan (and Lucas’s good luck charm of R2-D2) battling their way through the Separatist cruiser. These scenes were all simple and straightforward, the aim being to break in the actors and the crew gently. McCallum once more fulfilled his traditional role of operating the first clapperboard of the shoot, followed by Lucas’s cry of ‘Action!’ on his final Star Wars movie. That day saw the completion of forty-eight individual set-ups, comprising two minutes and twenty-eight seconds of the final movie, with filming concluding at 7.10 p.m. The first day would set the pattern for the next three months in the studio as the film was efficiently created, minute-by-minute.
The first week featured the central cast – McGregor, Christensen, Portman, Daniels – in relatively simple scenes. During the second week new arrivals in Australia included Mayhew, Ian McDiarmid as the Emperor, Samuel Jackson as Jedi Mace Windu and Christopher Lee, briefly reprising his role of Count Dooku in the film’s opening sequence. By the end of the second week, the key sequence when McDiarmid’s Palpatine turns on a Jedi delegation and battles Mace Windu was shot. As with Dooku’s fight with Yoda in Episode II, stunt doubles and digital trickery would be used to see the older Palpatine take on the younger Windu and defeat him, using the Emperor’s Sith powers. The battle took around four days to shoot and culminated in Palpatine renaming Anakin as Sith Lord Darth Vader.
One of the many links between Episode III and Episode IV – and certainly one of the most visual – was the recreation of the rebel blockade runner. It’s within the blazing white corridors of this ship that the first Star Wars movie opened, introducing filmgoers to hero droids C-3PO and R2-D2. When the set was being constructed in Australia it attracted many onlookers among the cast and crew, the majority of whom were children when the first movie came out. Towards the end of July 2003 shooting began on a set that had seen the entrance of Darth Vader over twenty-six years before.
The scenes shot on this iconic ship mainly featured Jimmy Smits as Bail Organa, one of the originators of the rebellion chronicled in the original Star Wars trilogy. Organa’s ordering of a ‘mind wipe’ for C-3PO explains why the protocol droid doesn’t recall the events of the prequels in the original three movies. R2-D2 seems to escape such memory erasure, suggesting that he knows the full saga. This scene also gave the last line of dialogue in the film to the golden droid, making a neat link to the fact that the same character has the first lines in Episode IV.
The gruesome make-up devised for the burned Anakin Skywalker saw the final Star Wars film awarded a higher cinema age-restriction certificate than any of the previous movies. Devised by Farscape’s Dave Elsey, the ‘burnt Anakin’ make-up showed the injuries that resulted in him being placed within the Darth Vader life-support suit. Elsey had been encouraged by Lucas to put aside ratings concerns and go as far as he felt he needed to in creating the look for ‘toasty Anakin’. The result was truly gruesome, and featured in an intense scene that climaxed the battle between Anakin and Obi-Wan. ‘I feel like I’ve been researching this make-up since I was a kid and first saw Return of the Jedi,’ said Elsey. ‘This was a chance to do something fresh for Star Wars. We’d seen Vader without his helmet, but I always wanted to know how he’d got so badly scarred and had to wear the Vader suit. I had read that he’d fallen into volcanic lava, and in my mind I’d been creating a prosthetic make-up that demonstrated these devastating injuries.’
The start of September saw the shooting of the final scenes for Anakin Skywalker, with Hayden Christensen encased in Elsey’s make-up and wearing blue stockings and a blue sleeve to allow for the digital removal of the limbs lost at the end of his fight with Obi-Wan. The final exchange of dialogue between McGregor and Christensen was filmed only after the pair worked on – and altered – Lucas’s long-in-gestation dialogue.
As written, Obi-Wan lamented the fall of Anakin by saying, ‘I love you. But I will not help you.’ Between the actors and the writer-director, the lines were changed on the day to be delivered in the past tense, emphasizing the fact that Anakin is already dead to Obi-Wan. They became: ‘I loved you. But I could not help you.’ In that version, the lines also play up Obi-Wan’s complicity in Anakin’s longer-term fall to the dark side through his earlier failure to help him resist the temptations of the Sith. It proved a powerful climax, the culmination of all six films, although Christensen referred to the morning’s filming as ‘just another day playing in the dirt’.
That may have been because the actor had an even more momentous afternoon ahead when he would don the full Darth Vader regalia for the first time. On the original films Dave Prowse had played Vader in the suit (with James Earl Jones supplying the voice), but he was often supplanted by swordsman and stuntman Bob Anderson whenever Vader was required to engage in battle. Christensen had undergone several makeup tests for the ‘burned Anakin’ prosthetic back in July, while he had also been fitted for the full Vader armour during August. As with the rebel blockade runner, the first appearance of Vader on the set of Episode III drew a large crowd of interested onlookers from other areas of the production. More than twenty-five years had passed since his movie debut, but the pulling power of this cinematic icon had clearly not faded.
Christensen donned the newly built armour behind a series of curtains, emerging fully clad in black to applause on set. The scene to be shot had Vader revived by the Emperor, only to be informed of the death of Padmé. (Anakin’s attraction to the dark side of the Force had been partly motivated by Palpatine/Sidious’s implication that it was the only way he could save his wife from certain death.)
‘The most special day of the shoot was when Hayden got into the Darth Vader suit,’ recalled McCallum. ‘Every single person in the studio was waiting outside the stage doors [to] get a glimpse of Hayden as Darth Vader.’ For his part, the actor was thrilled to be making cinema history. ‘I’d been looking forward to [it] since I found out I’d got the part,’ he said. ‘[I was] hoping I’d get to don the dark helm[et].’ Lucas was equally enthusiastic to see the completion of a vital scene that brought his saga to a satisfying close: ‘Having [Anakin] finally make it into the suit completes the circle of the movies. There was this key missing piece, which everybody’s always wanted to see – the return of Anakin Skywalker as Darth Vader.’
The following day Christensen shot the iconic scenes of the badly burned Anakin being put in the iconic suit, culminating in the iconic Vader facemask descending upon his scarred head. The blue stockings and arm coverings were again used so Christensen’s limbs could be removed digitally in postproduction. The day had begun with further work featuring Anakin’s slide down the slope of the volcano, but the donning of the mask completed the character’s story arc: the dramatic fall from hero to villain. In drawing on mythology for his inspirations, Lucas was touching on elements of Bible stories with Anakin’s fall being modelled after that of Satan, from angel to devil, except the elder Skywalker is redeemed in a way the devil never can be . . .
The scenes of Anakin being put in the Vader suit had actually been started the week before, but would continue to be fine-tuned and filmed in the following days. Both McGregor and Christensen had been in training for the physically demanding battle they knew was coming. The fight sequences had been worked out in storyboards and animatics, revised by Lucas. Much more was shot than would eventually be used. Nonetheless, the finished film featured an epic conflict between the two accomplished Jedi across the lava fields of Mustafar.
Lucas had deliberately scheduled these fight scenes to follow the filming of the character-based, dialogue- and exposition-heavy scenes. So it wasn’t until over forty days into the expected sixty-day filming schedule that McGregor and Christensen got to face off against each other with some lightsaber action. Each actor had to memorize a series of precise physical moves, while coping with filming largely against green screens and jumping from moving platforms. Lucas found the creation and filming of such scenes to be ‘tedious’, but he also knew that this was a dramatic moment for both characters where their building hostility finally bursts into the open – and neither will walk away from the conflict unchanged.
With minimal sets built amid a sea of green backdrops, the actors had to rely on their imaginations and the available concept art and animatics to understand what their characters were doing. The fight moved through several environments, from the Separatists conference room on Mustafar where Anakin kills the Separatist leaders, through a factory facility, and then down a river of lava. Swordmaster Nick Gillard (who had been a stuntman on Return of the Jedi) was responsible for choreographing all the lightsaber battles across the prequels. Now he faced the creation of the ultimate lightsaber fight, described by Lucas as ‘one of the longest continuous swordfights ever filmed’.
The last day of studio-based principal photography on Episode III saw the cast and crew shooting what would appropriately be the final scene of the movie:Vader, the Emperor and Governor Tarkin silently assemble on the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer to observe the construction of the Death Star. Under the prosthetic make-up of Tarkin was Farscape veteran Wayne Pygram, wearing a latex mask modelled after Peter Cushing, who had played the role in the first Star Wars movie – another connection uniting the saga.
Ewan McGregor had finished his role on the movie a few days earlier, replaying the scene in which he hands the baby Luke to the Lars family that had first been filmed without him three years previously in Tunisia during the filming of Episode II. In the interim Lucas has changed his mind about who should receive the new-born infant, preferring for the defeated Jedi hand to the child over to Beru rather than Owen, as had already been filmed. Australian Bonnie Piesse reprised her role as Beru, but due to the unavailability of Joel Edgerton, Owen was this time played by a stand-in (Edgerton would be shot against green screen in the summer of 2004 and added digitally).
For Christensen, it would be a few more days before he completed production, once more donning the Darth Vader armour for his final scene. Production wrapped on 17 September 2003, the fifty-eighth day of filming that saw Lucas beat his private target of sixty-three shooting days. With the completion of the final scene, five days ahead of schedule, an impromptu wrap party was held on the sound stage. McCallum and Lucas both delivered speeches thanking cast and crew for their dedication to the project and marking the bittersweet nature of the end of the final Star Wars movie. McCallum described the wrap as ‘a very emotional moment’, while Lucas admitted that Episode III had been ‘the most fun film I’ve ever worked on. I think we’ve made a great movie.’ It was a long way from the frustrated and defeated Lucas who had worked on the first Star Wars over twenty-five years earlier, and who had hated writing and directing, but felt compelled to make movies. Neither was it the end of the story, as the completion of principal photography was only the end of the second stage (following pre-production). Lucas had gathered his ‘material’ by mid-September 2003: now he had eighteen months or so to shape it into the final film he wanted audiences to see.
Even before the live action shooting, Industrial Light and Magic had started its work on Episode III. Back in May 2003 it had begun building computer models of spacecraft and vehicles and would work on the film non-stop right through until January 2005.
Lucas called his editing technique a form of ‘orchestration’ of the material he had collected during principal photography. He saw it as a form of creation equal to or even more important than writing the script or capturing the actors’ performances. By Christmas 2003, Lucas and Ben Burtt along with editor Roger Barton had put together their first rough cut, using the live-action material and a host of temporary animatics and in-progress effects shots. The creation of the film continued as ILM moved forward with its work on the digital components, thought to make up almost 50 per cent of Episode III. ‘A film used to have ten to fifty effects shots; we have at least 2,000,’ said McCallum.
ILM animation director Rob Coleman once again supervised digital creature creation, but as on Episode II he took a special interest in the digital Yoda. As mentioned, as a warm-up exercise, Coleman had replaced the puppet Yoda featured in Episode I with a CG version (a revision that wasn’t seen by fans until the 2011 release of the movie on Blu-ray). The first editorial task for Lucas was to compile the film’s seven or so Yoda scenes in order to allow Coleman to get started on creating the digital Yoda, especially those sequences in which he fought with Emperor Palpatine in the Imperial Senate Chamber. Coleman saw Yoda as a character that was both technical- and performance-based. It was equally important that these scenes be adequately completed before voice-actor Frank Oz could record his dialogue.
The post-production period had grown across the three Star Wars prequels to become a form of virtual filmmaking in which the movie Lucas had envisaged – in his head, in his screenplay and on the sets in Australia – could be reshaped and reformatted.
As the weeks progressed, more footage was completed, either as finished shots or as low-resolution animatics that Lucas would approve before ILM developed them into final, full-resolution scenes. As each finished scene was completed, the overall film was built up, element by element. It was a painstaking process, but one that gave Lucas complete control over his material and one he knew would work successfully following Episode II. In editing, he was able to use digital tools to lift elements of an actor’s performance from different takes and mix them together to achieve his desired effect. Characters could be digitally moved from one scene into another or from one location to another if Lucas felt it suited his evolving story. To Lucas, the tools might be different but the intention was the same as it ever was. ‘I’m making movies,’ he said. ‘Some people do storyboards and intellectualize it – I prefer to do it this way. I just want to tell a story and make it work.’
The whole process was an attempt to keep the cost of making a blockbuster movie reasonable, as Lucas was paying for everything himself. McCallum had aimed to make Episode II for 10 per cent less than he had spent on Episode I. With Episode III, the plan was to make the movie for the same cost as the first in the prequel series. The movie cost around $60 million to shoot, with the same again being spent on digital post-production and visual effects, making the overall prerelease cost of Episode III in the $115 to $120 million range, a reasonable price for a contemporary franchise blockbuster, especially a third instalment.
By January 2004, the opening space battle sequence was in a near finished state, so was screened in a preview theatre for Lucas and the ILM producers. The biggest worry about this opening sequence was ensuring that it could be easily followed by the audience, given that it started in an area of space crowded with a host of conflicting spaceships. Lucas called this ‘readability’, and concluded that, ‘It may be that some of these shots are a little fast.’While revisions of various sequences would continue for months to come, by the end of January the movie was over 75 per cent locked down. Given the amount of effects work and digital creations in the movie, Lucas admitted to Rob Coleman: ‘You realize this is an animated movie?’
Lucas may have regarded Episode III as largely animated, but despite the presence of many digital characters he still could not make his films without actors (much as he may have liked to). To complete his vision for the final Star Wars movie, a series of pick-up shoots had been scheduled with the main cast members. The scenes to be shot would improve upon material already gathered, fill in story gaps shown up in the rough cut or bring to life new ideas and concepts Lucas had for the film since shooting in the summer of 2003 in Australia.
The intended first session of pick-ups scheduled for March was pushed back to August 2004 as the rough cut and ILM’s work on the film were taking longer than anticipated. This particular movie had been troubling for Lucas, and his difficulties in committing to the story for his final Star Wars movie had come out in his prevarication over finalizing the screenplay. ‘As we’ve made this trio of films, this process of making things up as we go along has increased,’ admitted editor Ben Burtt. ‘I think it’s satisfying for George to take the characters and the tools, and experiment with them, because he’s developed it all, over many, many years.’
Reshaping the film in the digital realm had resulted in several near-finished scenes being dropped (much to the disappointment of many of those at ILM who had worked on them, as it put them behind schedule and that work would not be seen on the big screen). Characters’ relationships and interactions changed in the editing, improving some scenes but leaving Lucas with a few narrative holes that the pick-up shoots could fill.
Additional shooting had taken place during April and May, with ILM working on model shots (varying in size from a few inches to almost life-size vehicles) and character inserts, such as the death of Jedi Aayla Secura during the haunting Order 66 sequence, in which the Jedi Order is all but eliminated by the Emperor’s forces. By mid-May a larger unit was briefly back at Fox Studios in Australia shooting footage of a Wookiee army for battle scenes set on Kashyyyk. Animation director Rob Coleman directed these action scenes, rather than Lucas.
At the end of August and into the first week of September, the Star Wars crew were back in the UK shooting additional material at Shepperton Studios, just outside London. About two weeks of blue- and green-screen shooting were conducted with most of the principal actors present in various combinations across the shooting period. A handful of the scenes to be shot were brand new, while others were retakes or extensions of material already captured. Scenes shot included the Coruscant Opera scene in which Palpatine reveals to Anakin that he is a Sith Lord, additional Mustafar scenes, additional Anakin/Obi-Wan duel inserts and reaction shots, action scenes featuring Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine, and scenes on Utapau and from Amidala’s funeral procession.
After further work by ILM, a new rough cut was completed by October, with a running time of two hours and twenty-five minutes – over the target length of two hours fifteen minutes. While the vast majority of the movie was shot in the studio and realized in the digital environment, real-world backgrounds shot in China, Thailand, Switzerland and Tunisia were used to provide planetary locations. A small crew even flew to Italy during the eruption of Sicily’s Mount Etna in 2002 to capture footage of real-life lava for use in the Mustafar scenes. The end of January 2005 saw the final pick-ups completed at Elstree, with John Williams recording his Episode III score at Abbey Road in February.
Fittingly, the final shot captured for the movie featured Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker running across a platform. This movie in particular, and the entire six-film Star Wars saga, had turned out to be the story of Anakin Skywalker, his rise and fall to the dark side. This final shot took place on Elstree’s Stage 8, the same soundstage where Lucas had shot much of the first Star Wars movie back in 1976. Just as with the story within the films, the story of the making of the Star Wars films had come back to its beginning.
Following an out-of-competition screening at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in France, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith opened in the United States on 19 May 2005, with a final running time of two hours and twenty minutes. As mentioned, the movie was given a more adult rating than the previous Star Wars movies, due to its ‘intensity’, especially in the scene that sees Anakin Skywalker burn on the edge of the volcano on Mustafar.
Episode III received a much more positive critical reaction than the previous two movies (especially Episode II). The New York Times tagged the movie as ‘the best of the four episodes Lucas has directed’ (an interesting verdict, given that much of the ‘direction’ was not in the traditional areas of writing the script and working with the actors, but took place in building the movie in the digital realm). Negative criticism that was made revolved around the old targets of Lucas’s occasionally inept dialogue and Hayden Christensen’s performance (he was awarded a second Golden Raspberry for Worst Supporting Actor). Unusually, the film drew some political criticisms, with some conservative American viewers seeing it as an attack on the George W. Bush presidency and the conduct of the Iraq war. The Seattle Times claimed that ‘Without naming Bush or the Patriot Act, it’s all unmistakable no matter what your own politics may be.’ Lucas claimed this was not the case, as his inspirations were the ancient history of the fall of the Roman Empire and the period of the Vietnam War he had lived through in his youth. However, he did comment that, ‘The parallels between Vietnam and what we’re doing now in Iraq are unbelievable.’
Episode III grossed almost $850 million worldwide following its release across 115 countries, making it the second highest grossing film of 2005 (behind Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire). The midnight screenings held across the United States grossed $16.5 million alone, breaking the previews record held by The Lord of the Rings:The Return of the King. The $50 million opening day gross for the movie set a new record, surpassing the $40.4 million taken by Spider-Man 2, while the full single-day gross and Thursday gross broke records previously held by Shrek 2 and The Matrix Reloaded, respectively. While some of these records were themselves later surpassed, the film was deemed to have set American records for the highest gross for all but two of its first twelve days on release. Across the first four days the film grossed $158.5 million, reaching the $200 million point within eight days, and hitting $300 million on its seventeenth day of release. On release in American cinemas until October 2005, Episode III’s total US box office tally was $380.2 million, plus an international total of $469.8 million.
As always with the Star Wars movies, the awards the film won were not for writing or for acting, but largely technical. In a curious oversight, Episode III was the only Star Wars film not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. It was nominated for Best Make-up, but did not win. More populist awards, such as Favourite Film at the People’s Choice Awards, Movie of the Year at the Hollywood Film Festival and various other science-fiction event and movie magazine awards, perhaps better reflected the sentiment of general film fans.
With the closing scenes of Revenge of the Sith, the Star Wars saga was now complete. George Lucas was simply happy to have succeeded in his aim of making the two Star Wars trilogies, but despite his oft-stated desire to leave Star Wars behind, the franchise wasn’t about to let the creator go that easily.