The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [63]
Do you have percentage points in the film?
Everybody has points, but the key is to make them pay off. I figured I was never going to see any money on my points, so what the heck. I also had a chance to give away a lot of my points, which I had done with Graffiti. Part of the success is the fault of the actors, composer and crew and they should share in the rewards as well, so I got my points carved down much less than what my contemporaries have. But I never expected Star Wars to . . . I expected to break even on it, I still can’t understand it.
Why?
I struggled through this movie. I had a terrible time; it was very unpleasant. American Graffiti was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time and I was compromising myself to death. But I could rationalize it because of the fact that, well, it is just a $700,000 picture—it’s Roger Corman—and what do you expect? But this was a big expensive movie and the money was getting wasted and things weren’t coming out right. I was running the corporation. I wasn’t making movies like I’m used to doing. American Graffiti had like forty people on the payroll—that counts everybody but the cast. THX had about the same. You can control a situation like that. On Star Wars we had over 950 people working for us and I would tell a department head and he would tell another assistant department head, he’d tell some guy, and by the time it got down the line it was not there. I spent all my time yelling and screaming at people, and I have never had to do that before.
I’ve done this thing now. I’ve directed my large corporation and I made the movie that I wanted to make. It is not as good by a long shot as it should have been. I take half the responsibility myself and the other half is some of the unfortunate decisions I made in hiring people, but I could have written a better script, I could have done a lot of things; I could have directed it better.
When I saw you back in California last summer you were upset. You said the robots didn’t look right. R2 looked like a vacuum cleaner; you could see fifty-seven separate flaws in C3PO; you didn’t like the lighting—everything seemed like it wasn’t coming together. Was it coming together?
Well, for one thing, by the time we got back to California I wasn’t happy with the lighting on the picture. I’m a cameraman, and I like a slightly more extreme, eccentric style than I got in the movie. It was all right, it was a very difficult movie, there were big sets to light, it was a very big problem. The robots never worked. We faked the whole thing and a lot of it was done editorially.
How?
Every time the remote-control R2 worked it turned and ran into a wall, and when Kenny Baker, the midget, was in it, the thing was so heavy he could barely move it, and he would sort of take a step and a half and be totally exhausted. I could never get him to walk across the room, so we would cut to him there and cut to a close-up, and cut back so that he would be over here. It is all really movie magic more than it was anything else.
That’s why it’s amazing because when I saw the film I was surprised. I couldn’t see any seams. So I went again and maybe saw a couple of seams, but that was it.
I can see nothing but seams. A film is sort of binary—it either works or it doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with how good a job you do. If you bring it up to an adequate level where the audience goes with the movie, then it works, that is all. It is a fusion thing and then everything else, all of the mistakes don’t count anymore.
Well, the ‘Star Wars’ audience has no trouble suspending disbelief.
Right. If a film does not work, then you can do an impeccable job with making the movie. People still see the mistakes, and they get bored and it just doesn’t work. And so what can you say? THX was about 70 percent of what I wanted it to be. I don’t think you ever get to the point where it is 100 percent. Graffiti was about 50 percent of what I wanted it to be but I realized that the other 50 percent would have been there, if