New SG Interview: J.W. Rinzler The Making of Star Wars – The Empire Strikes Back0
Posted In Blog,Books,Entertainment,Interviews,Movies
by Ryan Stewart
“The level of desperation was a lot higher than I’d thought…”
– J.W. Rinzler
Few films in history have been as meticulously pored over as the Star Wars trilogy, which is why the best compliment owed to The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is that it feels completely fresh. An exhaustive, official biography of one of the most beloved films of the past thirty years, Making Of runs a sprawling 350 pages, is replete with interviews and insights from George Lucas and dozens of other contributors, and contains over 1,200 rare photos, including conceptual art, storyboards, candid set photos and special effects designs. More importantly, it’s a smart and candid history that doesn’t shy away from the underlying sources of drama that fueled Empire’s production, from Lucas’s brush with financial ruin when the self-financed film went massively over budget, to on-set bickering between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, to creative tensions between the producers and their hand-picked director, Irvin Kershner.
Honed down from a file cabinet’s worth of material compiled by Lucasfilm executive editor J.W. Rinzler and his team of archivists, Making Of charts the film’s journey from pie-in-the-sky ideas in a notebook to an inevitable reality in the post-Star Wars world to a grueling international shoot punctuated by injuries, narrow escapes, and financial and creative arguments, to a post-production headache that pushed its special effects artists to the breaking point. (“ILM veterans say it’s the hardest film they ever worked on,” Rinzler says.) Although the book allows for multiple, even conflicting views on certain events, it never loses the ring of authority, which is not surprising considering that Rinzler has previously authored books on a number of Lucas works, including The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, The Making of Star Wars, and The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.
Rinzler recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about how he went about the task of documenting the making of a classic.
Read our exclusive interview with J.W. Rinzler on SuicideGirls.com.
The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is out now and available at Amazon.com.
