Last week, I attended an awesome panel at Star Wars Celebration for the upcoming six-part documentary series Light & Magic from Lawrence Kasdan. There was a lot of fascinating stuff revealed during that event including how George Lucas described his Star Wars idea to a young Ron Howard; How Lucas envisioned the Rebel ships as hot rods; and Joe Johnston was given 24-hours to create the iconic Star Wars logo.
We also learned how the design of Han Solo’s ship, The Millennium Falcon, came about! That ship was created by Joe Johnston, and when asked about how that came about, he shared the following story:
“Yeah, the ship that was going to be Han Solo’s ship, we didn’t call it the Millennium Falcon, we didn’t have a name yet. But, this show called Space 1999 came out and it had a ship that looked very much like Han Solo’s ship and George didn’t want to copy anybody at all. So, he said we need a new ship, we need it right away because we’re starting to shoot this stuff.”
Word got out that a new ship was going to be designed, and Johnston was asked to use a cockpit and satellite dish that had already been designed, built, and wired for lighting. So, those things needed to be incorporated into whatever design that he came up with. He went on to say:
“And so, I was feeling a little pressure. I went home and I was sitting there probably at two in the morning and I’m lookin’ around my apartment and I’m looking in the kitchen area at a stack of dirty dishes that seems to have always been there, and I took the plate and you put another one exactly like it on top, it sort of looks like a flying saucer. But, you put engines in the back, that sort of implies that it’s going to go that way. Then you put a cockpit in the front, well, that sort of gives it a nose. I played around and did a series of five or six drawings and there was one that I really liked, and the trick is how to make sure that George likes the same one. So, I sort of finished that one a little bit more and outlined it and I showed it to him and he liked the same one I liked.
Lucas told him “the cockpit was sort of out front, and he said, ‘yeah, I’m not so sure about that.’ So, I said ‘what if we put it more on the side’ and he said ‘yeah, that’s good.” Johnston continued:
“George was very vague about asking for stuff, and I figured out why. He wanted choices. So he would say, ‘Darth Vader needs a ship to get from the Star Destroyer to the Death Star’ and I said, ‘oh, you mean like a shuttle’ ‘yeah, like a shuttle.’ and sometimes that would be the only input that he would have. But it gave him a lot of choices.”
It’s so fun to hear these stories about how some of the most iconic things from the original Star Wars films came about! Who would have thought that inspiration for the Millennium Falcon struck with a pile of dirty dishes in a kitchen sink.
The upcoming Light & Magic docuseries is going to be filled with these kinds of stories! It focuses on George Lucas and the revolutionary visual effects company he created, Industrial Light and Magic.
Lucas launched Industrial Light and Magic in 1975 with the mission of creating groundbreaking and innovative special effects for his iconic film Star Wars. After the movie was a huge success, Lucas, along with Douglas Trumbull and a team of students, artists, and engineers, expanded the company and started doing work for a variety of film projects that were being produced.
ILM continues to lead the charge on innovative VFX work for TV and film.