By Pete Vilmur
With 30 years now behind it, we've learned quite a lot about the making of The Empire Strikes Back since its U.S. premiere in May, 1980. Three decades worth of books, articles, documentaries, and interviews have revealed scores of behind-the-scenes stories about Empire, greatly enhancing our understanding of how the saga's fifth chapter was ultimately brought to the screen.
With our launch of "Empire Chronicles," a new series which explores many of the characters, vehicles, and settings from The Empire Strikes Back, we begin with an in-depth look at one of the film's most unforgettable pieces of military hardware: the All Terrain Armored Transport, or AT-AT for short. We've combed through dozens of sources documenting the creation of this intimidating weapon of the Empire, from early issues of the highly-regarded special effects journal Cinefex to the now-elusive video commentary tracks featured on 1993's Definitive Collection laserdisc set (remember those?). From these we've culled quotes or passages from the individuals directly responsible for conceiving, building, filming, or breathing life into the AT-AT, and have scoured our Image Archives for photos documenting its creation, some of which have rarely been seen.
So enjoy this fond look back at the making of what many regard as the saga's finest chapter, and be sure to keep an eye out for future entries we'll be posting in the coming months as we celebrate 30 years of The Empire Strikes Back!
Concept
George Lucas, Story and Executive Producer
"The walkers, if anything, were inspired by the original novel of War of the Worlds where the Martians walked on giant
spiders that walked on legs. I was trying to come up with a way of making this battle different and unusual without
putting tanks and normal military stuff in there... They're tall because I wanted the speeders to fly under them to
make a more dynamic kind of battle out of it. And again I was struggling with the fact that in the first film I had
this big space battle at the end of the movie but in this movie there wasn't anything like that."
— 2004 Empire DVD commentary
Joe Johnston, Art Director-Visual Effects
"George Lucas and Gary Kurtz knew at the outset that there was going to be a snow battle, and they knew we were going
to have armored speeders. But they hadn't really decided on what kind of vehicles the Empire would have or how they
were going to do it. At first they considered using existing military tanks from the Norwegian army, redressing them
to make them look alien. I did a bunch of sketches using the tanks as a basis. Then I ran across a xerox that a friend
of mine had. It as a promotional brochure put out by U.S. Steel in the early Sixties and contained a whole slew of
full-color paintings indicating 'what steel will be used for in the future.' The paintings were done by Syd Meade.
Interestingly enough, one of the paintings showed a four-legged walking truck! That's where the initial walker idea
came from. It was a very unique design."
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Ralph McQuarrie, Design Consultant And Conceptual Artist
"The angle fascinated me, looking up at the Imperial walkers. I put a snowspeeder in the foreground and a background
of fire from an exploding landspeeder that's apparently full of fuel. Now that's a battle scene! The effect shots
weren't completed yet [when the painting was done], but this was my dream of the ideal shot for this battle."
— Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #13 (Nov 1997)
Jon Berg, Stop Motion Animation
"I remember somebody had done a sketch on possibly doing the walkers through some sort of marionette system. We had to
figure out, first, how are we going to make these big machines -- just make them -- and then how are we going
to make them move?
— Star Wars Insider #49 (May/June 2000)
Joe Johnston
"George said the Imperial weapons attacking Hoth should look like walking tanks. The intention with the walker was to
make it more frightening and anthropomorphic so it would look like a big robot. The idea of having a head and shapes
that looked like big eyes and a big jaw was really to make it look more frightening."
— Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (1997)
Dennis Muren, Effects Director of Photography
"Part of the idea behind their slow movement was that they could be overpowered and they would lose. That was part of
George's vision on it. They were big, lumbering, you know, obsolete machines that could be overcome by a clever person
in the right spot with the right weapon. I think we might have talked about it being an analogy to Vietnam..."
— Star Wars: The Definitive Collection laserdisc commentary (1993)
Jon Berg
"I remember saying, 'This thing looks so much like an elephant, why don't we just go out and shoot some film?' It
wound up being this whole expedition that went out -- Dennis Muren, Phil Tippett and I, and a whole camera crew. There
was a wonderful place called Marine World Africa USA. The elephant we used was a really sweet Indian elephant named
Mardji [who had already played a bantha in A New Hope], and she had a trainer. We shot quite a bit of footage
of her walking back and forth, so we could get an idea of the motions an animal that size and configuration goes
through in just walking."
— Star Wars Insider #49 (May/June 2000)
Joe Johnston
"It kind of moves like a cat to me. I have a cat; she kind of walks that way at times -- stiff-legged, head
down. There is nothing particularly feline about the walker's appearance, but of all the animals, it reminds me more
of a cat than anything else."
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Phil Tippett, Stop Motion Animation
"Tom St. Amand [Stop Motion Technician] and I probably spent close to three weeks just figuring out how the walkers walk. Since these creatures
were mechanical and without very much personality, we wanted to create a walk cycle that we could use over and over
again with only a few modifications."
— Starlog (July 1987)
The Shoot
Dennis Muren
"The approach I took for the walking machines on this was to do them stop motion animation. There was some
talk about doing them motorized but I think we'd still be doing that if we'd actually made real walking machines.
Everyone sort of got together and made the models, the walking machines, probably about two feet high and the legs
about two inches wide, each one, just big enough for a hand to sort of grab it and be able to move it one frame at a
time from one position to the next."
— 2004 Empire DVD commentary
Lorne Peterson, Chief Model Maker
"Rather than try to drop the models into live-action background plates, we created a scale miniature
environment for the walkers to inhabit. Mike Pangrazio, a fantastic matte painter, created these enormous
photo-realistically painted backdrops of the Hoth landscape."
— Sculpting a Galaxy (2006)
Richard Edlund, Special Visual Effects
"We used about fifteen different background paintings in the walker sequence and the tauntaun shots. The largest was
about thirty-five feet wide and twelve feet high, and the smallest was maybe four feet wide and two feet high."
— Cinefex #2 (Aug 1980)
Jon Berg
"One thing I did when I was designing the walker was to create little squared-off pistons in the upper legs and little
doohickeys on the inside. So when you did the leg animation these little mechanisms would actually move along with it,
and you'd get secondary animation that you wouldn't have to worry about doing yourself. I thought those little fun
things going on with the walker's movement would make it look like something was actually happening mechanically
there."
— Star Wars Insider #49 (May/June 2000)
Dennis Muren
"They had a lot of trouble on location in Norway because of changing weather conditions and that complicated things
immensely for us in terms of matching. We ended up with footage for a sequence in which some shots would have bright
sunlight and a blue sky, cutting directly to a white sky and a snowstorm in which you couldn't see 30 feet away...So
we ended up adding a progressive blizzard to the sequence by means of our shots and George Lucas recut footage to
accommodate this. As the sequence begins, there's a big storm front approaching in the background and the walkers are
in sunlight in the foreground. Then you see clouds beginning to form and the sequence ends in an overcast that makes
the walkers look very menacing and large and dramatic. That problem with the weather wasn't really anticipated, but it
worked out nicely in that it gave us a chance to do a lot."
— American Cinematographer (June 1980)
Cinefex (a special effects industry journal)
"As a rebel officer looks through his electrobinoculars, he spots the approaching machines. The binoculars scan the
walkers from head to toe while a built-in digital readout designates their location. To achieve this scene, the
stop-motion walkers were filmed in VistaVision with a telephoto lens, the camera locked off. Twelve seconds of
animation were shot. The film was then front-projected onto a six-foot screen and rephotographed on tape using a
3/4-inch Sony video camera. Blurs were introduced here, along with a zoom-in on the walker's foot and tilt-up to the
moving head to give it a video verité look. The tape was transferred back to film during which a
binocular-shaped matte was added. Digital readouts were superimposed. 'The shot had everything that would take place
in a hand-held binocular situation,' said [Dennis] Muren. 'Because of all the generations and contrast, the final result looked
almost black-and-white.'"
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Doug Beswick, Stop Motion Technician
"For the five-walker shot, the two background ones were just mock-ups. Actually, they were photo cutouts that move
infinitesimally on a track. The legs of the cutouts had some small articulation to them. The photos were taken from
the angle the background walkers were meant to approach from."
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Cinefex
"Even more startling is the fact that the walker cutouts were actually 8x10 Polaroids, heavily retouched. 'We could
retouch a photo in twenty minutes, or take four days to build a model,' said Muren. 'The choice was clear.'"
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Phil Tippett
"When the speeder starts wrapping the rope around the legs of the walker, Pete Kuran animated a rope in 2-D cell
animation that twisted around the legs. Then, Jon Berg came up with an elastic band he wrapped around the walker's
leg. Jon used that to simulate the rope and he animated the shots where the walker was starting to get tripped-up and
falls over. The actual impact was done with a large scale prop that was shot by Richard Edlund."
— Cinefantastique (March 1997)
Peter Kuran, Animation And Rotoscope Supervisor
"Our department generated a cel-animated rope where this speeder ropes a snow walker's legs. The walker
trips over it. We even had a little cel-animated man crawling up one of the walkers to see if he could sabotage
it!"
— Fantastic Films (July 1980)
Lorne Peterson
"Steve Gawley devised a system of electromagnetic locks in the legs [for the four-foot walker]. When powered, the
magnets would hold the legs in place. When the power was cut, the legs would collapse. Unfortunately, the walker
weighed about ninety pounds and turned out to be too heavy for the magnets to support it. Instead, a steel cable
suspended the walker from above."
— Sculpting a Galaxy (2006)
Ken Ralston, Effects Cameraman
"Filming the Imperial walkers -- and all of the miniatures and stop-motion that went with them -- that was
difficult. We were combining them with snowspeeders. That was tough to achieve in that bright white environment with
the old optical printers available to us. No one had tried to show this kind of thing on film before."
— Star Wars Insider #105 (Dec 2008)
Alan Arnold, author of Once Upon a Galaxy
"It seems that a plan is under debate to rent space at another studio, none being available here, to shoot
an eighteen-foot-long mechanical foot in the act of crushing a snowspeeder during the battle on Hoth. Later, I learned
that the plan is to be dropped. The gargantuan foot will not be built, and instead the sequence will be done in
miniature in California."
— Once Upon a Galaxy: A Journal of the Making of The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Richard Edlund
"Another shot we did high-speed was the one where Luke's speeder gets crushed. For that, we had one large foot mounted
on an enormous pipe rig that was built out of camera range; and we used a special model speeder made out of thin
metal. An awful lot of work went into making that thing and detailing it out -- so it was a one-shot deal. If you blow
a take like that, the model makers aren't real happy."
— Cinefex #2 (Aug 1980)
Ken Ralston
"If the snow walker had a pop or a jerk in the animation, instead of redoing the shot, they would have a laserblast
hit it in the leg or wherever and it would make it look like it was injured or had something give it a shot, so that
was actually very time saving."
— Star Wars: The Definitive Collection laserdisc commentary (1993)
Joe Johnston
"It was a perfect type of puppet because the jerkiness that is inherent in stop-motion really lent itself to that kind
of machine. I thought it had a lot of things going for it. It was a great toy."
— Cinefex #3 (Dec 1980)
Julian Glover, Actor, "General Veers"
"On Empire, the last thing in the world that I knew about was what the thing I was driving was! I sat on the
top of a gantry with a bluescreen behind me and they shook it about a bit...There was one line which was, 'Target the
main generator.' It was in the middle of some other lines and I couldn't remember it. We must have done eight takes on
it. It was driving them absolutely mad! It wasn't until I actually saw the film that I knew what I was driving! I
said, 'My God, it's a giant giraffe!'"
— Lucasfilm Fan Club Magazine #10 (Winter 1990)
Sound and Soundtrack
The New York Times
"The Empire's immense anthropomorphic walking tanks make sounds blended from metal-stamping machinery, garbage trucks
and motors from oil derricks. 'Those walking tanks were supposed to weigh 500 tons, and it was difficult to get sounds
that would give that scale,' [Sound Design And Supervising Sound Effects Editor Ben Burtt] said. 'When they crashed, I used immense impact sounds like trains bumping.'"
— The New York Times (June 9, 1980)
John Williams, Composer of the Empire score
"Many passages required special instrumentation. For example, the music for "Battle in the Snow" has unusual
orchestration calling for five piccolos, five oboes, a battery of eight percussion, two grand pianos, two or three
harps, in addition to the normal orchestral complement. This was necessary in order to achieve a bizarre mechanical,
brutal sound for the sequence showing Imperial walkers, which are frightening inventions advancing across a
snowscape."
— liner notes, The Empire Strikes Back Soundtrack (1980)
