The Cult of Darth Vader

Yeah, I made a series of movies that was about one thing: Darth Vader. Originally, people thought it was all about Luke. The early films are about Luke redeeming his father, so Luke's the focus. But it's also about Princess Leia and her struggle to re-establish the Republic, which is what her mother was doing. So it's really about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons.

So now, instead of all these surprises that aren't actually surprises, when you get back to Episode IV, as soon as Darth Vader walks through that door, and you see Princess Leia with R2, you're going to say, "Oh, my God, that's his daughter. Are they gonna find out?" And you get through the whole first movie and nobody figures anything out. The figuring-out part is mostly done off-screen. The first three episodes are a tragedy, and the second three go slightly goofy, but they're inspirational: Even the worst, most evil people find compassion. Darth Vader has compassion for his children, and that's ultimately what children are for.

Often, in classical tragedies, there's a final moment when the scales fall from the hero's eyes.

Well, in real Greek tragedies, the kids are usually the problem. They're the ones that are killing the parents, but this is more uplifting: It's up to one generation to fix the sins of the last generation.

What was the visual evolution of Vader? Originally there was a Bedouin concept --

No, that was more the Tusken Raiders. Darth Vader has pretty much always been Darth Vader. When he's first mentioned in the script, he's a guy in a helmet with a breathing mask who can't breathe because of this fight with Obi-Wan. And I took that description to [designer] Ralph McQuarrie. He did different drawings, but they're almost all the same: a guy with a cape, a portable iron lung, a mask, a samurai helmet and a chest piece that had electronics on it.

Where did the samurai helmet come from?

I was introduced to samurai movies in film school. And I became infatuated with Japanese culture; I was going to do my first film, THX 1138, in Japan. Then reality set in.

Just how restrictive was that costume?

He couldn't move at all, really. We had to keep modifying the suit so people could move in it. By the time we got to the first light-saber battle, we realized we weren't going to be able to do much. And so I accepted it was an old man vs. a half-man, half-machine. But Jedi were supposed to be quite active. So for the next one, we got a really good stunt guy in, one of the best sword fighters in England. And Mark Hamill is a good sword fighter. For the final film, Hayden [Christensen] and Obi-Wan -- I mean Ewan -- took it very seriously; they trained for months. Those swords are carbon fiber: We went through lots of them, because they were hitting so hard, they would get bent. It's like learning to dance, only if you make a mistake, you really get hurt.

Did you ever know anybody who was in an iron lung? Vader's breathing sound is so scary.

No. Soundwise, the idea was that he had been almost killed, so his breath was much louder than anybody else's, like a monster breathing. I hired Ben Burtt to do the sound effects before I even finished writing the screenplay. I had given him a huge list of tasks before I went off and shot the movie: "R2 needs a voice, and we need lasers that are different from what anybody else has ever done, and I don't want the engines for the spaceships to sound like rockets or jets. And this guy is in an iron lung, so figure that one out." When I came back, he had this whole library of sounds. And he came up with this iron lung that was a combination of other sounds, and it was eerie and deeply disturbing, and I said, "That's it."

(Excerpted from RS 975, June 2, 2005)