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For the climactic battle sequence, which includes dogfights in space and missile runs on the Death Star, Lucas gathered all the old war movies he could find and spliced together their aerial-combat footage. "We did all that to get an idea of how to set up this scene," he explains. "It was all very complicated, with the most complicated sound problems, mixing and special effects." The dashing ten-minute sequence took eight weeks to edit (normally 105 minutes of a Lucas film can be edited in that time).
With all the wonderful illusions and tricks, the actors—the live actors, that is —sometimes felt like robots themselves. "They don't exactly give you a course in acting in a science fiction movie," says Carrie Fisher, 20, who plays Princess Leia. "At one point I'm supposed to react to seeing my planet blow up. You know, there go my parents, my record collection, everything. What do I see? A hand waving to tell me where to look." Adds Mark Hamill, 25, who plays Luke Skywalker: "Acting in this movie, I felt like a raisin in a gigantic fruit salad. And I didn't even know who the coconuts or cantaloupes were."
All nearly gagged trying to say some of Lucas' lines. " 'I thought I recognized your foul stench when I was brought aboard, Governor Tarkin,' is not everyday conversation," says Fisher. "There were times when I issued a threat to tie George up and make him repeat his own dialogue," adds Harrison Ford, 35, who plays Han Solo, the cynical mercenary captain of the Millennium Falcon. "I told him: 'You can't say that stuff. You can only type it.' But I was wrong. It worked." The only actor whom Lucas allowed to change anything was Alec Guinness, who plays Obi-wan Kenobi. Originally, old Obi-wan was supposed to start off crazy and then turn into the wise old wizard of Good. Guinness felt that that transition was not right for his method of acting or for the character, and Lucas relented. Now Obi-wan is wise from beginning to end.
Most of the time, Lucas would not direct the actors in the sense of telling them what to do, and at first this bothered some of them. "George directs like
John Ford," says Francis Ford Coppola, who has been both mentor and best friend to Lucas. "He doesn't really work a lot with his actors or tell them a lot. But he constructs his scenes so specifically, or narrowly—like a railroad track —that everything comes out more or less the way he sees it." Coppola considers Lucas "a pure film maker. He really only wants to put on film the things he loves. He has few pretensions about making 'great films' or 'great art,' and consequently he comes closer than most. I think, though, that it's both sad and unnecessary that he suffers so much while he's making movies."