AN 'EMPIRE' AT 40: UNWANTED MEAL!

Brian Johnson prepares Artoo for his blast off!

For the comedic sequence of Artoo swallowed and ejected from the Dragonsnake, a specially built lightweight droid shell was created and literally detonated like a cannon from a specially constructed hole at ILM, supervised by Brian Johnson. The hole would be covered with mist and the area around it with vines and foilage.

With the original filming of Artoo being ejected by the swamp creature shot at ELSTREE not looking right, Brian Johnson, now heavily involved with US ILM duties, is in charge of the re-shoots. He recalled in an internet interview to fan preservationist Brandon Alinger: “They tried to do it (the original scene) by pulling it out of the actual water, but you can’t suck an R2-D2 out on a cable. So I re-did the top of the lake, but we did it on a big table, about half the size of this pool. We made an oval hole through the top of the table, and I got a big air ram, relatively short. I had a spare R2-D2, and we put a tube inside the R2-D2, that went up the whole length of it, and blocked it off at the top. And then fitted that over the end of the air ram, with a seal in it, and I put tiny scalpel blades on the roof of R2-D2. And I had these silicone rubber sheets made which we stretched over the oval hole, and we covered the whole thing in liquid nitrogen, so there was all the mist, and reflected bits."

Joe Johnston comes in to see the shoot.

Brian Johnson oversees the operation.

"Richard Edlund lit it for me and I stood on the stage with my little button in my hand, and a compressed air bottle set up, and R2 was loaded onto this thing. We said right, let’s get ready to go. The cameras were set up, we had three cameras on it, and the door opened, and George Lucas walked in, with Francis Ford Coppola, and half of the Paramount chiefs, and FOX people, and Christ knows what – it was like a Garrison of producers and everything else. So I said alright, we’re ready to go. And I thought, “holy shit, I’m standing with this thing behind my back.” And on the wall, we had this net to catch the R2-D2. Because we knew we were going to have to do it more than once. And there were about 12 of these skins, and I picked the one I liked, just prior to the people coming. So I stood there, cameras rolled at high speed, 3- 2- 1- go… and on the net, the boys had put up a bulls eye. They asked me where they should put it. I told them how high I thought it would go, and they placed bets on where the R2 would go, or whether it would never even get there or whatever. And it came out – and it was perfect. It hit the net, and it the bulls-eye right in the middle of the net. It was perfect. Pure luck. Not only that, all the suits went, “ oh, great, thanks very much.” And off they went. And I was thinking, “ oh shit, it worked the first time, it doesn’t ever work the first time.” And then we put another membrane on and tried it again, and the membrane just stretched. It went “twang!” We did it again and again. I didn’t know but what happened was the guy in the model department, who had been given the job of molding, pouring, mixing the silicone and pouring it out had run out of the right stuff. He only made one sheet out of the 12 that was the correct consistency. So I had picked the one out, just when there’s someone looking over my shoulder, and that was the right occasion wasn’t it? So we had to have more made with the right mixture. That would just stretch slightly and then slap. I could have had this condom like R2-D2, with this mass of producers, and they’d be going, “oh… bloody English.” 

And Artoo goes flying!

The final shot, which would be slowed down in later post production.