There were many times more matte paintings in Empire than there were in Star Wars, and I was fortunate to have the help of Ralph McQuarrie to do probably about half the mattes. That was a tremendous help to me because there was an enormous amount of work piled up when I got there. We started painting immediately, just digging into the pile and doing paintings. I was still greatly concerned with the mechanics of the situation and seeing that the equipment was coming along the way it shouldmaking the right tests and pushing that along, as well as getting the paintings done. So it was great to have Ralph, who is a tremendous artist and was also the Conceptual Artist on the film, just to be there and do paintings at the same time. That saved me.
There are, of course, a number of sequences throughout the film where matte paintings are used and they are all quite different in terms of locale. One is the snow, one is the Cloud City, one is an interior, one is on the Bog Planet. We had mattes scattered throughout. There is one major sequence in which many matte paintings are used. It takes place at the end of the film, when Darth Vader and Luke are having a laser sword fight inside a giant tube that kind of runs away to nothing. They are on a catwalk above it, inside Cloud City and, at one point, Luke falls and we follow him down the shaft. That's a painting with a rear-projected element for blue screen. In other words, Luke was just photographed against blue, spinning on a wire with a tied-off camera. What we had to do was have him come in from the top of the frame, follow him down the shaft, and then have him go away. So his rear-screen elements had to be projected with motion control. We had to do a move on that, as well as match the move on the paintings. It's quite believable.
In that sequence there are probably a dozen paintings. Some are combined; most of them are front-projection. (One of the advantages of front projection is that we are able to take a plate and reduce it slightly, thereby helping to maintain the quality.) Some of the paintings were shot as backgrounds for blue screen elements. When I saw the finished film for the first timewhich was, of course, very exciting and filled with anticipation for me I noted that the sequence flows very smoothly. The blue screen footage and mattes cut together with the production footage quite smoothly and I don't think many people will be aware of the differences. Of course, as is George Lucas' method, he cuts very quickly, as well, and the story is very exciting at that pointall of which helps.
That matte paintings for the Cloud City sequence were exteriors used as backgrounds when the Millennium Falcon (Han Solo's spaceship) lands on a pad and takes off later. They served as transitional shots between the approaches to Cloud City through the clouds and the interior. Those were kind of quick throw-aways, but I think they worked pretty well because, in this case, you've got a matte shot that obviously has to represent something other than reality. Everybody knows full well that there are no cities that are floating in the cloudsand nobody has yet built one for a filmso it has to be produced by some degree of cinema magic. But these are the kinds of matte shots that always worry me. When you are extending actual sets or putting in backgrounds of hills and mountains, something that the audience can relate to as being real, then if you've succeeded the audience won't notice it. But with a Cloud City, people will say: "This has to be a painting; it has to be a miniature; it has to be something, because a city floating in the air can't possibly exist in reality." So shots like those are perhaps the most anxiety-producing mattes of all. Ralph McQuarrie did a good number of those paintings and, of course, he had a great deal of design sense for Cloud City. Also, the sequence takes place at sunset, which gives the visuals a nice, eerie, other worldly glow. I hope all of these things combine to create the illusion successfully.
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