One Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back Scene Was Filmed In George Lucas' Swimming Pool
From the icy wastes of the planet Hoth to the gorgeous sunsets of Cloud City on Bespin, "The Empire Strikes Back" has a lot going for it in terms of locations. This, coupled with creature effects by the likes of Phil Tippett — who designed the Tauntauns and Wampa for "Empire," along with Jabba the Hut and the Rancor for "Return of the Jedi" — is a big part of what makes the original "Star Wars" trilogy work so well visually.
Unlike the video-game sheen of certain prequels, sequels, and streaming spin-offs, which have had actors performing against green screen backgrounds and on Volume soundstages, "The Empire Strikes Back" looks and feels lived-in and real because it was filmed in real places. And that includes George Lucas' swimming pool.
The swamps of Dagobah may not sound like the best place for a pool party, but Lucas did indeed let the pool in his own backyard double for one in "The Empire Strikes Back." According to StarWars.com, Dagobah was created on a set in EMI Elstree Studio in England. It just goes to show that not every location in the original "Star Wars" trilogy was somewhere pre-existing on Earth, like the Tunisian desert or Northern California's redwood forests.
You may recall the scene in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Luke Skywalker first lands his X-Wing fighter on Dagobah, getting it stuck in the swamp. His faithful astromech droid, R2-D2, falls into the water, but the droid's scope quickly surfaces and heads toward the shore, almost whistling in a bleep-bloop kind of way. Right behind R2, though, comes the fin of a fearsome dragonsnake, which winds up swallowing the droid, before spitting it out. The crew of "The Empire Strikes Back" called it the "bog creature."
The bog creature lived in Lucas' pool
It seems the shot of the bog creature's fin in "The Empire Strikes Back" was a pickup shot, meaning it was filmed to plug a gap in the flow of images after principal photography had wrapped. Since it was closer to home than England, and the shot itself was a close-up, the "Star Wars" crew trucked in the bog creature (on the back of a pick-up, no less) and used the foundation of George Lucas' pool to pull off the necessary insert.
Having spent some time, as a teenager, attempting to clean my uncle's swimming pool, only to stir up algae and make the water look scummy and green, I can personally vouch for the fact that there's sometimes no discernible difference between the surface of a Florida pool and the surface of a Florida swamp. Could a bog creature live in that kind of pool?
Ask the gators, who used to come crawling out of the canal onto the embankment behind my uncle's backyard. For his part, Lucas (Uncle George, as some fans may think of him) lived on the opposite coast in sunny California, which posed a lighting challenge for the "Empire Strikes Back" crew as they were filming that pick-up shot of the bog creature.
Outfitting the pool with a diffuser screen solved that problem. A pair of scuba divers, meanwhile, came in to operate the bog creature from underwater. If this sounds like a lot of work just for one fleeting shot of a fin, it just goes to show that making movies is never easy. That's especially true for "The Empire Strikes Back," which Mark Hamill has called "the most physically grueling" film of the original "Star Wars" trilogy.
"The Empire Strikes Back" is streaming on Disney+.