Why Mark Hamill Preferred Tatooine's Heat To Hoth's Frigid Cold While Filming Star Wars
The cast and crew of "Star Wars" may have only pretended to go to a galaxy far, far away, but making the original trilogy took a lot of traveling. The films traverse multiple different planets, each with its own climates and locales. Since these were the days before wholesale digital environments, the "Star Wars" team had to go globe-trotting to locations that could approximate alien worlds.
Take Tatooine, the desert backwater where Luke Skywalker's (Mark Hamill) journey begins in the original "Star Wars." The planet's arid environment is actually the African country of Tunisia. The sequel, "The Empire Strikes Back," famously flips the original film on its head, so it begins on an ice planet, Hoth, rather than a desert one. To find the appropriate amount of snow, the crew headed to Finse, Norway. The rest of both films were shot in cozier conditions at Elstree Studios in London, but the on-location shoots came with challenges. Still, Mark Hamill would take the desert over the tundra any day.
Challenging shoots
According to Time Magazine's contemporaneous reporting, Tatooine was originally conceived as a jungle planet, and Lucas considered shooting in the Philippines. However, Lucas decided against shooting in the jungle and changed the setting to a desert and the shooting location to Tunisia. The desert wasn't free of problems; the heat caused equipment malfunctions, and a rain storm set the production behind schedule.
Despite how different Norway was from Tunisia, history repeated itself during the "Empire Strikes Back" shoot. Director Irvin Kershner recounted how, the night before the shoot was set to begin, Finse got hit with a snowstorm, and the crew had to dig themselves out. They couldn't even film outside because the cold temperatures made the film brittle; as it ran through the camera, it would crack.
To ensure the first day wasn't a total loss, Kershner set the camera in the kitchen doorway and had Hamill run around in the snow a few feet away (this would be used when Luke is running away from the Wampa). Kershner expressed sympathy for Hamill, saying, "The crew [was] nice and toasty and [Hamill] has to go out there and waddle around in the snow."
In 2020, Hamill spoke to StarWars.com about his memories of Norway:
"They had scouted a location that was going to take us 90 minutes to get to, where there was a glacier that had blue ice that photographed blue on camera. I was very excited to see it and then, as happens in filmmaking, it was one of the worst snowstorms in I don't know how many years. We wound up filming right outside the lodge. I mean, if you turned the camera around you saw people on their balconies having their hot chocolate as Harrison [Ford] and I were acting next to a dead tauntaun."
The Norway shoot continued to be plagued by everything from sub-zero temperatures to avalanches.
Hamill weighs in
Another challenge for Hamill came from the costuming; Luke's snow gear may have looked warm, but it wasn't built to actually protect against the bitter cold. Hamill mentions a particularly frustrating moment came when the crew decided his face needed more snow:
"I was supposed to be sort of groggy and semi-conscious when Obi-Wan comes to me in the vision. And they'd say, 'Get a little more snow on his face!' and Graham Freeborn [the chief makeup artist] would scoop up snow and pack it so it would be in my eyelashes and eyebrows. You'd go as long as you could and then you'd try to get in a tent and get warm until they needed you again. Certainly a challenging environment. I mean, North Africa could be warm, but that you can handle better than bitter cold."
I've never experienced temperatures as extreme as either Tunisia's heat or Norway's cold, but in general, I'd have to agree with Hamill's preference. The heat can be frustrating, but it's manageable as long as you've got water handy. Freezing cold makes functioning impossible as you huddle your body together and retreat to the nearest source of warmth. Hamill must have been very happy that, for "Return of the Jedi," they went back to Tatooine (this time filmed in Yuma, Arizona), not Hoth.