Some Of Star Wars' Most Memorable Scenes Were Those That George Lucas Didn't Even Script

"Star Wars" was a monumental piece of cinema. Riding on the New Hollywood era that saw the rise of several auteurs and the systematic collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system, George Lucas' third feature is both a giant indie production and a blockbuster epic. The first movie especially combines the pulpy fun of the adventure serials Lucas grew up watching with cutting-edge visual effects that changed movies forever.

There's a lot of Lucas' filmmaking style in the original trilogy (even if arguably the most "Lucas" scene in all of "Star Wars" came in "The Phantom Menace"), but these movies also show his strengths as a collaborator — especially in the action. That's because, well, George didn't really do that much work on those scenes, at least on a script level. Instead, many of the big set pieces in the original trilogy were left up to the imagination of the visual effects wizards at ILM to figure out how to bring this epic to life.

In an oral history of the making of "The Empire Strikes Back" for StarWars.com, storyboard artist, effects technician, and eventual director Joe Johnston revealed that the Battle of Hoth at the start of that movie was nowhere to be found on the script — at least not in detail.

"There was no written [Battle of Hoth] sequence in the first script that I read, and this was typical of the way George would do the action sequences," Johnston explained. "He would basically leave all the action out knowing that we were going to be using storyboards and models and whatever technique we could. We would figure out what the action sequence was."

As Johnston recalls, in the script, "There would just be a blank, and [Lucas] would say something — the example I remember is from '[Return of the] Jedi,' where the script said, 'Luke and Leia jump on a speeder bike and race off into the woods.' And then there'd be a blank slot."

As undeniably visionary as Lucas is, his vision for the original "Star Wars" trilogy couldn't have been achieved alone. The first film, the only one he directed, faced so many technological and budgetary limitations that he was forced to rely on others quite a lot — especially the visual effects team. Likewise, the editors made some big cuts and changes that vastly improved the film's pacing. By the time "The Empire Strikes Back" came around, Lucas passed the directorial baton (reportedly because he hates directing), so there was a lot of freedom for the crew to interpret Lucas' ideas.

"We had a lot of freedom. George had ideas about how to do things but he really wanted us to explore the best ways to figure out the action," Johnston said. "Specifically, to the Battle of Hoth, I just remember him saying, 'Just come up with shots. They don't even have to be connected. Just come up with cool shots that would show some ideas about how this how ragtag band of rebels on this snow planet defend their base from an overwhelming force of Imperial soldiers.'"

Despite all the criticisms of the prequel trilogy and Lucas' over-indulgence during the making of those three films, it's hard to argue against how successful "Star Wars" is as a universe, and a big part of that is thanks to the contributions of people who took Lucas' wild ideas and made them a reality.