The conclusion to the original “Star Wars” trilogy was far, far from settled when the film began pre-production. The film was scheduled to begin principal photography on January 13, 1982, but the panel of writing experts (George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, David Webb Peoples, and director Richard Marquand) disagreed on certain details (Kasdan, for example, he favored a more dour finale style where Han Solo is killed at the beginning of the third act, and an emotionally drained Luke Skywalker staggers off into the sunset alone).
According to John Phillip Peecher’s “Star Wars — The Making of Return of the Jedi,” co-producer Jim Bloom and production designer Norman Reynolds scouted the locations based on the story outline. They knew that Endor was a moon rich in forests and that Jabba’s habitat on Tatooine had to exist on the edge of massive sand dunes. The sets were being built in London, but a schematic is not a script. The individual scenes, the dialogues, the moments… none of that was there.
As production supervisor Robert Watts told Peecher:
“The script is the blueprint for everything, and without it you tend to wobble a bit. We’d had directions, we’d had discussions, we’d had drafts, but the final script came very, very late. It meant sometimes you build things because you can’t waiting for certain decisions that are then changed. Then when you get the go-ahead for the final script, you incur an immense amount of overtime, which is expensive, but somehow you make it happen. It happened this time, but not to a great extent.” .
