- "Building the set at Yuma was an enormous project... Over Thanksgiving holiday when we first erected the fence around the set, there was a reported crowd of 35,000 dune buggy enthusiasts there. We needed to camouflage ourselves from the public and to schedule our shooting to avoid stray dune buggies creeping into a shot in the distance. This wasn't easy because on weekends the buggies covered the surrounding hills like ants."
- ―Howard Kazanjian
Chewbacca, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker on their way to the Great Pit of Carkoon
Instead of returning to Tunisia, the filmmakers decided to stay closer to home and go to the sand dunes around Yuma for making Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. Buttercup Valley, California[1] was the filming site for the Great Pit of Carkoon sequence on the Dune Sea. Filming took place in April 1982, though construction had taken place over the previous five months.[2] The crew stayed in the nearest town, Yuma, Arizona, while filming, logging over 5,500 man-days in hotel rooms for set construction and filming.[1]
For A New Hope's Special Edition, the crew returned to the Imperial Sand Dunes to film additional shots of stormtroopers searching for traces of R2-D2 crash landing his escape pod.[3]
Sources[]
- Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace Scrapbook
Jedi at 40 | Ben Burtt and Randy Thom on Crafting Ewokese, Jabba's Voice, and the Rancor's Roar on StarWars.com (backup link)
Notes and references[]