Set decorator Roger Christian is the man behind such iconic Star Wars designs as the lightsaber, the Millennium Falcon interior, and the R2-D2 prototype. But the Oscar winner says that his toughest job was the trash-compactor scene. One of the oddest, best-loved, and most-nitpicked scenes from the original 1977 Star Wars, the six-minute sequence aboard the first Death Star finds Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), Han Solo (Harrison Ford), Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) trapped inside a deadly garbage chamber filled with space sewage, and inhabited by a mysterious tentacled monster called the Dianoga. Based on a new interview with Christian — and drawing from various remembrances of cast and crew members throughout the years — Yahoo Movies took a deep dive into the smelliest scene in the Star Wars galaxy.

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Watch the scene:

“Into the garbage chute, flyboy!”

One of the very first people hired by director George Lucas to work on Star Wars, Roger Christian was responsible (along with production designer John Barry) for creating a detailed futuristic world on a minimal budget. “His mantra was always, ‘Everything had to work and look like it worked. Nothing should look designed, nothing should stand out,’” Christian says of the visionary director. And that philosophy extended even to Darth Vader’s garbage.



It was Christian’s job to fill the trash compactor with junk. But he quickly realized that his usual building materials — i.e. the airplane scrap metal he used for the spaceships, or the camera parts he co-opted for lightsabers and binoculars — wouldn’t work.

“I couldn’t use my normal airplane junk, because it would have hurt them, you know?” Christian told Yahoo Movies. “I couldn’t put in anything toxic either, because these are human beings — they’re actors! So I was experimenting with anything. I had to put a huge amount of junk in there, and I was finding rubber bits and different things. [I needed] anything I could see that I knew wouldn’t hurt them, but would look right — rubber hosing, everything.”

“I used a lot of polystyrene. But if it breaks, it’s white inside,” he continued. “So I had the paint shop manage to inject paint into it somehow, so if a piece broke off, it wouldn’t show.”

“What an incredible smell you’ve discovered!”

Christian did his best to make sure that the actors were safe, but shooting the compactor scene was still an ordeal. For one thing, the actors were partially submerged in shallow water for the entirety of the two-day shoot at London’s Pinewood Studios. They wore wet suits under their clothes, which no one seems to remember fondly. “Every time I got wet or, more specifically, too wet, I’d have to get out of this wet rubber outfit to get blown dry,” Hamill said in a 1997 interview. “It was uncomfortable. You’d get rashes in places you never thought possible.” Fisher concurred, telling The Making of Star Wars author J.W. Rinzler, “I liked jumping through the garbage chute, but I didn’t like wearing the wet suit.”

Not only was the cast uncomfortable, but they became increasingly smelly as the shoot went on. In Christian’s words: “Water stinks after a while.” According to Dale Pollack’s Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas, Mayhew was reluctant to enter the water in his furry Chewbacca costume, which unfortunately retained its trash-compactor odor.

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