How ‘Star Wars’ nearly started a real-life war between Libya and Tunisia
Star Wars was seen as nothing more than a joke.
Seriously, people were talking about the original Star Wars as if it had killed the career of George Lucas long before it came out. While it might sound strange today, Lucas very much had a career to kill before the adventures of Luke Skywalker and chums hit theatres. He had a big hit in 1973 with American Graffiti, a light-hearted, nostalgic coming-of-age comedy that made $140 million at the box office and earned the only nomination for ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards of his career.
Suddenly, he was moving from American Graffiti to this mega-budget sci-fi spectacle informed by Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and several other sci-fi stories from the 1940s and 1950s that hadn’t been fashionable even at the time. Imagine if Avatar had been made by Olivia Wilde after the success of Booksmart, and you’ve got a fair idea of how sceptical people were about the picture. It wasn’t just industry suits and insiders that were sceptical, either; it was the vast majority of the cast.
So, with that in mind, you can imagine the atmosphere of the location shooting for the scenes on Skywalker’s home planet, Tatooine, which took place in the heart of the Sahara Desert in Tunisia.
For a fortnight, the cast and crew were hauled out into one of the hottest, driest parts of the world. Then, they were trussed up in large, uncomfortable costumes (spare a fucking thought for Anthony Daniels in his metal C-3PO costume). Then told to recite some of the clunkiest dialogue they’d ever spoken in the name of a film that was going to crash and burn harder than the Hindenburg itself.
The mood on set, it’s fair to say, wasn’t exactly stellar to begin with, then it got worse.
At the very least, the cast had some pretty spectacular props to work with, including the enormous, 27 metre long Sandcrawler built for the scenes where Luke and his uncle Owen meet Threepio and R2-D2. Additionally, Lucas hasn’t considered that they were filming near the border where Tunisia meets Libya. At the time, tensions between the two countries were at an all-time high due to the actions of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Then suddenly, this enormous vehicle shows up near the Libyan border. One that looks suspiciously like a military vehicle.
The Libyan government (read Gaddafi) immediately sent word to their Tunisian counterparts demanding they “immediately cease its provocative deployment of a massive military vehicle near the border”. Failure to do so, they said, would be read as an act of war. The Tunisian government ran this by the Star Wars production team, who reasoned that explaining to literal Muammar Gaddafi that they were actually just making a sci-fi movie and they had nothing to worry about probably wouldn’t work.
Thus, production was immediately canned in Tunisia and moved to Death Valley, California, as soon as possible. This wouldn’t be the end of the headaches surrounding the production of the first Star Wars movie, but it was arguably the most dramatic. Just as well the movie worked out pretty well for all involved, eh?