Part II: the Sets

THE SETS

The studio live-action sequences for most of the Star Wars movies were shot on English soundstages, and here are some extensive notes about the full-sized sets that were built there.

The original Millennium Falcon set under construction in 1976.

Also, because the cockpit interior is such an iconic part of the Millennium Falcon's design, and of great interest to model makers, I bring you a massive amount of ludicrously detailed information on that particular topic. It's basically the research I did while planning my own Falcon model, saving you the trouble!

So. Welcome to the most exhaustive resource on the Falcon sets known to humankind. Or at least to me. It includes a veritable treasure trove of behind the scenes photographs.

THE EXTERIOR SETS

Three or four physical sets representing the exterior of the Millennium Falcon have been built for Star Wars films over the years.

Original Star Wars (ANH) Falcon sets

Back in 1976 an external Falcon set was built at England's EMI Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, for two scenes: Docking Bay 94 on Tatooine, and the Death Star hangar. For space reasons only the starboard (right) half of the ship was constructed – the other side simply wasn't there! Since the ship was needed to appear in both locations, it was constructed first and then the two docking sets built around it as required.

The port (left) side of the ship is never seen in Star Wars. This also explains why the Falcon is missing its radar dish in the Docking Bay 94 scene – it was never built!

Not only was it a half ship, but a smaller one than you'd expect. If you were to logically scale out the models and interior sets you'd end up with a ship that should easily be 40% or so larger than the actual exterior set that was constructed. This is another famous Star Wars continuity error that can largely be attributed to limited budgets.

Because these are fairly interesting and iconic sets, I've done a fair bit of research on them, and have created a special subpage of information dedicated strictly to the original Star Wars Falcon docking bay sets. If you're interested in that subject, definitely check out those pages.

The Empire Strikes Back (ESB) Falcon sets

When it came to filming Empire in 1979, the production team decided that an entire craft was needed, and so the frame for a complete 360° exterior Falcon was built at a shipyard in Wales. It was transported to Elstree's newly built Stage 6 in 16 pie-like segments, where teams of craftspeople finished and detailed the piece. This enormous prop (65 feet in diameter, 80 feet long, and 23 tons, according to producer Gary Kurtz) was used in the Hoth hangar at the start of the movie, the gut of the space slug scene, and the landing platform in Cloud City. Again, the Falcon was the sole standing element and the various sets were constructed to fit around it, though the whole thing could be shifted around on compressed-air hoverpads.

The documentary for the Rise of Skywalker film shows the full-sized Falcon being slowly moved around on its hoverpads, pulled by forklifts. Awesome.

The previous ANH exterior set wasn't available to be reused, though the ESB Falcon had the same basic dimensions and therefore had the same problem of the interior sets not fitting.

A full spaceship set, not just one half, was built for ESB.

Because of the support problems discovered in ANH, two additional landing gear were added on the front. Also, a panoply of external lights, from landing lights to headlights, was added (see the lighting section of this site). The interior sets were recreated, though the cockpit interior set is notable for being a different depth than ANH's (see cockpit section below) and the hold set also has subtle differences.

Return of the Jedi (ROTJ) Falcon set

The Falcon half-set appears to have been retained for use in The Last Jedi, and expanded. In fact, in 2016 some naughty trespassing lads broke into the English shooting set for the movie and took some fascinating photos of the inside and outside of a revised full-sized and complete set which, like the ESB set, covers a full 360 degrees. This set was dismantled and rebuilt on an Irish cliff for certain scenes as well. Whether this counts as the third full-size Falcon or the fourth depends on your point of view.

Bizarrely, despite having access to all the original plans and blueprints, the builders of this new Falcon gave it a huge and extremely thick pair of "jaws" – the rectangular box structure between the two triangular mandibles. These don't match up with the films' CGI model at all.

“Solo” Falcon set

The Falcon in the Young Han Solo film looks rather different from what we're used to, since it was Lando Calrissian's ride at the time. It was a shiny panelled ship, with gleaming white corridors and hybrid square/circle wall sconces. The docking rings are also covered with flat plates, thus closely resembling an early Ralph McQuarrie production painting.

The Solo ship is basically slightly larger than the later iterations, since it's covered with smooth flat panels in blue and white. The idea is that the panels get ripped off during the Kessel Run, exposing the raw Falcon beneath that we all know and love. In addition, the ship has a T-shaped escape pod stuck between the front mandibles. Amusingly this pod-thing resembles an unreleased add-on toy that was designed by Kenner back in the 70s or 80s.

The ship also had a five-leg landing gear setup, not an ANH-era three-legger. This is explained in the film, when Solo pulls a manoeuvre that rips two of the landing gear off the bottom of the ship.

THE HOLD

The hold was a pretty important interior set for the first two movies with the light sabre training scene (Star Wars) and ship repair (ESB) scenes taking place therein. The room is broadly similar between the two films, with various size and detail differences. The set was reconstructed for the Force Awakens, mostly following the ESB plan.

For more details, check out my chapter on the Falcon's hold.

Corridors

The Falcon's corridors are all basically the same: circular in cross-section, lined with panels designed to look like grubby beige vinyl-covered foam cushions, and punctuated by protruding rings of smaller fake cushions. The floor has rows of narrow slots around the edges by the walls, through which yellowish light shines. It has simulated metal floor panels marked with narrow holes representing finger holes for lifting the plates. The walls are equipped with sconce lights.

There are two types of corridors - straight (cylindrical) and curved (toroidal). The curved ones are segments of circles and are meant to reflect the round design of the ship. The one visible behind the cockpit is straight. The corridors are not, it has to be said, a very space-efficient design given the relatively small size of the ship. But they look pretty cool, and the cushions do suggest a certain practical element, given the way the Falcon gets flung around in battle.

One of the many internal set problems on the ship is that the corridor is at the wrong height. External views of the ship show the cockpit raised above the centre line of the craft. But the internal set, when characters run from the ramp or the hold into the cockpit access corridor, has a floor that's totally level.

1977

The corridor is marked by a series of wall-mounted lights. They’re square grids, backlit with greenish-yellow light, and containing a complex black cone-shaped object in the middle. This object is actually the upper housing from a Scottish-made Coughtrie SW light fixture, of the kind seen in old warehouses, housing estates, and railway outbuildings all across Britain. These lights are still made and sold today. (remove the glass dome, the optional light shield, the internal socket, and the gooseneck and you've got yourself part of a Falcon wall sconce!)

Given the number of light fixtures in the film, and given the propensity of British set dressers of the 1970s to make stuff out of plaster, it's quite likely that the fixtures were all cast copies of an original lamp.

1980

The wall sconces had the same Coughtrie lamp housings, but the outer section went from square to circular. The light changed to a very pale blue.

The lamp change is of course a classical example of a set change that makes zero narrative sense in a Star Wars film. After all, replacing all the hallway lights in a spaceship is surely an expensive thing to do, especially when you have other worries like a bounty on your head. And since the square fixtures cut into the cushions on the corners, you’d need to replace all the cushions at lamp height as well. So mark this one up as yet another fantasy movie thing, resulting from a general lack of interest in obsessive continuity.

1983

Presumed the same as 1980.

The prosaic  exterior, showing the stub corridor located behind the cockpit. The labelling on the sawhorses indicate that the photo was taken during the filming of "Chapter III" or Return of the Jedi.

2015

The TFA set featured sconces of the same round design as the 1980 set, but the light colour changed to pale green.

2018

The interior corridors in the new Falcon set are all clean and white, with square wall sconces.

Backwall, interior side.

The interior (corridor) side of the cockpit's backwall isn't very important for people making models of the whole spacecraft, since it's obviously not visible when you look in through the cockpit windows. But the backside is important if you're making, say, a diorama of the cockpit.

1977

Shown for a split second in shadow as one of the stormtroopers who boarded the Falcon on the Death Star walks out. Basically the starboard side of the interior backwall is seen, and it's simply a blank grey wall.

Extra nerd note: there is a seeming continuity error here, as the sequence doesn't make sense if you assume that there are only two stormtroopers in that scene. The one with the small rifle is shown leaving the hold, and walking towards the ramp. Then the one with the long rifle is shown walking down the cockpit corridor. Then we cut to the ramp, where the one with the small rifle is shown frame left, and then the long rifle trooper arrives frame right, from the wrong direction and at the wrong point in time. So this sequence only makes logical sense if you assume there are four stormtroopers who arrive at the ramp at different times.

However, the curved wall to the side of the backwall backside, as it were, wasn't blank! There's a control panel there with switches and lights covering at least the upper half of that area. Amazing the set builders put details in parts of the ship that were never used or seen.

It's likely that this shot of Ford and Hamill wasn't taken in the stub corridor behind the cockpit set, but at the end of the corridor on the large interior set that housed the hold (the one in the stormtrooper photo above). This construction photo suggests the latter is the case, since the hold set was built off the studio floor to allow for the smuggling compartments.

1983

This Return of the Jedi outtake shows a similarly blank back wall, only with a horizontal join halfway down. The control panel above has vanished from the curved wall, and is replaced by a wall light. (though logically given the deeper cockpit,  the backwall should have pushed back and eliminated this area!) An upper wall cushion has been removed, revealing pipes and insulation. Also, the door panel to the far right of this photo seems to have a different arrangement of lights, and is set deeper into the wall, than the original ANH design.

Note one subtle difference between the ROTJ design and the ANH design. The wall cushions have been somewhat regularized in the view below – each mini ring cushion is the height of two large wall cushions. And the metal part of each ring has a triangular projection because the mini cushions don't touch the floor. Contrast this view to the ANH photo above, where the small ring cushions neither touch the floor, nor correspond to two large cushions in height. The Coughtrie housings also appear lighter in colour, though this could be an increase in brightness of the sconces compared to the dim ANH sconces. Finally, there is only one lamp per cushion for the majority of the internal rings, whereas ANH seems to show two lamps per cushion (see photo above).

2015

The interior backwall surface is completely festooned with random greeblies and cables in The Force Awakens. The starboard wall has the ROTJ-style lamp, and the cockpit backwall isn't pushed back inwards as it logically should.

It seems odd how clean and shiny the corridor floors were in this film. Given that the Falcon was supposedly abandoned in a junkyard for years, you'd think that the place would be filthy, with broken lights and holes in the walls, and piles of garbage and dead space rats strewn everywhere...

Corridor and hold floor hatches

1977

No floor hatches are seen in the hold. However the curved corridor that links the hold to the ramp has two practical underfloor hatches for the compartments in which our heroes hide upon arrival at the Death Star. These spaces required the entire hold and corridor sets to be built a few feet off the floor.

The mystery woman inside the compartment with Alec Guinness is apparently hair stylist Patricia McDermott.

1980

No corridor smuggling compartments appear. However the hold set has two visible octagonal floor hatches, and Han is seen entering one to attempt emergency repairs. This access hole seems to go pretty far down. Maybe the Falcon is actually a TARDIS.

Interestingly, the ESB set was only built about a foot off the floor, unlike the raised ANH set. This couldn't have allowed for a deep hole for the access pits. So the hold pits where Han tries to repair the Falcon in ESB were constructed by positioning part of the set over a deep tank on the studio floor.

2015

The new set reuses the smuggling compartment idea, though they’re in a different location from the first movie. Rey is seen in one of the hold pits, though the interior details look changed.

The table seems basically the same as the previous films’ table, but the lights on the control buttons may be different.

Couch

1977

A fairly high-backed couch with odd patterns in the simulated raised cushions. Definitely a memorable look. The top back is lined with blinky lights. The seats are equipped with seatbelts, which is logical enough though they’re rarely shown. Obi-Wan is shown sensibly buckling up during the Tatooine takeoff sequence.

The same scene shows a white plastic bowl and spoon on the ledge behind the couch, as Luke and Ben strap in. It’s vibrating and shaking quite a bit, so there must have been a stagehand back there, shoving the set around. A nice little detail that conveys a bit about Han’s slobby character.

1980

The couch has a slightly different configuration.

Bed

Most people don’t notice that there is, in fact, a bunk in the corner of the set, perhaps because it’s oddly shaped. The curved shape looks like an okay place for someone to rest, but I don’t know about sleep. It looks like a high-G couch from a space capsule more than anything. It was finally seen occupied in TFA.

Nav computer console

The navigation computer console, with its “peculiar dialect” and all, was a desk-like box in one corner of the set. It was covered with an assortment of greeblies and flashing lights.

1977

The lights tend to flash rapidly and in large unconvincing groups.

1980

The ESB lights flash in a far more believable pattern.

Secondary console

There was a secondary console of sorts in the 1977 film. It seems to have been moved during shooting as it doesn’t always occupy the same space. Its screens are a particularly unconvincing pair of panels with thin green lighting gels over top, and it's equipped with a completely ordinary 1970s-era Earthbound computer keyboard. It wasn’t replicated in the subsequent films.

Floor grates

The flooring is of a particularly celebrated type in the geek world. Basically it consists of heavy plastic shipping pallets, screwed down and painted black or dark grey. Set dresser Roger Christian made this discovery – that this one particular brand of pallet looked quite SF and futuristic – and so a number of influential and popular 1980s movies used the same material. They especially look good backlit, which reveals the complex shapes inside the pallet structure. Notable filmic examples of the space pallets include the Star Wars original trilogy, Alien and Aliens.

Star Wars employed the pallets for the floor of the Falcon and prison cell corridor, and the prison cell ceiling among other places.

2015

The TFA Falcon's floor couldn't use the original type of pallets, which are apparently no longer manufactured. However, rather than making custom floor material to replicate the original look, the set designers seem to have gone for a different brand of pallet which doesn’t resemble the original design. As a result the floor looks flatter, less open, and less gridlike. It's the lack of layering that makes it look two dimensional.

Kissing booth

1977

No smooching here.

1980

The small side room where Han and Leia have their first intimate moment is a small room located to the left of the round door that leads away from the cockpit and ramp. The door is decorated in the same style as the cockpit door, which I suppose is aesthetically consistent though there’s no particular reason for the coffin shape since the door isn’t set into a circular wall.

The side room itself is a narrow set filled top to bottom with intriguing moving greeblies and flashing lights.

Medical bay/bunk

1980

For the scene in which Luke is seen lying in intense pain following the removal of his hand, a small set was built, but no attempt was made to establish where this room is in relation to the rest of the ship.

GUNBAYS

The ship has twin gunbays at the end of a long slender ladder-equipped tube. This tube extends far beyond what could reasonably fit in the ship, but Han Solo’s extradimensionality module clearly was a good upgrade. They also have awesome gravity rotaters, which switch the "down" position by 90° in the gunbays relative to the ladders.

1977

The gunbays were just one set representing two separate octagonal rooms. Notably they didn’t have parallel walls - they were tapered in. Apparently this set was the primary responsibility of art director Norman Reynolds. It looks totally fantastic, yet it is another example of the fundamental size problem between the sets and the models. Not only is the interconnecting tunnel far too long to fit into the full-sized external sets, but the gunbay as a set is the wrong size for either the model or the exterior set.

Are those Lego bricks down to the left and right? They don't look quite right, but they're the sort of colours that Lego came in back then.

This causes problems for model makers - what size do you make the model? One approach is to put a flared petal-like section to the end of the gunbay interior when attaching it to the window. This is obviously not screen accurate, but so it goes. (De Agostini and Paragrafix use this approach) Another is to make the gunbay huge relative to humans and the seat, which isn’t accurate either. (Bandai do this) Or make the gunbay sized correctly to the sets but have them gigantic relative to the exterior of the ship.

1980

The gunbays did not appear in this film.

1983

The set was recreated for scenes of Rebel soldiers defending the Falcon during the battle of Endor. And it seems basically the same as the 1977 set. These sequences were not used in the final film.

2015

The TFA recreations seem like reasonable reproductions of the 1977 gunbays, with some obvious changes such as replacing the interior incandescent lights with LEDs.

CANNONS

Incidentally the quad cannons on the Falcon look totally different on the miniature, the external set, and the gunbay window set. They all follow roughly the same plan, but the proportions and details are highly dissimilar.

HATCH AND ELEVATOR

1977

Not seen.

1980

Lando is seen going up in a very narrow elevator to reach a top access hatch, in order to rescue Luke. This was a small one-off set, with the raising mechanism consisting of nothing more than a forklift truck to the side of the tunnel. As usual its height makes no sense relative to the external set.

As an actor, an important job is looking cool and dignified while standing on a forklift truck platform.

He then rises up through either one or two iris-like hatches, depending on the version of the film (1980 or SE). The original film has him rise up into bright white light, which is a continuity error since that scene was set during sunset and therefore should have a red-orange sky. The Special Edition tried to address this issue by having two separate hatches with bright light between them. The second hatch is CGI.

The Falcon exterior roof and hatch set was built, but never used in the film. Just as well - it looks completely and utterly unlike the models, with striped yellow and black hatch openings that the miniatures lack. It also seems kind of a stupid design to me. Having it deeply recessed like that means that water and dirt and whatnot would simply pool in there, only to flood in every time the hatch were to be opened! A raised hatch makes a lot more sense.

The dish was also built full size and filmed for this unused scene, though it’s unknown whether that bit was shot using the full sized Falcon’s roof, or if a different dish was constructed and used. The former seems more likely. Again there are continuity issues in appearance between the model’s dish and the set’s dish.

2015

Not seen. Some early production designs featured a door on the side of the cockpit interior which allowed access to the roof but luckily this odd idea was dropped.

USEFUL SITES

3D VR

The screenshot below is from an awesome 3D VR shot released by Lucasfilm/Disney as part of the marketing behind TFA. If you’re building a TFA-era Falcon interior, this is the one thing you need. The detail level of the actual pano is awesome. Well. Except for concealed areas behind the rear seats, that is.

The Falconer

Star Wars fan and 3D designer extraordinaire Joshua Maruska has built a complete 3D replica of the ANH-era cockpit interior, and has incredibly generously shared much of his work. The Falconer is a super-useful resource for anyone interested in this thing!

Stinson's All Things Star Wars

Another set of remarkable pages, Stinson Lenz's All Things Star Wars has some great resources and CGI models. Here's a 3D Falcon walkthrough!

1:1 Millennium Falcon Cockpit

All about an ongoing project headed by Greg "Sofaking" to recreate the movie set Falcon cockpits, life size. An incredible document showing all the work and research and rebuilds that have gone into this one.

Part III: the Lighting

Part IV: Conclusion

Copyright notice: This text is freely available to anybody who wants to geek out on their model plastic spaceship. Please link back to it, though.

Creative Commons model 4.