The Star Wars Episode IV Trash Compactor Scene Was Nastier In Real Life

In George Lucas’ pulp sci-fi epic “Star Wars,” the innocent farmboy Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) and the blowhard smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) infiltrate the Empire’s massive Death Star base to rescue the captured Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from a jail cell. The breakout doesn’t go terribly well, sadly, and the three, along with their space-Sasquatch friend Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew), get involved in a dangerous firefight with Imperial soldiers. To flee the conflagration, our heroes escape down a chute in the wall, not knowing where it leads. They find themselves inside a wet, cluttered garbage receptacle, surrounded by smelly machine parts and God knows what else. Gross, trash-eating eels lurk in the water. Well, at least they were no longer in immediate danger. 

Then, shockingly, the walls of the trash room begin closing in. They’re not in a receptacle. They’re in a compactor! Our four heroes do whatever they can to stop the moving walls, but cannot. Is this the end for Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewbacca? Come to the theater next week to see the next exciting chapt–  Oh, wait. “Star Wars” is a movie, no a serial. There’s no next chapter. The heroes escape and live to fight another day. 

The sequence is as fun as it is gross, and only nitpickers will have an issue with the notion that a space station would need to compact its trash before ejecting it into the infinity of space. The garbage room was designed and decorated by Oscar winner Roger Christian, and he did an exemplary job of making the trash look weirdly alien, yet still recognizable as refuse. Indeed, it was Christian who made “Star Wars” look dented, chipped, and “lived-in.” He also designed the interior of the Millennium Falcon.

It seems that shooting the trash compactor scene, however, was just as gross as it looked. Various interviews available online have put together a roadmap of the two-day shoot, and it is a litany of wet discomfort.

Archived by Yahoo! in 2015, Mark Hamill was quoted in 1997 about how damp and horrible it was. It didn’t help that he was dressed in thick “armor” that was, in fact, made of rubber. The actor recalls having to be dried off frequently. He said: 

“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. […] It was uncomfortable. You’d get rashes in places you never thought possible.”

The problem with shooting in a cluttered room that has been filled waist-deep with water is that it’s not filtered, circulated, or heated. It’s essentially an indoor puddle. Also, the fake “garbage” wasn’t exactly scrubbed clean before it was added to the puddle, making the water legitimately dirty. Peter Mayhew reportedly had the most difficult time getting in the water, as his costume was thick and furry and wouldn’t dry easily. Additionally, the odor of the water soaked into the fur, and it smelled bad for the remainder of the shoot. This was written in Dale Pollock’s biography “Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.” 

In J.W. Rinzler’s history book “The Making of Star Wars,” Carrie Fisher also complained about slopping around in water for two days of shooting. She, at the very least, got to wear a costume that was made of cloth and not rubber or fur, but it still wasn’t pleasant. “I liked jumping through the garbage chute,” she said, “but I didn’t like wearing the wet suit.” The chute into the garbage room was essentially a slide, so at least the actors got to have a little fun before soaking in the world’s grossest spa treatment.

No one mentioned the temperature of the water, but one might imagine that it was pretty cold. If Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewbacca looked uncomfortable in that garbage compactor, know that they probably weren’t acting.