The Empire Strikes Back opens in one of the most memorable locations in all of Star Wars. Hoth is the perfect tundra-covered planet. It's one of the places in the Star Wars galaxy where the environment threatens our heroes as much as the Empire. Luke barely survives a night on the planet's surface. Even with Walkers, the Empire struggles to overtake the Rebels hiding on Hoth's inhospitable body.
The cast and crew responsible for creating the incredible opening scenes of Empire fought against their environment just as much as Luke and his friends. Creating the ice-covered planet on the big screen required more commitment, creativity, and tenacity than anyone had expected.
The behind-the-scenes story of Hoth has all the excitement as Empire's opening scenes. The Star Wars crew and Harrison Ford almost found themselves frozen to death or buried by an avalanche. The creation of Hoth deserves a movie all to itself.
Finding Hoth
George Lucas often claims to have his films planned well ahead of time. At the very least, he has his general ideas outlined before production. While working on Star Wars, Lucas made some notes about potential locations a sequel film could explore. In his notes, Lucas listed "Hoth" as a gaseous planet with a floating city. Lucas would later rename the planet Bespin and place the Cloud City in its upper atmosphere. He also wrote down "the Wookie planet" and "Ice Planet". Ice Planet would eventually become the Hoth that we all know and love.
Getting Hoth onto the silver screen challenged the crew behind The Empire Strikes Back nearly as much as Hoth itself challenged the film's main characters. From the beginning, Lucas knew he wanted the Rebels to have an "underground installation" hidden amongst the snowy banks of Hoth's surface. He also described the planet as "Very hostile, with wind blowing around and the cold."
The Star Wars team needed to find a filming location that could mimic the look Lucas wanted. After much searching, in the spring of 1978 they settled on Finse, a mountain village in Norway. It seemed like the perfect location. Large, uninterrupted glacial expanses sat nearby. The town itself contained a railway stop and a hotel that could accommodate the cast and crew throughout the shoot. With a location scouted, the real challenge began. The team planned to shoot in Finse for three weeks. They ended up staying for more than eight.
Hundred Year Winter
As luck would have it, the Empire crew arrived to film in Finse at the beginning of a "hundred-year winter" in Norway. In some ways, the intensity of the weather made Finse even more like Hoth than the crew had originally intended. At times, temperatures reached as low as -30 degrees Celsius (-22 degrees Fahrenheit). Violent blizzards ripped through the area. The thick snow reduced visibility, and the heavy wind made recording sound next to impossible. It became a challenge to even set up basic accommodations, like bathrooms, in the glacial area where the shoot was meant to take place.
Prior to the start of filming, the crew dug long trenches out in the snow, meant to be the pathways the Rebels used to traverse Hoth and fight against the invading Empire forces. When they began filming on March 5th, 1979, the crew walked out to find that their trenches had been entirely filled with fresh snow.
The production needed to find some creative solutions to deal with the inclement weather. One of their major solutions involved abandoning their primary filming location. Instead, they shot the Hoth scenes directly behind the hotel that housed them all. According to assistant producer Jim Bloom, "If the camera would’ve turned around, you’d have seen a big hotel behind you." Luckily, all the falling snow helped create the illusion that they were in the middle of nowhere.
The shoot also had to shuffle around its schedule. They called in Harrison Ford from Oslo a week early, thinking they could film some of his scenes close to the hotel to allow time for the trenches to be cleared again. Unfortunately, early spring in Finse happens to be avalanche season.
As Ford began journeying out to the shoot, an avalanche buried the railway line to Finse. He didn't let that stop him. Ford took the train as far as it could go. Then he hailed two separate taxis to drive him along parts of the road to Finse that had been cleared. Twenty-three miles away from Finse, the taxis could go no further. So, Han Solo finished out his journey to Hoth via snowplow, and the production powered through its final weeks.
The result of all those creative workarounds and dedicated efforts are the unforgettable scenes on Hoth which open The Empire Strikes Back. In a way, the Star Wars cast and crew fought a battle of their very own on the inhospitable surface of Hoth. Meanwhile, the people of Finse simply call it home.