I’m telling the story of me…

• The BFI Film on Film festival, which runs from 12 to 15 June at BFI Southbank and BFI IMAX, will open with a screening of Star Wars (1977) from an original unfaded dye transfer IB Technicolor British release print.

“When I came here in the autumn of 1975,” said Gary Kurtz, waving at EMI’s Elstree Studios on a spring day of 1976, “absolutely nothing was happening.” Kurtz, who like so many former students at the University of Southern California’s film school seems to have got his first break directing a piece of Roger Corman’s The Terror, was co-producer of the enormously successful American Graffiti. On the strength of that, he was now doing a solo number, in a state of apparent serenity, on George Lucas’ Star Wars, for which Fox had put up a budget of six and a half million dollars.

“In Hollywood,” he went on, “the stages were so full of television shows and disaster epics we couldn’t get near them. It was unbelievable to me that over here there was so much space, so much talent, and so much opportunity going to waste. George and I had been preparing Star Wars for three years – in fact we could have made it before Graffiti – and we were ready to start shooting. So we moved in.”

Even as Star Wars arrived, such are the fortunes of the film industry, a large contingent of British talent was moving out, recruited by Richard Attenborough for rather more conservative military manoeuvres. But Kurtz and Lucas have secured some of the best names in the business, among them Gil Taylor (director of photography for Dr. Strangelove, A Hard Day’s Night and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy), John Barry (production designer for A Clockwork Orange), and John Stears (special effects man for several Bond films). And they tempted Alec Guinness, engagingly dubbed “a Knight to remember” by the publicity unit, to include science fiction among the subjects he has chosen for his return to the screen after some eight years. It is, naturally, a starring role…