At Toronto Comic-Con 2025, the podcast An Elegant Weapon led a panel session covering various topics, including Star Wars. The featured guest, Roger Christian, won an Academy Award for set directing for A New Hope. He spoke to an enthusiastic audience about crafting the aesthetic of the Star Wars universe, the unique challenges he faced, and how he invented the now-ubiquitous weapon of science fiction lore, the lightsaber. Christian shared his experience making Star Wars: A New Hope in his book, Cinema Alchemist.
Star Wars: A New Hope wasn’t easy to make
When George Lucas first shopped Star Wars around, production companies refused to make it. Science fiction films were expensive to make, but more importantly, there wasn’t any existing franchise that the studio could build on. Fox Studios got to the stage where they did their own analysis on the film script, determining it would make 12 million dollars. To ensure a profit, they gave Lucas a $4 million budget to work within, which was a minuscule budget to realise Lucas’ sprawling vision.
As a result, set decoration only had $600,000 in total to work with. This was the entire budget for building sets, robots, aliens, props, interiors, and on-location shooting. Somehow, Christian had to make it work. As he said at the Toronto Comicon 2025 panel, Christian strongly believed in Lucas’ vision and the story of Star Wars, and till this day, Lucas credits Christian as being one of only five people who stood by him to realise the film as Lucas had wanted to make it.
Building Star Wars on a budget
But creative vision is one thing. Execution is something else entirely. When approached by Lucas to work on Star Wars: A New Hope, Christian shared how he wasn’t a fan of the science-fiction films of the time. They looked too clean and clinical. He wanted a universe that felt more lived-in. Lucas was of a similar mind—he envisioned a Spaghetti Western in space, a film that was aesthetically closer to Akira Kurosawa’s work than contemporary Hollywood sci-fi. There, Lucas and Christian were very much aligned, as they were both admirers of Kurosawa’s oeuvre.
With barely any budget to work with, creating key elements for the film and making them appear both functional and well-used meant Christian was practically dumpster diving for parts, with the help of prop maker Bill Harman, who passed away in 2025. Christian and Harman would find parts and discarded bits and pieces outside set decorating shops, which they would transport through five countries to Tunisia where Star Wars’ Tatooine scenes were being shot on location.
There, Christian would bring in set decorator John Barry to bring to life the concept art made by Ralph McQuarrie, who is still considered one of the greatest concept artists of cinema. Christian and Barry would use McQuarrie’s art as the basis to put together different pieces of junk and create ships and props, including blasters and Chewbacca’s crossbow. Lucas, a man of very few words, would either outright say he didn’t like something, or he would give the team a smile, the only kind of approval anyone on set could expect.
A lot of Star Wars was made in wood
And thus the icons of Star Wars were brought to life. For the Millennium Falcon, various wooden pieces and tech parts were super-glued together until a spaceship of sorts was created. To complete the interiors, which would have been too expensive to build, McQuarrie painted his glass shower door and transported that to set on his car. Simpler times, folks.
R2-D2 was another conundrum. The remote control technology to power the droid simply wasn’t effective in the 70s. How else could they make a robot that could move without constantly falling over? Christian, being a native of the United Kingdom, used his knowledge of the construction of Daleks in Doctor Who to build the parts of R2-D2 from wood. He found the remainder of an old lamp to create the now-iconic dome of the robot. Once Kenny Baker was found, R2-D2 the friendly droid came to life.
The blasters were similarly put together using existing weapons and stuck-on pieces of wood. It shouldn’t have worked but Christian had a keen understanding of Star Wars and was well-aligned with Lucas on the aesthetics for the film. The blasters were a success. So much of Star Wars was made out of wood, but it still holds up.
The next thing Christian brought to the conversation was his greatest quandary while working on Star Wars—creating a lightsaber.
Creating the first lightsaber
Christian viewed the lightsaber as an iconic prop of the Star Wars universe, akin to King Arthur’s Excalibur. But he had no starting point on what it looked like or how it would work in the universe. He had been in the process of putting together Luke Skywalker’s binoculars and was visiting a camera shop that had lots of odds and ends. The shop owner directed Christian to a box of broken items. The moment Christian looked at the contents of the box, he knew he’d found his lightsaber.
In the box were broken parts of three Graflex camera flashes. For those not aware of vintage cameras, the parts were specifically the handles that held the enormous flashes of old press hardware. They were exactly what Christian was looking for, not just because of their hand-held cylindrical look but because they had a button on the side, perfect for a Jedi turning on their lightsaber. A few modifications, such as adding a T-strip or two, as well as the addition of a D-ring so Luke could hang the lightsaber from his belt, and science fiction’s most elegant weapon was born.
Christian was modest about his contribution to changing the landscape of science-fiction cinema in the west, but his legacy endures. He is currently in the process of creating a documentary about the making of Star Wars: A New Hope, which will finally shine a spotlight on the names of the behind-the-scenes heroes of a galaxy far, far away.
Cinema Alchemist is available now on Amazon.