George Lucas Had A 'Frustrating' Rule For Mark Hamill's Star Wars Fights

It's been over four decades since "Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back" hit theaters, and all these years later, we're still analyzing it. Fans want to know every detail about how the original films came to be, how they were shot, and their effect on decades of subsequent blockbusters. Some of them have been studying every movement and bit of information for their entire lives and could answer more questions about the franchise's galaxy than many of the filmmakers and actors. 

Sometimes it's fun to consider how little the actors actually knew about the details of the franchise's lore when they were shooting the second film, with only the first movie and the "Star Wars Holiday Special" to go on. (Okay, maybe just the first movie.) In a 2020 interview with StarWars.com, Luke Skywalker actor Mark Hamill spoke about a rule "Star Wars" creator George Lucas had for the actors that he didn't learn in time for one fight scene. Fair warning: Once you learn it, you'll be unable to keep from looking for it during every rewatch and future offering in the "Star Wars" universe. 

The rule had to do with lightsaber battles. Hamill said in the interview that he'd been working on a fight sequence with stunt coordinator Peter Diamond and Darth Vader's double Bob Anderson (who was an "Olympic fencing champion"), and he called the training "intensive." He explained what happened, saying:

"We had worked out a sequence we were all particularly proud of. And I'm talking weeks and weeks of this ... and we said, 'Let's bring George [Lucas] in.' We brought George in to look at what we had done and he said, 'Um well ... You can't take your hands off a lightsaber. You can't hold it in one hand.' And we said, 'What?' We had choreographed stuff where, you know, we did spins around and we did various things ... He didn't want us to ever take both hands off the hilt."

They had to restructure the fight, though Hamill said Diamond and Anderson were really helpful. "It was frustrating, but I was very lucky to have Peter, who was so skilled as a stunt coordinator, and Bob. He was someone who, he could counter if I made a mistake, he could counter it and incorporate it into the routine, and we could keep going. It takes an expert to make a novice look good, and that was certainly the case with him."

In a 2014 "Star Wars" lightsaber featurette, Hamill gave another reason for the two-handed stance. "George was adamant that these things were really, really heavy and that we couldn't take a hand off. We always had to have two, like Excalibur, it's like forty or fifty pounds of weight."

Lucas added that they wanted to speed up the fights as Luke improved his technique. "And so we very slowly started moving away from the two-handed form ... to sometimes using a one-handed form."

You can see the focus on the two-handed battle in "Empire," but there are definitely moments where both combatants use a single hand for effect. Luke is actually fighting with a single hand when he, er, loses his. 

It's also a technique where Vader seems to use to show Luke that he doesn't consider him a threat in the beginning of that fight. He later clearly grasps the saber with both hands as the fight intensifies. In "Revenge of the Sith," Anakin (Hayden Christensen) uses one hand for some of the final battle. In a 2017 YouTube video from Leia's Lair where the seven forms of lightsaber fighting are shown and explained, you can see quite a number of both Jedi and Sith using one hand at times. Plus, if you're someone who uses more than one lightsaber, like Asajj Ventress (who sometimes fights with two red lightsabers), you clearly have to learn to use your hands independently. (Also, so many people lose one hand in this series, learning to fight with one hand just seems like self-preservation.)

Still, using two hands in so many of these fights seems to up the stakes — at least for me. The one-handed grip seems like you're taunting someone, as though you don't need to bother with much attention to form. When two hands are used, it feels like every body part is focused on the fight. 

All the "Star Wars" movies are currently streaming on Disney+.