Peter Diamond - Remembering An Old Friend

Peter, when I first met him in 1997.

by Iain Lowson

I first met Peter Diamond when I interviewed him for Titan's Official UK Star Wars Magazine, back in 1997. His was to be my first feature interview for the publication, and only my second feature interview at all (the first was with Chris Foss, and can be found elsewhere on this blog). It was with some high degree of nervousness that I went to his house in beautiful Gerrards Cross, just outside London, with my tape recorder in hand.

Peter set me at ease immediately with his warm welcome. He led me into the porch of his lovely house, then dropped a bombshell. "I'll be back in a moment. I need to set the answering machine. I'm expecting a call." I said that I'd be happy to wait while he took it if it was important. He told me not to worry. "It's just Anthony Hopkins. I'm teaching him the basics before he does Zorro." With a twinkle in his eye and a grin, Peter went off to sort the phone, leaving me feeling more out of my depth than I have ever felt since.

Having a chat with Marcus Hearn, archivist at Hammer Films

After the chat, which ranged all over the place, Peter and I stayed in touch. I wrote a screenplay adaptation of Billy Budd, Sailor for him which sadly came to nothing (though I've since turned it into a play), but his faith in me, his wise words of guidance, and his encouragement meant a lot to a writer just finding his feet. I was delighted that Peter came to my wedding in Scarborough many years later, and I even had the chance to see him at work on Heartbeat, his 'pension fund' as he called it.

Sadly, Peter is no longer with us. He worked right up to the end, in a career that spanned more than 50 years. He is sorely missed by all who knew him.

Frazer Diamond is custodian of his fathers website, which can be found here: http://www.peterdiamond.co.uk/

Many of the illustrating images came from an amazing archive posted to Imgur of 1,138 behind the scenes pics from the original Star Wars Trilogy. There are many more shots of Peter at work in that fascinating collection.

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The Return of the Stooges
An interview with Peter Diamond
by Iain Lowson

Please note, the text of this interview is copyright 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Peter Diamond has spent the better part of his forty five year career at the top of his profession. Three weeks before he was interviewed for Star Wars Magazine he fell down a flight of stairs. Chances are he was paid quite well for it. It is also quite likely that his action prevented an actor half his age from being hurt.

Sitting in his large house in leafy Gerrards Cross, Peter Diamond presents the image of a man at peace with himself. He began a career in stunts in the 1950's, working with the likes of Errol Flynn. He continues as a fully active stunt man and as an arranger and co-ordinator on UK series like "ThiefTakers" and "Heartbeat". Outside of this country Peter puts in some considerable amount of work on "Highlander - The Series" and "Zorro", both the series and the movie. Always keen to develop his talents further, Peter made the move into directing with these last two, having found it impossibly difficult to break into the field in the UK.

"Everyone in England wants to direct. I don't look for directing jobs in England, but I direct in America. We did eighty episodes of "Zorro" and I directed forty of them. I've been directing in the series of "Highlander". I have a production company with my son Frazer. He wrote a screen play when he was fifteen, which I thought was brilliant. Frazer got a job with Prominent Features, which is Terry Gilliam and John Cleese and all that lot. He's now got two projects in development which I'm involved in. George (Lucas) was such a catalyst for Frazer."

As a boy, Frazer was one of the Jawas (along with brother Warwick) during the studio shooting. It at this time that Frazer Diamond met George. So how did Peter Diamond meet up with the man behind Star Wars?

"I was working on a Sherlock Holmes film ("The Seven Per CentSolution") with Robert Duval, and I was also doubling Robert. The picture finished and, as usual, there was an end of picture get together with the crew. Robert, like me, doesn't drink or smoke. So we were sitting down having a cup of tea and I asked him, 'Where are you off to next? You going back to the States?' He said yes, he had such-and-such a project with so-and-so, what about you? I said I hadn't got anything lined up but that there was this picture called 'The Star Wars', but I don't know anybody on it. He said 'I do. George Lucas is a friend of mine', and he introduced me to George Lucas."

The script of the film was largely incomprehensible to Peter, even after three readings. He passed the script on to Frazer (he still has it) who declared it brilliant. His fears thus assuaged, Peter took the job. Although he was brought in on Star Wars to co-ordinate and arrange the stunts on the film, Peter's greatest contribution to the whole feel of the three movies came with the style of the lightsaber fights.

"I met up with George and Gary Kurtz at Elstree Studios. On the office walls were all the drawings by conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie. George was explaining it all to me and, I must admit, it was all going right over my head until he came to the sword fights. He explained, I've got these laser swords and I don't want it broadswords and I don't want it fencing; I want it somewhere in between. I had to create a style that was unique to Star Wars. There is no jumping around stairs, no dangling from chandeliers. It was simply two people with blades."

This potential simplicity was complicated by the design of the first lightsaber props. The hilts had wooden blades plugged into them. These were painted with light reflecting paint. Small electric motors spun the blades which were lit from off camera. The resulting bright blade gave the animators a clearly defined area in which to paint the coloured blades. An unpainted sequence can be seen in the original print, just after Vader has 'killed' Kenobi, when the Dark Lord's lightsaber is white instead of red.

Peter, on the left, hard at work with Sir Alec and George Lucas.

"Because they (the lightsabers) were made of wood, and Dave was such a heavy handed man, every time they touched blades they kept breaking. I taught them both to do their own fight, both Sir Alec and Dave (Prowse), but I had to teach them not to touch each other, which made it difficult. It's a natural tendency when you are cutting at someone's head to bring it down as hard as you can. It took slightly longer to shoot than anticipated because of that problem."

"In the sequels we used painted carbon fibre fishing rods, we didn't have to rotate them, and they could really hit each other."

For Star Wars, Peter headed a team that included just two other stuntmen; Reg Harding and Colin Skeaping (brought in to double Mark). As a result, Peter appears more than fifteen times in the first film.

"I think I had more exposure than Luke Skywalker! I died so many times in 'Star Wars'. Because I like to lead from the front with stuntmen, when Mark and Carrie swung over the trench and were escaping, I was the Stormtrooper they shot off the top. I did the first fall."

"You couldn't do the normal stuntman's fall. You couldn't bend, you see. You had to fall straight and then turn onto your shoulder just before you hit the bed."

The story of how much Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill enjoyed the swing has been very well documented. Peter's side of the story puts the whole thing in a new light.

"Reg and I, with the wire guy, rigged and rehearsed the swing ourselves. Come the day that Mark and Carrie were meant to do it, we put the harnesses on, Reg and I, with everyone watching. We had decided to show them how safe it was, with the wire and everything else, over a height of about twenty feet. As we set off, there was a terrible tearing sound. My harness had unclipped."

"I hung onto Reg and I said, 'Your harness has gone'. He said, 'No, it's yours'. I hung onto Reg and we reached the other side. Mark said, 'That's dangerous! I heard the harness rip!" Now, if I'd said 'Yes, you did', there is no way he would have gone on the harness, no way. I said, 'What are you talking about?' and told the biggest lie of my life."

"I said, 'No, no, that was my trousers' and I showed him a big tear on my right leg, on the inside. He said, 'Oh, I thought it was the harness'. 'No it was just my trousers you heard. I tore them as I came over'. What had happened was that in the morning I had been rehearsing Dave Prowse and Sir Alec and I'd split my trousers. Mark never found out, and I have never told him to this day."

Sweating for his art in the Tunisian desert.

As well as numerous Stormtroopers and detention block guards, Peter had a couple of other larger roles. Firstly, he was the Sand Person who attacked Luke.

"I sweated buckets! I don't like the sun, I have to tell you. We went up to the mountains, Mark, Jack Purvis and I. I rehearsed at the actual location where we were going to film it. I'm the only stuntman in Tunisia, there were no others there. So I said I'd better play the Tusken Raider, because I'd rehearsed Mark, he had confidence in me, he knew I wasn't going to hurt him."

"Next, we're doing a sequence which is outside the Cantina which is in Tunisia. There's a man who comes out of the Cantina and speaks to the Stormtroopers. Who's going to do it? At least they could take me back to the studio, so they said 'Peter, you can play this character. So in the studio, I'm in the Cantina. I'm the one who gave them away. I get letters like that; 'To the Man Who Gave Them Away'!"

Standing behind Kabe, the short rodent, is Peter
as The Man Who Gave Them Away 

As a note to trivia fans, that character has now been given a name in the Star Wars mythos. Garouf Lafoe has his very own trading card in the New Hope expansion set for the Decipher Inc. collectable card game, joining Peter's Tusken; URoRRuR'R'R.

With only three stuntmen, all of whom were continuously being thumped about, shot, thrown and dropped, the situation became something of a running joke with the rest of the crew. Peter, Reg and Colin became Larry, Curly and Moe; the Star Wars Stooges.

It wasn't always a laugh-a-minute, though.

"The thing about the Stormtroopers was that when we got hit you had a firework effect go off in the front of you. On two occasions, not to me but to the other guys, they caught alight. It was all plastic armour. We had a job to put them out quickly. Falling about was the easy part. The danger came from the squibs."

With so much involvement in Star Wars, including being one of the very few people working on the film with a complete script, did Peter feel that there was something special going on?

"To me it was a run-of-the-mill job, I just did it, enjoyed it, and never for one moment did I believe that my picture as a Tusken Raider would go around the world! I didn't see it until I went to the crew showing at the Dominion Theatre. I took a producer friend of mine to see it and he said, 'Do you know, if this script had been brought to me, I wouldn't have backed it'. So few people could see the vision of it, which is why George had such trouble getting funding for it. I think the sequels came about when the studios saw how much money they could make."

Peter wasn't involved in the filming in Norway for 'The Empire Strikes Back', but was there in the studio, being shot with the best of them. When it came to the first duel between Vader and Luke, the decision was made to use BobAnderson to double Prowse.

An unmasked Bob Anderson blocking the lightsaber duel
with Mark Hamill

"Because the fights were more complicated, I had to get a double for Dave Prowse. Dave is not a swordsman, not for the style I was looking for."

On top of the greater degree of complexity of the fight, there were also the more practical considerations of safety. While Mark Hamill could see reasonably well, the man in the suit was limited by the mask, complete with tinted lenses, in a dark, smoke filled environment. A further point was the emotional motivation in the fight. Luke is battling desperately, as much against fear and anger as against the experience and strength of the Dark Lord. Vader is testing Luke, contemptuously at first (fighting with only one hand), then with caution, finally with anger. All the time he is looking to turn Luke both to the Dark Side and to his side. Peter needed someone he could relate to, as well as someone who knew sword fighting.

"In any sword fight, you're only as good as the man you fight. Bob Anderson was European Sabre Champion in his youth. Then he was British Olympic Coach. We've worked together for over forty years. Bob and I have done so many fights together, it's unbelievable. Bob had a style that was flamboyant and suited my idea, and George's, for what the fight should be like. I discussed style a lot with George."

You can just make out Peter on the bottom left of the shot.
The tracksuits became almost his trademark.

This relationship between the Diamond and Lucas is exemplified in the sequence during the Bespin duel when Vader hurls scenery at Luke, knocking him through a window.

"There was a meeting one lunch time to discuss the best way for Mark or Colin Skeaping to go through the window. Each department put in their three pennies worth. Colin and I had discussed the matter. Colin is a gymnast. I had watched him working out, and he had done some round-offs (a series of flips followed by a somersault). I asked him how high he could get on the round-off. He showed he could get about six feet off the ground."

"When we had our meeting, and George asked what I thought, I said to George 'Well, we thought Colin could do a round-off and the bit you use would be of the last piece of him going through the window'. Colin did it, without going through the window, and George said, 'Ok, we go with yours'. It saved a lot of shooting time; I would say about half a day."

When "Jedi" came around, Glen Randall was Stunt Co-ordinator and Peter was Stunt Arranger. Peter and Glen (brought in on "Raiders" because Terry Leonard had been injured on "The Lone Ranger") had already worked together in the same jobs on "Raiders of the LostArk", each directing and arranging different sequences. Their working relationship was already established.

"For me, it was a dual thing between us, and there weren't any problems there. The big problem with working in America is the work permit. A lot of people were trying to stop us going out there because we were British stuntmen. I could go (during the filming of 'Jedi') because I was continuity on the action."

Peter has only one real regret from his time on 'Raiders'..

"I'm sorry that Harrison wasn't involved in any sword fights. I was involved with him, throwing punches and so on. I would have liked to have been more involved with him from the action side of things. He didn't do a lot of real action on it. If you analyse it, it was mostly firing guns and running away."

The reason for this was immeasurably more to do with health than with a split workload.

"I keep telling people we don't go to the nice locations. We go to the worst parts of the countries because they don't want the tourists. I can't tell you the stomach problems we had on 'Star Wars' and 'Raiders'. Ninety eight per cent of the crew had sickness and diarrhoea."

The only real fist-fight, between Ford and Pat Roach, was choreographed and shot by Randall. Peter was out on the roads shooting elements of the truck chase. It was during the shooting of the point where Indy jumps from a horse onto a moving truck that a potentially terrible accident was narrowly avoided.

"Terry Leonard missed the first time. He fell off the horse and nearly went under the wheels of the truck. We were working then at about fifteen, twenty miles an hour. We couldn't go much faster than that or we'd miss the mark."

Bizzarly enough, Terry had been injured on 'The Lone Ranger' while emulating the famous Yakamar Kanut stunt of jumping from a moving horse onto a stagecoach, moving out onto the horses, down under the coach and then up over the back of the coach to finally regain control. Fortunately, Terry got it on the second attempt and went on to complete a modern version of the Kanut stunt he probably thought had it in for him.

About to be swept off the truck Indy is driving in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Once more in the thick of the action, Peter can be clearly recognised as one of the unfortunate German soldiers swept off into the underbrush by Indy's deft driving.

"Here we were doing about twenty five miles an hour. We couldn't go much faster. If it were going too fast, we would have gone right past the camera site. What we did was put a big white mark around a palm tree and you knew that immediately you saw that palm tree you had to go off the side of the truck. It was no good seeing it go and then going, because then you were past the shot. Fortunately, the sand was on an incline which took away most of the momentum of the fall."

Although 'Raiders' had been filmed a number of years before, Glen and Peter quickly found themselves back with the same excellent working relationship and back in the desert, in the stunt intensive sequence above the gaping maw of the Sarlacc. Peter once again led from the front.

One of Peter's odder jobs was playing a character dubbed the 'Light Man'
in Jabba's Palace. The character was cut before any FX pass was done,
so no one really knows what it would have looked like.

"I was actually the first man into the pit. The question was what was going to happen when we hit the pit, so I was the first person in. The pit itself was foam rubber covered with a sand material. The amount of sand that came down with you when you hit the hole covered you completely, buried you. There was a safety bed which you landed on to protect you, but then you had to be dug out."

Although the whole sequence was complex and occurred on three levels simultaneously, Peter found no real difficulties with it.

"If one were to analyse it, it's simply a guy with a sword against guys with guns. To me it was like a period piece, an 18th Century fight aboard a pirate ship, which I've done many of. The difference was falling off into a big monster instead of the sea."

About to be thrown from a speederbike in a London studio,
and hit a tree in an American forest.

Moving from desert to forest, Peter was most intensively involved in the sequence with Mark and Carrie on the speeder bikes.

"When Mark jumped from bike to bike, I was the one he threw off into the tree!" Perhaps by this point Mark had heard the story about the harness...

Working with Peter Mayhew,
the mighty Chewbacca.

The lightsaber duel in Jedi presented a further challenge, not least of which was putting yet more emotion into the fight.

"The evil is killing his love for his son. Vader has to decide between Dark and Light, but his son takes it in the long run. I suppose it happens to everyone eventually; no matter how bad your children are, you eventually come back to them. And visa-versa."

While there had been a little in 'Empire', in 'Jedi' there was a great deal of interaction with the scenery in the duel between father and son. Despite this, Peter had no say in the design of the set.

"The sets were already built when I got there. So now I have to get things into the set which can be easily put there to make things more effective, like cutting the bars. There's this bridge above which is solid iron and I looked at this and thought he (Luke) could do a back flip up to there, he's using the Force, and I said to George , 'I think we should drop the bridge'."

"We talked to the art department and discussed ways of doing it. We put in all the welds and everything else to make it possible. The problem is that if you are on a ramp and it starts to fall you immediately start to fall. (The dropped end) was very close against the back wall and Colin could have been hurt. I gave him a very fine wire which he held onto and he rode it down. So he went with it and he didn't actually fall until he reached the end and dropped down onto the bed."

Blocking the lightsaber duel on the second Death Star,
again working with Bob Anderson.

"That is the kind of thing I have to think of when I'm working. What you have in the script is a small piece that says 'Darth Vader fights Luke Skywalker'. That could take three weeks! You have to develop something from that, work it out, discuss it with your director. You work on the set, do a few storyboards, explain what it's about. You could tell him how to shoot it, if he wants to know. What I usually say is that I can present it to you if you want to shoot it, or I can shoot it for you. I hope they say each time, 'You shoot it', because I've already worked it out. I've already edited it in my mind. I can shoot outside of the continuity."

With new developments in the craft of film making, especially in the ILM-led realm of computer animation, the stuntman's trade is changing.

"Computer generated shots are going to be more important now because the audiences are expecting more. I personally believe that in about ten years time they won't want stunts in films, they'll just computerise it. It's sad in one respect. There are a lot of new people coming up who will never see out their careers as stuntmen."

"Speaking as a director, I would encourage the use of computers because I learned my trade in the old black and white days of the BBC when it was live, with one bite of the cherry. With computers I know I can set a shot now and do it all with computers and probably do it in one shot. As the costs come down, directors will take more notice of it, and production companies will cut the costs of making movies."

Will Peter be involved in the filming of the prequels?

"I don't know. No-one has asked me. I'd like to think that I did a good job and they'd ask me back. But there's a different producer, and I don't know him. It's being shot fifteen minutes from my home, just along the M25. So I could live at home and be very comfortable, even come back for lunch if I had to. I don't know what they are doing with computers now; they may dispense with laser sword fights altogether."

"The thing that worries me if I'm not involved in it, and this is purely from a continuity point, if they get a stunt co-ordinator who just does bash-bash-bash, it's not the style. The style is critical."

Things may be moving and changing for the film industry in general, and stuntmen in particular, but Peter Diamond maintains that relaxed, controlled persona.

"I'm basically the same guy I was forty years ago. I haven't changed. I treat every actor, regardless of their status exactly the same way. I try to have a laugh with them, I try to relax them, which I think is important. A lot of actors I work with could do their own stunts, I could teach them. But you have the insurance problem. I had to explain that to Roger Moore once. We eliminate the danger. I can honestly say (and Peter reaches out, tapping a wooden table in front of him) that I've never lost anyone in all of the films I've been on. I've never broken anything, and I've never had a stitch."

"I've been at this forty five years now. If my name was Paul Daniels, people would say 'Oh, he's the magician'. But you say Peter Diamond, and people say 'Who's Peter Diamond?' I'm really a magician. I'm creating something that an audience sees that I know never happened. That has been the whole story of my career; making someone else look good on the screen. We're in the make believe business. The industry is moving on and I'm trying to move with it. I know I've got a busy year ahead of me, no matter what."

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Use of Force

When two Jedi meet in combat there takes place a duel that is both of the body and of the mind.

On a purely physical level, a lightsaber is quite clearly no ordinary bladed weapon. The scintillating beam of focused laser energy must be treated with caution and respect. Practitioners with standard, metal bladed swords of all kinds know that at the most there are only two edges to worry about. This means the weapon can be safely brought back towards the body and leads to close quarter, intense combat. Most swords have a hilt or basket guard to offer protection to the fingers.

A Jedi Knight has a blade that cuts no matter which side touches and no matter what the pressure applied. There is no guard over the hand; no metal can deflect a lightsaber. All of this puts a distance between the combatants and creates an open and slashing style that is quite dynamic.

On a mental level, when Jedi do battle the Force is wielded as dextrously as the light blades. A Jedi is taught to use the Force to augment their physical abilities, allowing them to perform incredible feats of acrobatics. A skilled Jedi can even withstand the physical strength of a Dark Lord, despite advancing years.

While the duellists are fencing with lightsabers, they are also testing and probing with the Force. When Lord Vader and Luke Skywalker fought in the presence of Palpatine, Vader and his Emperor brought to bear the power of the Dark Side to push Luke into anger and onto the dark path. At the same time Luke was bombarding his father with hope and trust and a son's faith in his father's good side, seeking to turn Anakin back to the Light Side.

It is no wonder then that Peter Diamond had to create a totally new and original style for Jedi duels.

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Peter On… George Lucas

"The thing I liked about George was that he was open to any suggestions. He wasn't a big egotist. He would ask your opinion and be open to it. I rather admired that. I like to think that George and I complimented each other. He had a marvellous vision of what he wanted to do, I think he learned from me and I learned from him."

Peter had experience with blue screen and back projection (originally planned for the X-Wing cockpit sequences), but found the techniques Lucas pioneered on the Star Wars movies to be very instructive. When not active on set, Peter would simply watch George at work.

"I'm still very technically into film making. Any new innovation coming in, I'm interested in finding out about. I watched George, especially out in Tunisia. I just watched him and I learned."

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… Mark Hamill

"I really liked working with Mark. When I first met him he was a young twenty two year old, full of enthusiasm, but very accident-prone. In fact, before we even started shooting, he had an episode in the Dorchester hotel when he hurt his arm."

In Tunisia -

"We passed a shepherd and his goats on a rocky hillside, and Mark went to pat the dog and I said, 'Mark, leave it alone. We're in a strange country, it could be rabid or anything'. 'Oh, I never thought of that.' You had to take special care with Mark."

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… Harrison Ford

"Harrison was a very easy man to work with, very out-going. He wanted to learn. He was very down-to-earth and he's stayed that way to. He was fond of saying during Star Wars, 'If this doesn't work I can always go back to being a carpenter'."

"I taught him how to do an on-screen punch, which stood us both in good stead for 'Raiders'."

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… Irvine Kershner and Richard Marquand

"Irvine obviously had fixed ideas with what he wanted to do, but he was still double checking with George whether it would fit in with what he had in mind. Richard was exactly the same. I had worked with Richard before, fortunately. But George was the guy; it was his vision entirely."

(This interview first appeared in The Official UK Star Wars Magazine, Issue 7)

Peter Diamond working on Heartbeat, his 'pension', with a stunt man from a generation who grew up watching Peter's work.
Peter loved working on the show. When I met him on the day I took this, he revealed he'd turned down the chance to work with Bob Anderson in New Zealand on Lord of the Rings to stay in the UK near his family and this much loved series.

Peter's obituary in The Stage.

A little gem turned up on YouTube the other day. This mini documentary contains a snippet of footage of Peter and Bob at work on set. Go have a look. :)

http://youtu.be/6YdBvWauNwA

If you're looking for other Star Wars interviews, there are a couple more on the blog:
Don Henderson, who played General Tagge, and John Hollis, who played Lobot.

A scan of the original photo I took of Peter, back in the day.

(This is copyright to me, btw, so please don't copy without express permission.)