Star Wars Production Notes: The Sandcrawler

Gary Kurtz - "The long shots of the sandcrawler are a miniature (photo above) - for the shots of it rolling across the desert. We did film a full-sized piece that was about 40 feet high and 125 feet long. We investigated the possibility of using a very large earth mover or some such vehicle - but they were not where we needed them and were also very expensive to rent. We found it was better to do our own. We fabricated the pieces in the studio and shipped them over to Tunisia on trucks on four road-trains - that's what they call truck-trailer combinations in Europe - across the English channel to France and Italy, to Genoa, and across on a ferry to Tunisia."