Watch: 'Star Wars' Lightsaber is Actually Camera Tech from the 1930s | No Film School

In his original vision for Star Wars, George Lucas designed his universe with a retrofuturistic aesthetic, otherwise known as "junk sci-fi" or "gomi." Opting for an unpolished and lived-in look, Lucas encouraged his team to be scrappy; the art department used practical effects and outfitted scenes with props transformed from junk.

Set decorator Roger Christian took this cyberpunk edict to heart. One day, as he was creating lenses to fit Luke Skywalker’s binoculars, he stumbled across a piece of junk that would become one of the most iconic weapons in cinema history.

"I went to a photography shop where we got all our equipment from and I asked, 'Have you got anything buried away that I might look at?'" Christian said in an interview. "Out of this box, I found these Graflex flash handles."

Thus, the lightsaber was born of a flash bulb from an antique camera. The Graflex 3-cell flashgun was originally designed to hold flash bulbs to vintage Speed Graphic cameras, affectionately known at the time as "press cameras," as they were used by photojournalists for the first half of the 20th century.

Christian attached a part of a calculator, added a black grip, and painted the bulbs with blue projection material. (It should be noted that while most of the lightsabers in the 1977 Star Wars were made of Graflex bulbs, Obi-Wan Kenobi's was devised of a ballast pipe from a Rolls Royce jet engine.)

Graflex, originally a division of the Eastman Kodak Company, first came to market with the Graflex SLR, a focal plane shutter camera that used the same swinging-mirror lens viewing mechanism as modern single lens reflex cameras. The Speed Graphic cameras from which Christian fashioned the lightsaber also employed a focal plane shutter, but replaced the SLR swinging mirror and through-the-lens viewing with an external viewfinder.

One of the two original lightsaber handles, made for $15, was sold to a Seattle museum for $250,000, making the lightsaber one of the most valuable movie props in history.

Old cameras vintage Star Wars

What's the Hype With 'Interstellar' Revisiting Cinemas After a Decade in 70mm IMAX?

Here's Why You Need to Revisit 'Interstellar' in 70mm IMAX

Celebrate the love and hope at the center of Nolan's space epic in the format it was meant to be seen.

If we know anything about Christopher Nolan, he likes to go big. Nolan started with smaller-scale stories (as many of us do) with early noir adjacent works like Following, Memento, and Insomnia, then started going and staying big with his illusionist drama The Prestige. Since then, the scale has been various degrees of massive, with the biggest scope in his time-and-space sprawling epic, Interstellar.

While Interstellarmight not be everyone's favorite Nolan outing, there's no denying it's an impressive feat of filmmaking and his most emotional—if watching Matthew McConaughey's Cooper desperately try to reach his family through quantum space-time doesn't make you cry at least a little bit, what's going on, dude?

With Interstellar'sIMAX release, it's a great time to shed some tears in a public setting in one of the most prestigious film formats around. As we mentioned in our film gauge piece, Nolan loves shooting on film and utilizes 65mm intentionally to provoke a tone of massive scale. In that regard, Interstellar was made for 70mm IMAX. That goes without saying, dawg. That being said, other factors make Interstellar a perfect movie to revisit in theaters while you can.

Let's break down the release further below.

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