The Life-Size Millennium Falcon

Star Wars Fans Build a Life-Size Millennium Falcon in
Their Backyard!

The story is true! A lot of people are constantly asking us if it's true. Did you really build a life-size Millennium Falcon in your backyard?
When did you do it? How did you do it? Why did you do it? The simple answer is that we did it for an independent short film called Stuck on Star Wars.

The whole construction ordeal began in September of 2001 as I convinced a friend of mine to let us build the falcon in his backyard.
We made the promise that it would only be there a month.
Three months later, and he was starting to get worried. Four and a half months later, and he wasn't talking to me.

The crew starts to construct the base for the Life-size Millennium Falcon

The falcon was over 40 feet wide and 12 feet tall. The neighbors were a little furious. We built it in a very upscale residential neighborhood and they didn't seem to understand what we were doing. One of the neighbors sat on his porch for about several months watching us before he got the nerve to come over and ask us what we were doing. We told him we were building a tool shed. He asked us about the ramp and we said we were making it handicapped accessible.

Our set designer, Sean Leistico, designed the blue prints we used to build The Falcon. The problem though was that Sean used the Hasbro Toy model of the Falcon and that had only three landing gear. The actual Falcon used in Star Wars had five landing gear. This created a huge problem because once we added the cock pit, the whole thing wanted to tip over. We had to use tons of cinder blocks which we placed on the other end of The Falcon to balance it. We also tied a part of The Falcon off with rope. That wasn't the only time we had a problem with The Falcon almost crashing. One week into construction, the whole thing came down because we didn't have a good base structure.

The materials we used to build The Falcon was everything we could get our hands on. We used rope, wood, cinder blocks, cardboard, and even chicken wire! All in all, the original cost estimate was $700 to build this, but in the end it cost us a little over three grand (mostly in part because we didn't know what we were doing).

A page of the actual blue print for the Lifesize Millennium Falcon

The day came when The Falcon was finally complete. We rought our actors over to quickly film the scenes, although there was a little bit of reservation from them because The Falcon didn't seem very safe. One of the problems we had was The Falcon swayed back and forth when you walked across it. But besides that little detail, The Falcon was a site to behold. It was funny because we had The Falcon all lit up at night and all these cars started slowing down and circling the neighborhood to see our beautiful Falcon.

The day after filming concluded, a huge thunderstorm came through and destroyed our Falcon. What took us four and a half months to build, took Mother Nature several minutes to destroy. It was agreed upon by all that we would have a Jedi fire and burn the remains of our Falcon.

Here's a view from from the cockpit

The crew continues to construct the Falcon to reach their deadline

The Falcon served its purpose and was destroyed

Click here to watch the "Construction Impossible" Video