by Edward Gross
DALE POLLOCK
It’s the difference between a Gary Kurtz and a Rick McCallum. Gary Kurtz knew the universe. Gary Kurtz was the only one Lucas communicated with on the initial Star Wars film. He would barely speak to anybody else. I mean, read the interviews with the actors. If he gave them four words of direction a day, it was a good day. Usually his direction consisted of, “Faster. Louder. More intense.”
BRIAN JAY JONES
The lack of a Gary Kurtz is why the prequels become quite a bit of a mess. Lucas is really engaged in both the technology, which of course he loves, and world-building, which he really loves, to the detriment of the films at times. I think for him having a Gary Kurtz is hugely important, because you can see the difference between a Gary Kurtz and Rick McCallum. It’s the difference between having a yes man like McCallum and somebody who’s willing to say, “I don’t think that’s the right thing to do and it’s a bad decision,” and is willing to walk away even when he thinks the decision is bad. To use a Beatles analogy, it’s like McCartney needs a Lennon. You need somebody there to say, “You know, that line’s a clunker” or somebody who says, “That’s the best line in the song.” You need somebody to do that. Remember, Kurtz came in at the beginning of his career and when you’re there on the ground floor, you feel freer to speak your mind. I don’t know if Rick McCallum was worried about telling George Lucas “No!” and that’s why he was such a yes man. Or maybe he really did believe everything Lucas was shitting was marbles. Clearly you can see the difference when you don’t have Gary Kurtz around. Kurtz was a great person willing to call bullshit on Lucas when he needed it.
* * *
As far as the film was concerned, McCallum began pulling together an early team to bring together concepts and designs based on Lucas’s ideas—about seven months before any actual writing was done. He also attempted to apply lessons learned from the extensive production schedule of Young Indy, such as planning on signing the cast to long-term deals, seeking talent from art and architecture schools, using digital technology to create sets and landscapes, and securing soundstages.
Early hires included director of photography David Tattersall (The Wind in the Willows, Con Air, Soldier), production designer Gavin Bocquet (xXx, Stardust), concept artist Terryl Whitlatch (coming from a background in zoology and anatomy, and who was in charge of creature designs), and ILM’s Doug Chiang as design director (he currently works as vice president and executive creative director of Lucasfilm). Actual art development began in January 1995.
RICK MCCALLUM
Gavin Bocquet and our cameraman, David Tattersall, and the basic shooting crew from Young Indy were all brought on board for the prequels. Their dedication and attention to quality was something we wanted to bring to Star Wars. Our philosophy has always been that this is a family, it’s teamwork. We’re totally interdependent on each other. We’re only interested in people who can pack their egos long enough to work for a single individual dream. That’s why I wanted the people who were with us on Young Indy. They worked on the longest location shoot in the history of film or television. They are the ones who suffered to make Young Indy a great project. Being away from home so long created great hardships on their lives, yet they never complained—they did it all for the series. But nothing they ever suffered on Young Indy came close to the experience they had on the Star Wars films.
GAVIN BOCQUET
(production designer, The Phantom Menace)
I was always interested in film throughout my school days. The two films that were strong influences on me were Jason and the Argonauts and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe that’s why I have ended up working on the type of films I’ve been working on? However, at that time there was no obvious career path that would lead me into the world of films. So being quite creative, I went to art school and studied product design. Firstly, at undergraduate level and then at postgraduate level at the Royal College of Art in London. During my time at the Royal College of Art, the first Star Wars film came out, and that again started to bring forward my interest in the film world as a possible career.
RICK MCCALLUM
We had a couple of artists working at the ranch since the second week of January [1995]. They were conceptualizing George’s ideas. We met with George once a week and he’d go through some of the ideas that he had been thinking about that week and then they started developing sketches of various characters and worlds and certain action props and vehicles. This would get more and more intense as we got going, but it was basically the ideas that are on his mind that he wanted to get a visual handle on. They’d come up with the sketch and then, the next week, George looked at it and made adjustments to it. We cataloged and archived and photographed each piece of work that they did.
GAVIN BOCQUET
The most important thing that the art department and I tried to achieve when we started on The Phantom Menace was to keep the visual spirit and identity of all the previous Star Wars films. We wanted the fans to really believe this was part of the same saga visually, and apart from pleasing George, which of course was our professional aim, that was our major personal aim. George has very precise ideas about what he wants, although you have to put the ideas in front of him for him to react to. So by a process of elimination you would slowly get your ideas closer to the visions George had in his head.
RICK MCCALLUM
It was exciting just watching these meetings every Friday with George and the artists, even though they could be very brief, sometimes a half hour to an hour. I was usually with George all day, but when we got up there, just watching him begin to weave the characters together was amazing. Each week saw a dramatic increase in that. That’s where his real genius is—the ability to take ordinary things and names and characters, events, and stories and then put a new twist on them. They’re right there in front of you, but you can’t quite see it until George fleshes them out. It’s like a cubist painting—he looks at reality in such a special way and makes the connection between the imaginary worlds and the people and the things that they need to survive and live. It really was quite amazing to sit back and watch this happen.
GEORGE LUCAS
I think somewhere in the dark recesses of the company’s files there is something with every creature and everything about them, but I’ve never seen it. And I don’t really know. Even though I live this and I know the worlds very well, and I know what everything in them is, half the time I’m in the fortunate position of just getting to make it up. So when somebody asks me a question, I know what’s consistent with a particular environment and what isn’t. And, really, that’s the job of the director, to keep everything in line. I can do that on the movie, but I can’t do that in the Star Wars universe.
GAVIN BOCQUET
There are certain elements—whether it is hardware, characters, costumes, or specific pieces of furniture—that have a lot more connection to images and ideas that people have seen in Episodes IV through VI. It could come down to very small pieces of furniture or details in sets. You see it in certain types of ship designs from Doug Chiang and the concept group. It is certainly not overplayed; it could be quite subtle. Fans who have knowledge of that will probably see where we place them. Apart from Tatooine and Coruscant, there wasn’t too much initial connection in Episode I to the other films. I think George was quite happy with that on Episode I, but on Episode II and III we were getting closer and closer to the storyline in A New Hope, as well as visually closer.
RICK MCCALLUM
As George was working on sequences, he would stop by the art department and say, “I have an idea for this,” or “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had this?” and so on. Then the artists would do their conceptual drawings and he’d come in the next week and say, “No, I was thinking this would be a little longer and the engine should be a little bigger,” etc. It was difficult designing things without a script, but since we were dealing with the guy actually writing the story, it was very clear. He’d tell us the sequence and we�
�d know the characters within the sequence. The sequence might change, the dialogue might change, the shift of the focus might change, but the characters wouldn’t. So we needed the locations where it would take place and we needed the characters. Once we had those, we could begin to design them. No matter what happened with the script, some of the new characters will remain and some will be deleted, but we had this armory of characters that could allow us to make those shifts.
* * *
Over the next two years, the Chiang-led team created and went through thousands of different designs based on Lucas’s concepts. In terms of look, it was Lucas’s determination that the new trilogy take a different stylistic approach from the originals, more like a “period piece” that, between the three films of the trilogy, would transition to the look of Episode IV. As an example, the battle droids were viewed by Lucas as a precursor to the stormtroopers. Ultimately, Chiang and his team would work closely with production designer Gavin Bocquet, director of photography David Tattersall, and ILM’s John Knoll to bring the different environments to life. Aiding in that was the use of animatics to capture story sequences.
RICK MCCALLUM
We did not travel down the traditional storyboard path. In 1995 we started by doing animatics on two large sequences. Animatics are a 3D representation of our storyboards. We also started the storyboard process on some of our larger action sequences. As each storyboard got completed, and George refined it and made his changes, we output them in animatic form. We used a computer program that allowed us to create vehicles and landscapes in 3D. We then began to output them in shots and started to edit a sequence; we had about seventy minutes that George had cut before we even shot a single frame of film. It’s a communication tool more than anything else. For me, it helped enormously with budgeting and scheduling and we used it as a tool to express to both cast and crew what was going on in every blue-screen shot. Everyone knew what the background looked like, what the props were that they were interacting with.
* * *
While the script was being honed and the designs coming together, the process of casting the disparate characters began with casting director Robin Gurland, McCallum, and, of course, Lucas.
RICK MCCALLUM
The casting process began two and a half years before we started shooting. I hired a really nice woman from San Francisco named Robin Gurland as our casting director. Her first year was spent trying to find a young boy for Anakin, because we knew it would be very tricky. An eight-year-old is very, very tough to find. You can meet them when they’re seven and by the time they’re eight, they’re a totally different kid, depending on their environment and what happens to them. So, Robin started looking at six-year-olds and tracked them, to see how they maintained certain characteristics at eight that were attractive at six. That was a long process to find Jake Lloyd.
GEORGE LUCAS
I’m always looking, first and foremost, for very accomplished actors, people who are extremely talented and know their craft very well. So I’m looking for the best possible talent I can find, and I’ve done that in all my movies. Next, I’m looking for people who have the stature and, more importantly, the demeanor of the character.
RICK MCCALLUM
A year and a half before we started shooting, we locked in on the main cast. That was pretty painless. George had written very specific things for us to look for and find. Robin did an incredible job and we cast the whole movie in less than six months. They’re all such easygoing, laid-back, professional actors. There was no star behavior that came out of any of them.
* * *
Liam Neeson, an actor with a certain set of skills, was cast as Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn. Prior to The Phantom Menace, his films included Schindler’s List (1993), Nell (1994), Rob Roy (1995), Michael Collins (1996), and Les Misérables (1998).
RICK MCCALLUM
Liam is such a great actor. He has an enormous stature and he’s just a wonderful guy when you meet him. He has a lot of authority, but with a real gentleness at the same time. He is extremely wise and always a surprise to me. He has all this dramatic weight behind him—I always think of him as Schindler from Schindler’s List. Something happens to him on film; the dignity, the power that he has without saying a single word comes through.
GEORGE LUCAS
Liam Neeson’s character is a master Jedi, the center of the movie just like Alec Guinness was in the first movie. You think, where are you going to find another Alec Guinness, where are you going to find someone with that kind of nobility and that kind of strength and that kind of calm? Liam is the guy. There isn’t anybody else who can do that. When you start looking at other actors, there are very few who actually have the same quality in them. When you see him in the part, it’s like, “Of course!” It’s a natural. From my point of view, he seems to have been born to play that role. He’s very quiet. He’s very big. He’s very powerful. But he’s very contemplative.
LIAM NEESON
I’ve always been a fan of George’s. The quality of American Graffiti was rough, very energetic, and infused with his love for automobiles. I got my driver’s license at age thirty. I drive a car that I may remember the make of. There was something about the love and care that he had for cars that’s conveyed in American Graffiti. And then to see Star Wars—that it was from the same guy! It was reminiscent of—God rest him—Stanley Kubrick. He did something entirely different every time, with a different dynamic, energy, and rhythm.
IAN MCDIARMID
(actor, “Senator Sheev Palpatine”)
I knew Liam a bit before the film. He did a play called The Judas Kiss for my theater company, the Almedia. Liam and I actually had very few scenes together in Episode I.
PERNILLA AUGUST
(actress, “Shmi Skywalker”)
I loved working with Liam. When you meet him on the set, you just go with it. He’s so there, so supportive and so polite. I’ll do anything with him. He’s also such a great actor who arrived on The Phantom Menace set right after wrapping Les Misérables, directed by Billie August.
NATALIE PORTMAN
(actress, “Padmé Amidala”)
Liam is very kind and reserved. He’s a very classy man and such a great actor. He had just finished filming Les Misérables and he hopped over and started Star Wars the next day. It was amazing to watch him work. He was very good to me.
* * *
By the time he would pick up Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber for the first time, Ewan McGregor had already established himself as an actor to be reckoned with in films like Shallow Grave (1994), Trainspotting (1996), Emma (1996), and A Life Less Ordinary (1997). He is also the nephew of Denis Lawson, who played Wedge Antilles in the original trilogy.
GEORGE LUCAS
The first thing Ewan McGregor said when he came in for his audition was, “You’ve got to give me this, because my uncle was Wedge.” I said, “Okay, that’s a good reason.”
RICK MCCALLUM
Ewan is playing the young Obi-Wan. A fantastic Scottish actor who can play a variety of roles; he’s like a chameleon. To have somebody be in Trainspotting at the beginning of one year and Emma at the end of the same year, shows amazing versatility. He is really a mercurial, multitalented, multifaceted human being. He just seemed to us the perfect Obi-Wan.
GEORGE LUCAS
Ewan McGregor is the perfect young Harrison Ford, but he’s also a great young Alec Guinness. He’s extremely relaxed and very strong. All the things that Alec Guinness is. Ewan is very witty and enthusiastic and young and impatient, and those things come through.
EWAN MCGREGOR
(actor, “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” The Phantom Menace)
I knew I wanted to be an actor when I was nine years old. Denis used to come out to Crieff, my small, conservative town in Scotland, where I lived. He didn’t wear any shoes and he had long hair, and I would say, “Who’s that weird guy?” He was so different from the people I was surrounded by and I think my wanting to act had a lot to do with that. I
wanted to be different as well. There was that and I was obsessed with old black-and-white movies from the twenties, thirties, and forties, from Hollywood, Ealing, or wherever. They were so beautifully shot and the acting was very straightforward and amazingly underplayed. They had very good stories, which we seem to have forgotten about these days. The third reason I wanted to be an actor was that in Britain we had a tradition called the Principal Boys. If there was a production of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack would always be played by a woman. It was all about sex. Whenever I would go to the theater, I would fall in love with whoever was on stage. And it’s still absolutely about sex.
