by Edward Gross
But Denis didn’t give me much advice. He was actually very bored doing the Star Wars movies. He had a tiny part in all three and I think he’s rather bemused that he still gets fan mail from people. He has done some very good work, but it’s always “Denis Lawson from Star Wars.” He didn’t think it would be a good idea for me to do the Star Wars film, really. Everyone asks if he’ll have a cameo in the prequel films, but he can’t because Wedge wouldn’t be born yet. George was joking about having him play Wedge’s father and age him up a bit.
IAN MCDIARMID
I’ve known Ewan for quite a few years. His uncle, Denis Lawson, and I are great friends. We’ve been friends since we were at drama school together rather further back than I care to admit. I remember that Ewan first came into my theater when he was studying acting at Guild Hall. He came to see his uncle and me in Volpone. That’s when I first met him, and I’ve watched his meteoric rise ever since. I’ve seen him now and again, on and off. As I say, though, we weren’t often together in Episode I. We actually had one day together where we worked very close, with Ewan, Jake, and myself. Ewan and I swapped old stories. We’re both Scots, so there was an immediate bond.
EWAN MCGREGOR
There’s no doubt that Star Wars is the hugest thing there is. When I was getting ready to start, I realized I hadn’t thought about that kind of thing—how huge it was—since the time they had offered it to me. It took me a long time to say, “Well, maybe this isn’t the right thing for me to do.” No, it really was, “Do I want to do Star Wars?” Well, yes. Yes! But I couldn’t think about playing Kenobi, because I was kind of in Star Wars denial. Essentially it was like making any other film.
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When she assumed the role of Queen Padmé Amidala in The Phantom Menace in 1995, fifteen-year-old Natalie Portman had already had a great deal of success in Hollywood. Five years earlier a Revlon agent tried to get her interested in being a child model, and while she turned that opportunity down, she did use it to acquire an agent for acting. In 1992, she (along with aspiring singer Britney Spears) auditioned for the Off-Broadway musical Ruthless!, and both became understudies. In 1994 she played a child who’s a protégé to Jean Renoir’s assassin in Luc Besson’s The Professional, which was followed by roles in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) and, in 1996, Ted Demme’s Beautiful Girls. She sings in Woody Allen’s underrated musical Everybody Says I Love You and fights aliens in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! Just prior to becoming part of the Star Wars universe, she appeared on Broadway in the adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank.
NATALIE PORTMAN
When I was offered the films, I took a long time to decide whether I was going to do them or not. That was for two major reasons. One was the commitment—I was signing at age fourteen for at least ten years. That’s a huge thing to do at any age. When you’re fourteen and you don’t know what you’re going to do the next day, you’re not really jumping at the opportunity to sign away your life until you’re twenty-four. That was the first consideration. The second one, obviously, is that The Phantom Menace is so big. When you do any sort of big film, it changes your life. The recognizability—I really couldn’t prepare for that. You can imagine what will happen, because you see other people being so excited, but it worried me that people would be more interested in me and my private life. It makes your life much more difficult, but it presented so many opportunities. It seemed like I would have the best summer ever, so I said yes.
RICK MCCALLUM
She’s like Audrey Hepburn: serious, deeply committed, and focused. She was only fifteen when we started the movie, but there’s just something electric about her. She is a lovely actress. She was always our first choice for this role.
GEORGE LUCAS
The perfect queen! She’s very strong. At the same time, she’s very young. She plays a fourteen-year-old queen in The Phantom Menace and it’s the same problem I had in the first film with Princess Leia. Natalie is very intelligent, has a lot of presence, and is a very strong person. I needed somebody to play a fourteen-year-old girl who could basically be elected to rule a planet and make that believable.
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Early on in his life, Ray Park devoted himself to studying the martial arts, though by the late 1990s he had turned his attention to acting. He was a stunt double and played Raptor #3 and Baraka #2 in Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), and would follow The Phantom Menace with Sleepy Hollow (1999) and X-Men (2000), playing, respectively, Headless Horseman and Toad. In the first of the Star Wars prequels, of course, he memorably portrayed Sith Lord Darth Maul, who would ultimately go into combat against both Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan.
GEORGE LUCAS
I was looking for the kind of sword-fighting we had already done, but I wanted a more energized version of it, because we actually never really saw Jedis at work—we’d only seen old men (Obi-Wan), crippled half droid–half men (Darth Vader), and young boys (Luke). To see the Jedi fighting in their prime, I wanted a much more energetic and faster version of what we’d been doing.
RAY PARK
(actor, “Darth Maul”)
My wanting to act was one of the reasons I started with martial arts. Also, my dad was a big fan of movies. We watched a lot of martial arts and science fiction movies. I saw Star Wars when I was about seven years old. It was one of the first movies I saw after we moved to London. I got all the action figures. I was a big fan. My dad cried when he saw the trailer for The Phantom Menace. Anyway, I was into movies and martial arts. My heroes were Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jet Li. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was my break. It was where I learned about the industry. Before I got that, I was going to set up a gym and teach full-time. I met people on the film. I got to perform stunts. It was a good experience, but it made me feel even more that I wanted to be an actor out there in front of the camera, doing stuff for myself and not for someone else.
RICK MCCALLUM
One of the problems we had when we were casting for Darth Maul was that Robin Gurland was really looking for an actor, and I wanted an actor, too. But the truth finally came to us that an actor could only go so far in the role, because it was so physical. When I saw Ray in the first makeup test, that was when I actually did the deal with him to be Darth Maul. There was no point in going with anyone else. It’s not a major speaking role. It was really about attitude and stunt performance. He has all those gifts and more. He made total sense for this role. We got him into the stunt union—everything was a first for him on this film. He is a really focused and caring guy and he’s quite stunning in his makeup for the role.
RAY PARK
People can’t quite take it in that I played this character in the movie or that I am who I am. They can’t comprehend how this nice guy could have played this evil character. Some people don’t believe me at all when I say, “I played Darth Maul.” When I was on Phantom Menace, I was concerned about the kids I used to teach gymnastics to, because I was the bad guy and I didn’t want them thinking, “My coach is a bad guy in real life.” But it’s great when people come up to me and say they were eight years old when they saw Phantom Menace for the first time and it got me into tae kwon do and karate. It’s nice to hear that it was an inspiration. I grew up with Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee, so it’s really nice that the character had an impact on kids to want to do martial arts. I also played Snake Eyes in G.I. Joe, so I’m aware that I’ve relived my childhood. Like, G.I. Joe was the first toys I played with. Then it was Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back that really got me into martial arts and gymnastics. I saw Luke Skywalker do a handstand with Yoda and I was like, “That’s what I need to do. I need to learn.” I even asked my dad, “Can you build me a lightsaber?” So Star Wars really had a big impact on me as a kid as well.
I didn’t know what to expect. I kept an open mind about what might happen. I knew that once people saw the movie, they would realize that I wasn’t an extra. But I didn’t realize just how cool Darth Maul would look and how popular he would be.
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A newcomer was needed to play the role of young Anakin Skywalker, and the production cast Jake Lloyd, who began his acting career at age seven on four episodes of ER, in the film Unhook the Stars, as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s son in Jingle All the Way, and Apollo 11.
JAKE LLOYD
(actor, “Young Anakin Skywalker,” The Phantom Menace)
After Jingle All the Way, my mom was like, “Okay, you worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Are you done now?” I was like, “No, Mom, I’m still up for the new Star Wars film.” She was like, “We’ll have to talk about that.” Then my agent called me and she was like, “Oh, how would you like to go to England for four months?” I started yelling and then I took a deep breath in, and I was like, “Oh my God, I got Star Wars.” And then I started crying.
RICK MCCALLUM
We went through two years of searching for the right kid to play Anakin. Jake has a very interesting personality. He’s smart, mischievous, and loves anything mechanical. He was really a good kid. He had all the right qualities that George was looking for in Anakin.
GEORGE LUCAS
With Jake, he was this wild little Tom Sawyer kid who was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for in Anakin.
PERNILLA AUGUST
I tried to be a motherly friend to him. I got to know his parents, because they were always with him, which was good. He’s so relaxed. I’ve worked with kids quite a lot, and you have to be patient with them. They are so sensitive. I think it’s important that child actors always have one person to relate to, and George was that person for Jake. He would talk to George about the character and our relationship. I thought what I could do to help Jake was just to show that I’m professional and that I’m doing it for real, to be open and be there when we were acting.
NATALIE PORTMAN
Jake was a little elf on the set, just running around, being happy and playing. When you work with kids that young, you get scared that they’ll be obnoxious stage kids corrupted by the business. And Jake wasn’t like that at all. He’s a total kid. He was playing with droids and constantly telling us riddles.
JAKE LLOYD
I wasn’t nervous. I treated the other actors like they were just regular people. And they treated me the same way. They were all really nice. I really enjoyed working with everyone. I worked a lot with Ahmed Best and he was always making me laugh. And I worked a lot with Pernilla August. We all became really good friends. George was really nice to me, too. He helped me a lot, as any director would help an actor. I think that his being a nice guy helped me. He treated me as he did the other actors, and that felt good.
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Prior to his work as Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace, musician and actor Ahmed Best cowrote and coproduced three albums for the Jazzhole, and was a part of the cast of Stomp, which toured the United States and Europe. It was this show that brought him to the attention of casting director Robin Gurland, who thought he would be perfect for the CG character.
AHMED BEST
Stomp is very different from The Phantom Menace in terms of what I do as a performer. Stomp was an incredible training ground. You could try anything. If it worked, if it got a reaction, you swam, and if it didn’t, you sank. So I learned how to play off people. In doing The Phantom Menace, I looked at George as the audience. I just bounced ideas off of him. Stomp was also a very personal show. It’s very much about putting your personality, who you are, out there. I tried to approach Jar Jar as a personal character. It was more than a surprise; it was a shock that they cast me in the movie. I had no idea, no inkling. I had no motivation, even, to seek out this movie in any way, shape, or form. After I got it, I just knew it would be cool.
RICK MCCALLUM
We made a very conscious choice up front to always make sure that whatever digital character we were doing, the actor who would do the voice would be present when we were shooting those sequences. In the case of Jar Jar Binks, we had a wonderful actor named Ahmed Best from the stage show Stomp. He was in a suit that resembled the CGI character. Ahmed was on the set every day. We would always rehearse with him and we would actually shoot sequences with him. That was not only for the actors, so they would know where their eyelines were, but so that we would have reference for everybody at ILM to understand the lighting conditions he was in. So, we took a great deal of time and effort. George wanted to make sure that the actors felt comfortable, that they wouldn’t be talking or interacting with sticks of ping-pong balls or any crude or artificial markers. They always had an actor to work with.
AHMED BEST
I wore a costume that made me look exactly like the character does in the movie, aside from the ears and the neck. The arms were made of foam latex. They had the same design, the same flesh tone and fingers. The costume was made out of leather; it’s the same thing Jar Jar has on in the movie. I would do scenes with the actors in rehearsal and then shoot them with the actors. Then I would go back to the bench and George would do shots without me in them, too. The costume got pretty hot, especially when we were in Tunisia, but I survived.
GEORGE LUCAS
He’s a very hard character to figure out; very hard dialogue to understand and make work. Kind of Yoda times ten. But Ahmed Best just sort of took to it. It takes a very particular kind of personality. A lot of people couldn’t figure it out. They couldn’t equate what they were saying with real life, but he really got it and turned it into a real language and a real character. When you’re doing a digital character, you end up having the actor on the set. I do, anyway. I cast Ahmed Best, because he was a talented actor and also because he was focused a lot on movement and dance. He knew how to move his body and create a character with his body. I wasn’t sure if I would re-voice him or not. That wasn’t a concern. I just wanted to make sure he was up to acting with the other actors in the movie. Could he create a character? As it turns out, Ahmed was terrific. I used his voice. He turned in a great performance on the set.
AHMED BEST
I was very happy they decided to use my voice, but I always knew they would. I just had to convince them. I guess I did a good job of it. It was always in the back of my mind that they wouldn’t use it. That’s reality, but it didn’t stop me from doing the best I could do. And then they used it.
RICK MCCALLUM
Every day when we’d do a sequence and set up for a shot, George would rehearse with him and the actors. They would make sure that they blocked out all the movements they had, and then we’d always film Ahmed with the actors. We’d do one or two takes and finally get to the take that we liked, and everybody knew what the behavior was. Then Jar Jar would get out of the shot and we’d reshoot it, very fresh, where everybody knew where his position was and knew where they needed to be looking in order to see Jar Jar. So that’s how we did it throughout the whole movie. ILM needed to see the lighting reference, so they always have their plate with Jar Jar in it and the animators know what the basic movement of Jar Jar is. Then they also have the lighting of Jar Jar; what he’s got to look like and the shadows that he casts on other people. Then on the empty plate, without Jar Jar, they take their wire model of Jar Jar and animate it. That’s where they create his performance. It’s an amalgam of what Ahmed did on the set and their imagination. George directs that performance in animation for huge periods of time.
GEORGE LUCAS
Now with a digital character, not only do you have to hire that actor, but you have to hire a second actor with the same techniques, the same skills, the same talents—plus some. That actor is called an animator. He works in collaboration with the original actor. They work together in terms of motion capture and spend time together. He takes the performance the actor on the set did—and the voice performance he did—and turns it into minute facial expressions, eye movements, and things that really create the character on the next level. With digital characters, you’re basically paying two actors to create one character, so it’s twice as expensive that way. With an actor, you shoot it and thr
ee hours later, you’re finished. With a digital character, it takes three or four months.
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Swedish actress, director, and screenwriter Pernilla August, and frequent collaborator with director Ingmar Bergman, was cast as Shmi Skywalker, Anakin’s mother. As established in the film, Anakin, it seems, was the result of an immaculate conception.
PERNILLA AUGUST
I’m not surprised George added the immaculate conception scenario. It’s a little controversial.
LIAM NEESON
There’s a virgin birth in every mythology and in every culture. Sometimes people just attribute it to Christianity. That’s not true. It’s ancient. But Pernilla and I had a few giggles when she had to say her line. When it came to my close-up, I thought, “How do I play this? Do I do a double-take? Do I say, ‘You’re still a virgin?’” I just had to take it in stride.
