Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  For Episode II, I had a Steadicam harness to support C-3PO. I worked out a rig which put the weight on my hips rather than down my spine, because it was rather heavy. Threepio really did become a demon puppet at one point—like in a horror movie, where the puppet takes over its master and strangles him. I had to do strengthening exercises so I would be able to support him, and also so I could get back into the suit. It was a challenge, to use that boring word actors use. But it was a horrible challenge. There were a couple of times when I thought I had bitten off more than I could chew, but I got away with it—just in the nick of time.

  * * *

  One of the highlights for the cast was the battle in the arena between the Jedi Knights and Count Dooku’s army of droid soldiers on Geonosis in the finale.

  SAMUEL L. JACKSON

  I had spent so much time as a child in my room fighting imaginary pirates and Basil Rathbone and all those guys, and running from the Cyclops and all those other fantastic things, that when George put me in that big, empty room and said, “Okay, lots of things are attacking you. Fight them off,” I went straight to that place. I turned the Star Wars theme music on in my head, started looking around and said, “Okay, let’s go.” It was great. George would say, “Okay, there’s a big thing running around in the arena.” I would say, “How big is it?” “It’s kind of like an SUV and it hits you and you lose your lightsaber. And it runs away and you start doing things.” It was fun. It was the biggest kid’s game in the world. Just open your mind and have some fun.

  KYLE ROWLING

  (fight choreographer, actor, “Jedi Master Joclad Danva,” Attack of the Clones)

  We actually filmed that scene a week or two before we came back and did the second unit shoot on that set and it was just the principals in that scene. One of the things [stunt coordinator] Nick Gillard did for me is he put me in that scene as one of the last surviving Jedi. It was a fast two-day shoot, so you didn’t really have time to hang out with the stars while they were working, although I was already in rehearsals with Hayden and Ewan, so we had the occasional chat. But everyone was very professional and polite. It was very funny, actually: a huge soundstage with sand on the floor and a blue curtain that went all the way around and people shouting at you, “Now these things are walking in and shooting at you, and these things are flying around overhead, this monster will run past you here, when you hear your number, fall down,” etc. If you look carefully, Joclad is on the floor one minute and fighting the next. “I’m alive! I’m dead! I’m alive! I’m dead! Or am I?”

  ZACHARIAH JENSEN

  (actor, “Kit Fisto”)

  We had soundtracks playing and there were lots of “being a Jedi in the backyard as a kid,” but with awesome costumes and lots of cameras. There were individual sessions where George had some specific directions as well as group scenes and lots of improvising. It was a long and tiring day, but fun!

  LILY NYAMWASA

  (actress, Jedi “Stass Allie,” Attack of the Clones)

  I liked the action and I was so happy that I could use my martial arts moves. But, it was very sad to watch a lot of Jedi dying. During the shoot, I swear I had tears in my eyes—although I could see that it was acting—but I really felt sad to see them all dead. I would like to play a strong female warrior. I like to challenge myself, so anything that takes me outside my comfort zone would do it for me. Also, I think it’s becoming trendy to have female action heroes, so I wouldn’t mind playing a female action hero, saving some innocent people somewhere in the world. Although this won’t be as challenging as playing an evil person, because, naturally, I regard myself as a philanthropist or a people person, so it’s easier for me to act a good person than playing a bad person. I found it challenging when we were filming the arena scene. George Lucas kept saying to me, “Lily, put on your angry and serious face, you’re supposed to be killing enemies,” and I thought I was trying my best, so something like this would be really good and challenging for me.

  * * *

  “Challenging” is probably an appropriate word for what most of the cast felt as they filmed the vast majority of Attack of the Clones, as a large majority of the sets were virtual, meaning that they were essentially acting against nothing in front of a green screen.

  EWAN MCGREGOR

  (actor, “Obi-Wan Kenobi”)

  Shooting was boring as hell. What bothered me most was that everything was so deliberate. It’s all about, “We’re going to go and do this now…,” as opposed to getting under the skin of what the character’s thinking. There’s no spontaneity; your job, as an actor, is just to get it out. There’s not a lot of psychological stuff goes on when you’re acting with things that aren’t actually there. If I wanted to be polite when people inquire about it, I’ll say, “It’s not quite as performance-based as the films I’ve been doing in the past” or I’ll say something diplomatic like, “I’ve never done a movie that big before. I’ve never done anything with effects or that kind of blue-screen work, so it’s a different process.” But, quite honestly, after my initial excitement, the filmmaking process turned out to be the epitome of tedium. The work was so complex with all the special effects and stuff, that I found myself just hanging around for days and days and days. When you realize that George Lucas and his people went into eighteen months of postproduction after two years of preproduction and three and a half months of actual shooting, you can judge for yourself exactly how important the live-action actors were to the film. We were just a small part.

  NATALIE PORTMAN

  The technology and effects are definitely part of the enjoyment for me. I mean, there’s so much technology and you can learn so much by talking to the special effects people or the camera people who are measuring the distance between different spots and the blue screens so they can get the right dimensions for the light and the shadows. It’s just incredible and also makes you feel like you’re part of something much bigger. When you’re working with three hundred people on a movie and everyone has such an important role, it’s nice to know that you’re part of a crew more than being the center of attention.

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  It definitely required a leap of faith, because when you watch it on playback, you’re not sure what it will be like when they mesh the live-action and CGI elements. So, it’s a risk, but you know you’re in good hands. To be honest, if there was a feasible way of getting those ridiculous environments on Earth—so we could actually act in them—it would be counterproductive for the actors, because we would be so much in awe of our surroundings and thinking, “I’m this character and this is my world and my norm.” Not knowing what it will actually look like makes you not take in your surroundings as much as you ordinarily would. The blue screen forces you to use your imagination. So it was helpful in almost every way.

  EWAN MCGREGOR

  The process makes it difficult to maintain momentum in the performance, it being all in my imagination. It’s very important for it to be very, very sharp and very quick, because these creatures would be coming from all over the place. I had to imagine where they were coming from and look in each different direction. It’s all quite complicated and at the same time it was exciting.

  CHRISTOPHER LEE

  It was a very interesting experience. So, George was sitting in front of one monitor, and a special effects king was sitting in front of another. One was looking at one thing and the other was looking at something else. And there were blue screens. But the two of them knew what was going to be on that screen. They knew what was going to be in front of us, behind us, below us, and above us, but we didn’t. It was described, some of it, in the script. But even then, it wasn’t crystal clear, because we didn’t know what kinds of characters they were going to put in, what these characters were going to look like. So even though I acted in the movie and had the script, I couldn’t tell you what happened ahead of time. What’s on the screen could have looked so much different from what I actually read. I was always a little nervous t
alking about the film—aside from the fact that I signed a confidentiality agreement, because I had no idea what will be going on around me.

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  You don’t have any real environments to be affected by with blue screen, and the majority of sets were blue screens. In many ways, it’s not that dissimilar from doing theater, where you don’t have those real environments and it demands much more of your imagination. I was excited by the challenge and by the fact that when I finally saw the film, I would have a fresh experience, because I hadn’t really seen any of those places I was supposed to be in. At the same time, I was pretty accepting of the blue-screen work, probably because I hadn’t been a part of too many films in general and especially none that worked like this one. I was twelve when I did In the Mouth of Madness. I got to meet Sam Neill and that was neat. Other than that, the other films were all sort of hobby projects more than anything else. I was more interested in other aspects of my life at that time. Acting was a way to get out of school.

  CHRISTOPHER LEE

  I must say I didn’t find blue screen a problem at all, because I have a very vivid, powerful imagination. If I know what’s supposed to be there—although I may not know what it looks like in the physical sense—I can deal with it. In this kind of film, you’re working and getting nothing back from the other person. Well, I’ve been through that many times with some of my colleagues, if you get my point. So I’m used to it, let’s put it that way. In a war movie made forty years ago, a single line in a script could say, “And there’s a battle.” Well, that could take three weeks to a month to shoot. And you don’t know what it’s going to look like, because you’re just one part of it. So much of it has to do with trust.

  * * *

  Additional shooting took place at England’s Ealing Film Studios during March 2001, for which Lucas had come up with a new action sequence taking place in a droid factory in an effort to add more action to the film’s final act, which for many came across as a glorified video game sequence.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  It’s a lovely little studio. It’s very compact and it is very easy to work out of, because it has two reasonably small stages. All of the workshops are around it so you don’t have to walk miles to get to them. We didn’t have to share it with anyone; we basically had the whole place to ourselves. When you’re doing this kind of intense work, moving back and forth from one stage to another two or three times a day, it is important to have interconnecting stages. It is a wonderful place to make a movie. It also happens to be the place where Alec Guinness first started his film career. He filmed all the Ealing comedies at this studio, so it is kind of sweet and nice to be here.

  When you are doing a film as complicated as Star Wars, what happens is that you shoot the bulk of the film all at one time. You want to try to get through all the difficult stuff, all the major set pieces, the major special effects—all the really complex stuff, location work, etc., on the main shoot. You want to get through that as quickly as you can. You then edit the film and it’s like rewriting an article—you cut and paste and change things. When you are writing, you just have to make up the dialogue, but when you are filming, you have to go back and reshoot. It is actually not so much reshoots, but additional shooting. Often when you are shooting, things are out of continuity; you film the ending first and so on. Everything is filmed out of order.

  What happens as a result of that is that some actors never meet each other and you watch it in the editing process and you realize that there were scenes you could have filmed which would have made that scene more intense, or you think, “Gee, I would like to develop this character a little more or add more of that.” Sometimes you think, “Maybe this action sequence isn’t long enough” or maybe it’s too long or you need another dialogue scene to cement this relationship. We’ve always done this. We did it since day one on Young Indy, we did it on Episode I—we went back and shot three or four times. They’re just little bits and pieces, things which make the film that much better.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  George was always tinkering. On Episode II, I was there, George decided he wanted this shot of Anakin’s mechanical hand taking Padmé’s flesh hand when they get married. The movie was finished, it was literally the day before the movie was coming out. I was in Rick McCallum’s office, the producer, and there was a guy there who was like, “We can’t do it.” And Rick says, “You want me to tell George you can’t do it?” And the guy says, “We can’t do it for the celluloid version, but we can do it for the digital release.” You know, it’s digital, you can send them that one thing and they can make the change. And that guy went running out of the office. There was some high-pressure stuff going on. They got that shot in for the digital release, but not the film release. George was always changing things.

  * * *

  The pioneering effects work from ILM entered new territory completely with the wholly CGI character, in the form of Yoda, replacing the puppet that had been used to great success in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi … and to lesser success in the theatrical release of The Phantom Menace.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  Before, they had done Jar Jar, and they really had high hopes for him. That’s before my time, but I know it was a fact. Then, of course, Jar Jar became detested by a large number of people. But, the CG character existed—whether you hated him or not—the fact that they pulled it off at all. So now they were taking it to the next level with Yoda.

  My first full day I was on the job, they said, “Here’s a VHS cassette of Episode II—the latest cut—stick it in the machine, we’ll close the door, and don’t tell anyone what you saw.” It was amazing! There was lots of temp stuff in it, because ILM hadn’t completed all their shots, and Yoda was a little animated spec fighting Count Dooku, it looked terrible. I rapidly learned everyone thought this fight between Yoda and Count Dooku was not going to work, that it was going to look terrible.

  * * *

  As the film entered postproduction, John Williams set to work once more crafting the film’s glorious soundtrack. Returning for the first time since The Empire Strikes Back to the themes of romance, and revenge.

  JOE KRAEMER

  (composer, Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher)

  The major new theme in this score is the Love Theme for Anakin and Padmé. It’s a fascinating theme because in many ways it is a minor-key version of the Main Theme (Luke’s Theme), bearing a strong resemblance to the melodic contour and rhythm. It’s also interesting because as it passes through its many twists and turns it actually modulates to a lower key, which has a subconscious effect of darkening our psychological response to the tragic and doomed love affair. And by titling the concert version of the theme “Across the Stars,” Williams draws an association to the old cliché of star-crossed lovers.

  The other significant theme is the Separatist Theme, which is essentially the Love Theme with a different first note. But what’s really cool is that Williams takes that central melodic idea and modulates in a parallel chord sequence to the Emperor’s Theme, which creates a subconscious connection between the two seemingly disparate elements: Anakin and Padmé’s Love, and the Emperor, inextricably tied together by the war with the Separatist movement.

  Williams evokes the music of Bernard Herrmann and his score for North by Northwest in the terrific chase through Coruscant early in the film, with its wonderful pulsing rhythm and imperative xylophone. And even though it went unused in the final mix, there is some electric guitar heard on the soundtrack album that demonstrates how, even five films into the saga, Williams was still trying to find ways to inject new ideas and textures into the fabric of the scores.

  Reel 6 of this film, like The Phantom Menace, was a large action reel, this time showcasing the prolonged fight sequences in the Geonosis Arena, first between our heroes and the monsters, and then between the Jedi forces and the battle droids, before moving to the deserts of the planet for a large-scale ground bat
tle between the clone troopers and the mechanized forces of the Separatists. From the moment Mace Windu arrives at the battle until Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Padmé take off in pursuit of Count Dooku, the score is all created editorially from the mostly unused action music from The Phantom Menace that had been dropped in favor of “Duel of the Fates.” This was a major deviation for a Star Wars film, and it was apparently the plan from the beginning. I can only imagine how much work had gone into the composing of this music in the first place, and the disappointment that it went unheard must have been palpable, so it was a win-win situation for everyone involved. Funnily enough, the music Williams wrote for the first half of the arena scene in this film was dialed out, Ben Burtt finally able to have a sequence in the film driven by sound effects, well deserved. But this unused music would come in handy on Revenge of the Sith.