Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  STEVEN MELCHING

  (screenwriter, Star Wars: The Clone Wars)

  The Matrix on the surface was very flashy and groundbreaking, but I think Phantom Menace was actually more groundbreaking in terms of its filmmaking. It was just more seamless and invisible, whereas The Matrix used a lot of techniques that we’re all familiar with and using the bullet-time stuff, which I had been seeing in Gap TV commercials.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  There’s actually a great meme showing Lucas in 1983, standing among all the spaceships and everything they built. Then they cut to 1999 and he’s standing in front of the green screen, but that’s really what he’s done at that point. I mean, I think he feels like he’s earned this. He’s the one that invented the CGI technology. He’s the one that had the faith that it would work and he’s having a great time.

  * * *

  Most of filming took place at England’s Leavesden Film Studios, a former Rolls-Royce aircraft factory. In 1994, unable to get access to Pinewood Studios, Eon Productions, the company behind the James Bond films, leased the space, gutted the factories on the property, and turned them into soundstages for the first Pierce Brosnan 007 film, GoldenEye. After that, Lucasfilm took over the property for the duration of production of The Phantom Menace. And while Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow would be filmed there, in 2000 it began serving as home base for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and all of the subsequent films in that series. Warner Bros., Potter’s producer, ultimately purchased Leavesden outright, turning part of it into a permanent Harry Potter exhibit open to the public. But at the time, it was ideal for the return of Star Wars.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  It’s an old Rolls-Royce aircraft engine factory which was bought by a company called Millennium, which is a Malaysian consortium. The thing that makes it unique and extraordinary is that it has the largest backlot in the world. One hundred and eleven acres and over 850,000 square feet of stage space. What was great is that we had it all to ourselves for a very long time. We had an extensive area for special floor effects, we had a huge area that we turned into our special creatures effects, which is where we were making our creatures. We also made every single costume ourselves. We had an enormous construction area, because we were building close to fifty sets. We had our own rigging department, our own fire department, etc. It was like a small city. It’s basically the same Young Indy template. We did everything ourselves and didn’t depend on the kindness of strangers.

  DAVID TATTERSALL

  The advantage for Rick and George was that they could lease the entire facility; they didn’t have to share anything with other productions, which is the usual situation in a studio setting. Because of that, many sets could be built at once and left standing indefinitely. Our production designer, Gavin Bocquet, had about fifteen quite large spaces to work with, which gave us the room to have some twenty-five fully constructed sets to shoot on. Meanwhile, all of the wrapped sets at Leavesden would be replaced with new ones—we’d then return to shoot, using the next twenty-five sets, including the Jedi Council Chamber, the starfighter hangar in Theed, and the palace’s generator complex. The advantage to this plan was that we had time to pre-rig and pre-light before we began shooting again, which allowed us to just go from one set to the next.

  * * *

  While the studio was secured, extensive scouting by McCallum, Bocquet, and David West Reynolds, the author of numerous Star Wars reference books, was done to find locations that would be unique to the film.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  We scouted locations in Morocco and Tunisia. We invited David West Reynolds to join us on this trip. He’s not only an intelligent guy, but he was fun to be with. In terms of archaeology and science and the movement of races, he is very knowledgeable. He saw things on this trip he had never seen before. He was the first to spot Ben Kenobi’s house, although we found it totally by accident. It was by the ocean and we said, “It can’t be by the ocean,” but it was! We also found the entrance to Mos Eisley, which is completely covered over now and looks totally different. We found an area in Tunisia called the Ksour. These are fortified grain areas. They were used in this one section of Tunisia where the Berbers would store their grain. Ksour have unusual shapes and have existed for hundreds of years and almost all of them remain intact. They are very difficult to get to, so it’s not something that tourists end up seeing. You really need a four-wheel drive and be committed to spend at least a week finding them. Nobody has been there. Basically what I wanted to do, since none of us had worked on the previous three films, was to make sure we really understood Tatooine well. All my life, I’ve always wanted to see this area of the Ksour. I thought it might be a good place for Jawas or slave quarters or something else that would relate to the prequels. The trip was very worthwhile.

  GAVIN BOCQUET

  We traveled a lot on those scouts, mostly through Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. Sometimes it was just myself, sometimes a small group with Rick McCallum. Extraordinary travels and a once in a lifetime experience. For the Naboo environments, I traveled to most of the grand and impressive buildings that southern Europe has to offer, from cathedrals, palaces, monasteries, grand houses, etc., and eventually we decided on the palace at Caserta in Italy for the Naboo palace. We covered both Tunisia and Morocco for the Tatooine locations, and decided to stay with Tunisia. Rick McCallum and I initially did a tour of all the old Star Wars locations in Tunisia, to see what we might be able to use again, which was almost like an archaeological expedition, and we even saw remnants of old set pieces still lying around on many of the locations, which was extraordinary twenty-five years later.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  What’s interesting is that the countries we were going to didn’t know much about Star Wars. In fact, when we were in Morocco, they didn’t know much about Star Wars or Indiana Jones. They didn’t even know who Indiana Jones was. I think the films were made before they really started seeing a lot of movies. David West Reynolds said that nobody in Djerba knew anything about Star Wars, even though they had huge portions of the series all over their backyards and in the streets, nobody knew what they were for.

  GAVIN BOCQUET

  There was probably no average workday, and that is what can be so exciting about the film business in general, and even more so with Star Wars. Every day is a surprise and different. You could be in the office all day designing on the drawing board, you could be on-location scouts in different countries or closer to the studio, or you could be supervising set builds and also supervising all the other design work being done in the art department.

  Other locations included Cassiobury Park in Watford, Hertfordshire, to serve as the forest of Naboo; a return to the Tunisian desert for scenes on Tatooine, with the outside of the city of Tozeur serving as Mos Espa; and the interior of Theed City’s Naboo palace at the Reggia Palace in Caserta, Italy.

  DAVID TATTERSALL

  The long-term lease at Leavesden worked well with the production’s general shooting schedule. We had three distinct phases on the production. The first was to work our way through our initial twenty-five sets at the studio, including the Galactic Senate chamber, the Mos Espa arena, Watto’s junk shop, and Anakin’s home on Tatooine. In the second phase, the company moved on to Italy and then Tunisia for location work depicting the Queen’s palace on Naboo and scenic desert exteriors on Tatooine, respectively.

  For the palace, all of the large palaces in Europe were scouted, but Reggia Palace in Caserta, Italy, just north of Naples, was selected because it featured the types of space we were after. George was looking for something on a massive scale and which featured classical architecture that could then be digitally enhanced and extended to seem even bigger. Unfortunately, Reggia Palace is also a popular tourist attraction and could only be secured for a handful of shooting days from the late afternoon into the night. Shooting in Reggia Palace was difficult for other reasons as well, primarily because we were shooting in anamorphic. The architecture
there is almost entirely vertical, so composing shots that really took in the structures was sometimes hard, and we were limited in what we could do in there because it was a historic place.

  In one key scene there, Queen Amidala and her assault team are pinned down by the platoon of battle droids within a vast corridor of polished stone. To escape, they blast through a large window and use grappling-type hooks to climb to the next level of the castle-like structure. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get permission to use squibs—explosive charges—while shooting in Caserta. But Gavin did a brilliant job of reconstructing that corridor from Reggia Palace back at Leavesden after we returned to England for just one day of shooting. That let us blow chunks out of columns and shatter the windows, but it had to match what we’d shot at Caserta.

  Back at Leavesden, there were a number of extensive sets and situations that were challenging but also impressive to the cast. One of them was the Jedi Council sequence.

  SAMUEL L. JACKSON

  The first time I stepped on the set for Episode I, it was a little daunting, but only because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing until I got there. Even when they told me I was playing a character named Mace Windu, I didn’t know what he did until I went to costumes and they started putting Jedi robes on me. “Really? I’m a Jedi?” I looked at the script and saw my first conversation with Yoda. “Okay, how do I wrap my mind around this?” Apparently, this guy is pretty important and they’ve already been working on the film for two months. Here I am just showing up and I’m going to Liam Neeson’s funeral and we’re having a conversation there.

  It was daunting to go into a situation where everybody had been there for a while. People had been in makeup for three hours and they had big heads and long necks. But by the time Lucas said, “Action,” it was like, “Huh? Oh, what? Yeah.” It was hard to keep a grin off my face sometimes, because I was looking around and thinking, “Look at this. This is great.” You do get used to it, though, and then you go into a very comfortable space where you walk in, you command it, and you feel like you’re a Jedi. You walk into the Jedi Council meeting, sit down, and pull out your robes. It happens.

  * * *

  While the movie was shot on 35mm, it would be the only entry in the prequel trilogy to do so. Some portions of it, however, were shot in high definition digital, which both Lucas and McCallum believed was pointing toward the future of production. Additionally, the fact that The Phantom Menace had no less than three visual effects supervisors—John Knoll, who handled on-set production, the podrace, and space battle sequences; Dennis Muren, in charge of the underwater sequence and the ground battle; and Scott Squires on lightsaber effects as well as with teams on miniature effects and character animation—says so much about the scope of the film. There were a little less than two thousand effects shots in The Phantom Menace (by comparison, Avengers: Endgame and The Force Awakens contain 2500 VFX shots each, whereas Jurassic Park in 1993 had just 63).

  RICK MCCALLUM

  Some of the effects technology we were trying to utilize was really beyond state-of-the-art. It was pushing the envelope in a new way, especially in terms of character animation and digital set technology. Those two areas were really being pushed heavily. But we also wanted to have the right amount of time to explore and continue the way in which we did The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The production template for us was that we’d shoot in a very nonlinear form. We’d shoot the bulk of the film, then we’d edit, then George rewrote and we’d go back and shoot, then we’d reedit, rewrite, and reshoot again. We kept on doing that; fixing and placing all the bits of the puzzle right up to the very last moment that the picture was being released.

  RON MAGID

  (journalist, visual effects historian)

  Given that they had the ability to endlessly tweak and repurpose like this, the question was whether or not there was such a thing as having too much control over the images.

  GEORGE LUCAS

  Having lots of options means you have to have a lot more discipline, but it’s the same kind of discipline that a painter, a novelist, or a composer would have. In a way, working in [digital] is much less frustrating than working in film, but it’s not as though it’s limitless no matter how you go. The artist will always push the art form until he bumps up against the technology—that’s the nature of the artist. Because cinema is such a technological medium, there’s a lot of technology to bump into, and I think as more people use digital they’re going to find [it has] a lot more limitations. Some of those limitations will be [equivalent to] the limitations they had with film, and some of those limitations will just be because they’ve gone so far that they finally bumped into the technological ceiling.

  DAVID TATTERSALL

  Because so much of the picture would be completed in postproduction, I found myself working on a largely virtual production. The extensive use of blue screen on Episode I is what made shooting it so very different from any other I’ve done. The sheer amount of blue-screen material was amazing.

  * * *

  And for many of the cast members, it could be overwhelming given that there was actually very little for them to interact with. Some enjoyed the process, others clearly did not.

  EWAN MCGREGOR

  It was a different process from anything I had done before, only because it was a special effects movie and I had never made a big film set in space before. It’s a different process; a much more arduous, time-consuming process to make one of these films. It’s really hard work. When you’re in front of a camera, it’s the same deal wherever you are and whatever the budget is. What changes is how big your dressing room is, if you have a fridge that’s stocked up every day. That’s all superfluous and it doesn’t mean anything in terms of the work. But in a film like Star Wars, compared to A Life Less Ordinary, let’s say, it’s a very different process for an actor. I knew that would be the case. You’re just another player amidst a large amount of people. That’s why I love movies. It takes hundreds of people to make them. In one respect, you are just another worker on the set.

  LIAM NEESON

  At the end of the day, you still have to act, whether it’s with Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace or Aidan Quinn in Michael Collins. There’s something you still have to convey and share. Acting for me is about reacting, so it is very difficult to act with something that isn’t there. Yet there is a technique to it. My main consideration was that I didn’t want to be like someone in those early, early science fiction films where you see the hero with a glassy-eyed stare trying to fight some huge ant. Subconsciously, as an audience member, you say, “That guy is not looking at anything.”

  So we were conscious of that in The Phantom Menace. There were actors in back of the camera just to give us some kind of input. Sometimes we had little colored balls. We just needed something to help focus our eyes. I admired what all the actors did in A New Hope in regards to their attitudes towards the technology. It was very matter-of-fact. This is the universe they’re in. Mark Hamill jumps into his speeder and—phooph!—he’s off. He sold it as much as the special effects magicians did afterward. I loved that the actors used all of that. To them, it was everyday stuff, and I tried to do the same thing.

  EWAN MCGREGOR

  When [Alec] Guinness was interviewed about playing Kenobi, he said, “There wasn’t a great deal of psychological preparation to have to do.” I have to deliver the lines and hope they do the backgrounds nicely. In a way, that’s all it was. It’s not as demanding as other parts I’ve played in terms of emotions. It was a long shoot and very tiring. It’s just a slog making a film like that. Science fiction movies are very taxing.

  NATALIE PORTMAN

  When I saw the movie, I didn’t recognize 99 percent of the settings. It was really weird to do and I didn’t realize how weird it was until I saw the movie. I saw myself walking around places I had never been to, places that had been totally fabricated. It was a really different skill to master as an actor. It’s a huge exercise in imagin
ation. Not only do you have to imagine what your character is thinking and feeling, but you have to imagine what’s around you. It’s like a kid playing with a cardboard box and pretending it’s a horse or a spaceship. That’s what I was doing.

  * * *

  One of the key scenes in the film—which was obviously inspired by Ben-Hur’s chariot race—was the podrace scene on Tatooine, which young Anakin participates in hoping to win his freedom from servitude. The two-headed podrace announcer was Fode and Beed, voiced respectively by Greg Proops and Scott Capurro. Both were filmed in heavy makeup and blue bodysuits, but were ultimately replaced by full CGI.

  GREG PROOPS

  (voice actor, “Fode”)

  George Lucas has his vision and I was but a prawn in the salad. The face makeup was quite good and took several hours.