Secrets of the Force

by Edward Gross

  RICK MCCALLUM

  If the audience cared enough about Anakin, what happens would be unbearable. Because it’s no different when you love somebody; all of us in our personal lives have had that problem with some member of our family. That’s what the whole movie is about. It’s a saga of the family. Sooner or later from one generation to the next there is somebody who screws up badly. And you never understand. And if you are a close family, you love them anyway and nothing is more unbearable when you can’t help them. This is a family saga that takes place over twelve hours. It is in six parts. If you watch all six together, then you realize that you aren’t left with darkness, you are left with something much more positive. You have to watch Star Wars as an entire series.

  JOHN KENNETH MUIR

  Revenge of the Sith is the best and the most widely accepted of the prequels. It is a “War of Terror Age” parable about people surrendering liberty in the face of fear, and the consequences of doing so. For the first time, the central theme of the prequels really comes together. That idea is that people who are afraid or fearful tend to make bad decisions. People who are scared of losing their way of life give away the things they should never give away. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” In the Star Wars universe, free people give away their Republic to be safe from a boogeyman, the Separatists. And one man, Anakin, gives away his goodness—part of his identity—in the mistaken belief that by embracing the dark side, he can protect his family. The Chancellor is voted into power as Emperor by the very people who need protection from an Emperor. The scared masses practically beg a “strong man” to protect them. And he does so, at least after a fashion. Palpatine tells Darth Vader: “Go bring peace to the Empire.” Unfortunately, it is the peace of subjugation, the peace of oppression, that he provides.

  BRIAN JAY JONES

  (author, George Lucas: A Life)

  Revenge of the Sith gives Natalie Portman one of the greatest lines Lucas has ever written, which is, “This is the way liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” I think especially nowadays, every day that line gets better and better. Again, one of the finest he’s ever written, whether he meant to do it or not.

  * * *

  Production on Revenge of the Sith began in June 2003 in Sydney, Australia, also shooting in Thailand, Switzerland, China, Italy, and the UK. With much of the cast of Attack of the Clones returning, the production welcomed back Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca, much to the joy of fans.

  PETER MAYHEW

  (actor, “Chewbacca”)

  Rick McCallum called completely out of the blue. I almost dropped the phone. It was a pleasant surprise. Rick was calling from Australia to ask about dates and availability. I think my answer was, “When can you get me on a plane?” So it was a very enjoyable and welcome conversation. The last time I had actually worn the costume was for the MTV Movie Awards, which was an interesting event. There were loads of Hollywood and music people there, and Chewie sort of stole the evening. He got the only standing ovation of the night. It was a ball and I had a great time. But I had a better time, I must say, on Revenge of the Sith.

  The change between films in special effects makes a hell of a difference. First of all, it’s faster now. It’s much quicker to use a blue or green screen, where certain items represent certain things. And with modern cameras, you get instant replay and can see what has been shot, whereas before you had to wait for the footage to come back from the processing plant. That usually took a day. Now you have everything instantly. So if anything goes wrong, you can shoot it again right away, while everyone’s still there. The whole process is much quicker.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  It was fantastic to work with Peter Mayhew and have him return as Chewbacca. He’s such a consummate gentleman and a decent guy, and he wanted to be back in that suit so bad.

  PETER MAYHEW

  So far as acting against nothing—which is what you do when you have the blue and green screens—that’s where the skill of the actor comes in. You are told what’s going to be around you and—if you use your imagination—you know what has come before and what occurs afterward. You work out what you’re going to do in your mind.

  Comfort-wise, I had a water-cooled suit underneath the original. It kept me pretty comfortable when I wasn’t working, and when I was working, I would just unplug it from the power unit, tuck it in under the costume and stay cool for fifteen or twenty minutes. However, certain scenes were done with CGI, but the majority of Chewie’s stuff is me.

  I saw Ewan, Hayden, and everyone from the Sith cast when we were shooting in Australia, and I also shot with a couple of other Wookiees. That was interesting, because being the older and more experienced actor who had played a Wookiee before, I could sit back and know what I was going to do, whereas some of the others were a bit tense. I was the boss man, the Wookiee boss man, apart from George. It was nice to be back. It was also weird not standing next to Harrison Ford. How do you describe it? It was odd, but it was also nice that Chewie could become the personality he has always been. Under Han Solo, Chewie was a little bit daunted. But in Revenge of the Sith, we saw much more of Chewie and learned more about him than you did in the last film, Return of the Jedi.

  * * *

  A unique challenge was given to ILM and the Lucasfilm design team at the start of production: to create a fully CG villain … with four lightsabers. General Grievous—a deadly being who abandoned his physical body in favor of the perfection that is metal and machine, the supreme commander of the Separatist droid army—would go on to become a fan favorite, appearing across multiple TV shows, video games, and novels. The man behind him is the film’s animation director, Rob Colman; he is voiced by Lucasfilm sound engineer Matthew Wood.

  RICK MCCALLUM

  He’s a really interesting digital character, but he isn’t a crucial player in the whole film. He’s a bad guy who has to be eliminated at a certain point in the story. Obi-Wan is sent out to destroy him and then Grievous becomes a major plot point, but only his destruction is important.

  ROB COLMAN

  (animation director and motion capture actor for “General Grievous,” Revenge of the Sith)

  Grievous was fully computer-generated. What was neat about him from both an animation and acting point of view was that he has no mouth or eyebrows. He only has these eyes that are sort of hidden behind his mask. Several of my animators were concerned and asked, “How do we make him expressive?” It was a great acting exercise getting him to emote through his body performance. I was fortunate enough to take Chuck Jones out to dinner a few years ago, and one of the questions I asked him was, “Which character was the hardest to achieve—and that you were happiest with?” It turned out to be Marvin the Martian. He told me that Bugs Bunny was a little bit of him and a little bit of the other guys, and that Bugs was actually easy to animate. But Marvin has no mouth and yet he’s constantly talking, so they really had to focus on his performance and movements.

  WARREN FU

  (concept artist, Revenge of the Sith)

  My main inspiration for tone and attitude with General Grievous was Michael Meyers from Halloween, although the final character in the movie didn’t act like that. If you study the face, you can find a few other influences: The Crow, Shrunken Heads (in the mouth), and some shapes stolen from the Desert Skiff [from Return of the Jedi].

  ROB COLMAN

  When we were doing Grievous, I said, “Okay, here’s our opportunity to animate a character with no mouth, but who talks a fair amount.” Grievous’s eyes look great and we went through a whole elaborate investigation as to how he should move. Originally, Grievous was going to be very powerful and tall, but George said, “Nah, I don’t want him to be too Vader-like. I want to make him more sinister. He’s ill. He’s grievously ill.” And the subtext there is that Grievous is the first generation, the Alpha version of this creature-droid technology blend. So he’s s
ort of this sickly prototype. The same technology would then, in George’s mind, be used to build Darth Vader.

  WARREN FU

  The MagnaGuards turned out closer to how I envisioned them. I pictured Grievous being a silent but deadly character that spoke through its intimidating presence, so I was a bit surprised to see how animated and talkative he turned out. But at the end of the day, my work as a conceptual designer was in service of greater story, so it doesn’t matter how I envisioned him, I’m just happy I was able to contribute the design to this great universe. I’m actually pleased to see that he’s still a prominent character in the universe. It’s pretty surreal to think that he’ll be around longer than I will.

  * * *

  Revenge of the Sith is set three years after Attack of the Clones, beginning with an action sequence involving Anakin and Obi-Wan working together—which, as far as Hayden Christensen is concerned, nicely establishes how things are between them since the last film.

  HAYDEN CHRISTENSEN

  (actor, “Anakin Skywalker”)

  They’re like brothers now, and that’s a great setup for where the relationship goes and how it unravels. Anakin becomes slightly suspicious of everyone around him, including Obi-Wan. The seedlings of dismay are planted and their friendship begins to spiral from there. We know where the relationship is heading. We know that it’s going to all resolve itself in this lightsaber duel at the end. But it’s very much like a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid partnership at the get-go. So you’re really emotionally invested in their friendship, and when things fall apart, you’re affected by it. Anakin isn’t doing so well with his relationships in this film. Padmé senses that something is up.

  * * *

  The Clone Wars are still raging and the Republic is starting to crumble. At the behest of the Separatist leader Count Dooku, the Separatist droid army, led by General Grievous, has invaded Coruscant and kidnapped Chancellor Palpatine. Anakin and Obi-Wan set out to rescue the Chancellor by boarding Grievous’s ship and fighting their way to the chamber where Palpatine is being held by Dooku. The two Jedi engage in another lightsaber duel with the count, during which Obi-Wan is knocked out. Anakin bests Dooku and holds two lightsabers to his neck to subdue him. As Anakin stands over Dooku, Palpatine shifts into his Darth Sidious persona and urges Anakin to kill the treacherous count (who, in one of the film’s best moments, is visibly shocked to discover that the master he has been completely loyal to has betrayed him). Anakin hesitates for a second, but then complies and beheads Dooku.

  RAY MORTON

  And here is where the first of the script’s major problems arise. The most problematic aspect of Clones is that in the middle of the film, Anakin—who up until that point is portrayed as the film’s hero—slaughters an entire tribe of Tusken Raiders. He does what Jedi have always been warned not to do: he gives in to his hate, anger, and his aggression, turns to the dark side and becomes a villain. But the movie almost immediately forgets about this transformation and resumes portraying Anakin as a hero, as if the incident never happened. While the movie ignores the murders, moviegoers couldn’t and were left with very conflicted feelings about him—at best there’s an unease about him; at worst they despise him for being the villain he has chosen to become. The three years between films could have helped them forget about all this and return to viewing Anakin as a sympathetic protagonist (something that is necessary if they’re to see his transformation into Vader as a tragedy). However, Sith sticks the dilemma right back in their face in this opening sequence.

  And after this happens between Anakin and Dooku, we once again see that Anakin is a murderer. While an argument can possibly be made that we should have some sympathy for Anakin after the killings in Clones, because he was distraught over the death of his mother and so wasn’t thinking clearly, in Sith the killing is in cold blood—Anakin slays Dooku simply because Palpatine tells him to. So while this film is supposed to be about the descent of Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader, as far as we’re concerned, that descent has already occurred. However, once again the script doesn’t see it that way. Moments after he has killed Dooku, Anakin goes right back to being a hero—fighting off the droid army, trading quips with Obi-Wan, smart-mouthing Grievous, commandeering the general’s ship, crash-landing it back on Coruscant, and returning the Chancellor to safety. The movie cheers Anakin, but we can’t. Not after the evil we’ve seen him do. And this makes it hard for us to experience the joy the film clearly wants us to feel in the next sequence: upon returning to Coruscant, Anakin reunites with Padmé, who tells him she is pregnant. He is thrilled and the movie expects us to be thrilled for him, but we aren’t because it’s hard to feel happy for a guy we just watched murder someone in cold blood at the behest of the worst person in the galaxy.

  * * *

  A short time later, Yoda travels to the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk to help the Wookiees repel an invasion by Separatist forces. Not long after that, Obi-Wan is sent on a mission to find General Grievous on the planet Utapau, where, accompanied by a group of clone troopers, he will eventually track down the droid general and, after a vicious fight, destroy him and finally bring an end to the war.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  (author, The Making of Revenge of the Sith)

  Episode III had more miniature shots than all the original trilogy put together. That might’ve been true for Episode I, but I know it was true for Episode III. And I saw it firsthand. It was incredible—they were building the sinkhole planet (Utapau), and I saw from day one to the end, the whole volcano miniature going up right next to where the dailies theater was. And there was Lorne Peterson working on it, and a bunch of other guys. It was fantastic. It wasn’t like, “We’re going to do all CG, screw models.”

  * * *

  One unaccredited position on Revenge of the Sith went to Steven Spielberg, who wanted some firsthand experience working with the new digital technology and motion animatics his friend, George Lucas, had developed. The preliminary form of directing for CGI sequences, animatics, are motion storyboards that have since become industry standards for big-budget movies, and was first developed for Attack of the Clones. Directors Guild of America rules—which Lucas had left in 1977 along with Hollywood—prohibited Spielberg from actively working on the project, so his work went uncredited. Though rumors persist as to which section of the film Spielberg worked on, the one confirmed section was the Obi-Wan Kenobi / General Grievous chase sequence through the tunnels of Utapau.

  JONATHAN RINZLER

  One thing is that Spielberg was involved with some of the animatics for Episode III. He had planned quite a bit of stuff. Not much made it into the final version of the film.

  George liked to play around with ideas. Originally when Obi-Wan falls off the creature [in the Grievous fight on Utapau] and into a sinkhole into the water, there was going to be this whole thing where he comes out into a cave, and there’s this creature in the cave, and he makes friends with the creature—and then there were these troopers following Obi-Wan and the creature eats them. So, there was all kind of stuff.

  * * *

  Lucas created the two Obi-Wan and Yoda subplots to separate Anakin from Yoda and Obi-Wan, so that there would be no one to stop Anakin from going over to the dark side. As Obi-Wan is about to depart on his mission, he and Anakin bid each other a warm goodbye, which is the last time they will be together as friends. With Obi-Wan and Yoda out of the way, the narrative now focuses on Anakin’s final descent.

  RAY MORTON

  Still wanting to present Anakin as a tragic hero, Lucas sought to give him a sympathetic reason for his transformation—some motivation that would allow us to retain enough compassion for Anakin to see his fall as an epic tragedy rather than just as a guy going bad. Lucas was able to come up with a motive that had the potential to generate this compassion: soon after learning Padmé is pregnant, Anakin begins having nightmares in which he sees her die in childbirth. Already haunted by his failure to save his mother, Anakin becomes
determined to keep Padmé safe. Palpatine—seeking to convert Anakin so he can utilize his powers for his own nefarious ends—uses the boy’s fear to his advantage. Revealing that he is a Sith, Palpatine suggests to Anakin that the Sith possess the ability to keep loved ones from dying and hints that he can teach Anakin how to save Padmé. Anakin is initially horrified to learn the Chancellor is actually a Sith, but when Mace Windu attempts to kill Palpatine, Anakin, fearful of losing the knowledge that will help him save Padmé, foils Windu, saves the Chancellor, and finally embraces the dark side. Had Anakin still been a sympathetic hero—if we hadn’t seen him commit mass killings and cold-blooded murder—this motivation would have worked perfectly to frame his turn as a tragic fall. However, because we have already seen Anakin access the dark side, it is not as effective as it could have been.