Why called phantom menace

I took one or two of his friends and I put alien masks on them, just rubber masks, Halloween sort of aliens, and made them into other podracers. Therefore, I had action of them in the cockpit, looking over their shoulders, driving, and so on. I could intercut this with all this other race footage I had lifted from other sources.

Then he would add to it. We essentially wanted to try all different kinds of gags, how many different ways cars could pass each other, how many different interesting combinations of situations Anakin can get into so that he can cleverly get out of it, and that sort of thing.

We just played with this for a long time, months, as an exercise. He wanted to be prepared for shooting with a version of the race that could be shown to everybody in production so he could get an idea of the speed at which things would operate, the kind of angles we wanted. Trisha Biggar, The Phantom Menace costume designer: It was a great, fantastic thing to be involved in and to be asked to be involved in, particularly when everyone was aware that there were so many people waiting to see what would end up on the screen.

I was the ninth animator at ILM. There were six animators on Jurassic. Number eight was David Andrews, and number nine was me. The entire CG department was probably around 45, 50 people total. My strategy was to work on the smaller films.

I was afraid that I was gonna be lost on the bigger films. I wanted to make a mark there. I recognized this as an incredible opportunity. The first uncredited film I worked on, I only did one shot, was Flinstones. I was just a regular animator on Dragonheart , and then James Strauss, who was the animation director, incredibly talented guy, got sick, and they asked me to move up and supervise the animators. So I did do that on Dragonheart , which then got me an opportunity to be the animation supervisor on the first Men in Black.

He was taking care of his young kids. And you need to fly over for a day interview with George in London. Jim Morris has just been an amazing person for me in my life. Great mentor. This is sort of my nature, and trying to be as well-prepared as possible. I had found a book on early interviews of George Lucas. I think it was published by the [University of Mississippi press]. These were all pre- Star Wars films. And in it, I found out that George, for a while, had wanted to be an animator and he was also a big fan of the National Film Board of Canada.

Well, I had worked at the NFB. I think that was just probably the perfect segue into it. I was a fan of Star Wars , but I was not a fanboy. Back then, ILM was super-strict.

You were not to be a fanboy, you were not to ask him for his autograph or anything. After the show, I got a phone call that said Robin wanted me to come to the Ranch and audition for Star Wars. Everybody kept it really hush-hush, nobody was really talking about it. It was just like a rumor at the time. It just kind of came to me. So I went up to Skywalker [Ranch] one afternoon when I was supposed to be rehearsing.

She just gave me a bunch of different scenarios to go through, improvising different scenarios. I did that. I was put in the mo-cap suit, I started moving in the suit, and that was the first time George directed me. But nobody knew what motion-capture was. This was the first kind of motion-capture-actor test ever.

George wanted this to be done but nobody knew it could be. Everybody was really stepping up to the challenge at the time, and I think the one missing piece was how they were going to do it and make Jar Jar feel like a real character, and that he was in this room with all the actors. If this was all there is, at least I had some fun. Then, another two weeks go by. I was a child. George Lucas: You know, all films are personal.

Unless you get hired to do something and you just do it. But anything you write, and direct, and have control over is personal. And in that particular case, one of the main driving aspects of the film was the backstory. In doing the first three Star Wars , I had to create a backstory about where everybody came from, what they did, and everything that had happened. I was basically trying to fill in the gaps with pieces that I had to make a full story.

The original idea for Star Wars was one movie about the tragedy of Darth Vader. But as the story grew, it ended up being three movies and the backstory was never explained. Over the 10 years after Return of the Jedi , I realized people misunderstood a lot — such as where Anakin came from. So it was a way of finishing the whole thing off.

George Lucas: Actually, I was looking forward to it because, finally, I was going to get to do something that a lot of the frustration had been taken out of. A lot of the frustration in making movies was technical.

Once we went digital, it was so much easier. I could focus on the story and other things. We just hoped it would be accepted by the niche audience that goes to see fantasy and Ray Harryhausen movies. Years later, of course, he kept his vow and we did the Special Editions. That led into the new sets of trilogies.

It was an exciting time, actually. Really it was, for me. I looked forward to it when he, as I said, he called me up and talked about this podrace. I spent a lot of time in developing those elements, and what each planet did, and why they did it the way they did. So I had all this material. A lot of the story elements were givens. Early on, it was that Anakin had been more or less created by the midi-chlorians, and that the midi-chlorians had a very powerful relationship to the Whills [from the first draft of Star Wars ], and the power of the Whills, and all that.

I never really got a chance to explain the Whills part. And now I was just having to put it into a script and fill it in, kind of sew up some of the gaps that were in there. But it was also the way that the Sith worked. What really happened is, the Sith ruled the universe for a while, 2, years ago. Each Sith has an apprentice, but the problem was, each Sith Lord got to be powerful. And the Sith Lords would try to kill each other because they all wanted to be the most powerful. Which is exactly what they did.

And he went through a few apprentices before he was betrayed. People have a tendency to confuse it — everybody has the Force. You have the good side and you have the bad side. Maybe kill a few people, cheat, lie, steal. Lord it over everybody. But the good side is hard because you have to be compassionate. You have to give of yourself. Whereas the dark side is selfish. So it seemed natural that when I had the technology to actually make the film — for example, I could finally have Yoda be the warrior he was meant to be — then I would move forward to thinking about how I could make that a movie.

Because I had all the backstory, I had basically the three scripts. Or at least the material that was in the three scripts. George Lucas: The inspiration for Star Wars , one of the very first ideas, was when Richard Nixon tried to change the Constitution so that he could run for a third term.

We all knew he was a crook, he was a bad guy, he did terrible things and we sort of chugged along with it. How does it die? Would the people vote for it? And the populace gives up the democratic powers and this guy is suddenly running the show. You end up with the Empire. Everybody thought he was a nice guy. And he was plotting to take over the Republic. The thing about Anakin is, Anakin started out as a nice kid. He was kind, and sweet, and lovely, and he was then trained as a Jedi.

Ultimately it has to do with being unwilling to give things up. He knew she was going to die. And he became a Sith Lord. Officially head of the art department, Doug Chiang was in for a surprise when George Lucas briefed him on his ideas regarding the overall look of the prequels.

I had no idea where George was going to go in terms of design aesthetics. George Lucas: World building is the hard part. Even on those original three movies, I had quite a number of designers: Ralph [McQuarrie] and Joe [Johnston], and later on we had probably seven or eight designers. But I did it on the first three Star Wars movies. Each Star Wars movie had three different societies.

Three different cultures, three different worlds. And those three worlds were the basis of everything. We used deserts, and then we used forests. It was hard to find that many different environments to be able to build around. That was one of the problems of going on to the next three, which was I had to come up with worlds, fashion, and craft that were very different.

If you do what a lot of people do, it just becomes generic. One person I can point to who is great at world building is Jim Cameron. Avatar was brilliant. You have to know the rules on everything. If you come up with something new, you have to say what all the rules are about it. Doug Chiang: The good thing is, that during the whole process, I realized that part of why Star Wars design is so timeless is because George anchors it in a real historical timeline.

And when I realized what he was doing with that, we established the timeline for all designs with our design history in the US. And then as you segue more toward the original trilogy, design would become more like the manufactured era of the s. It was all different. Everything was different. Well, not everything, but all of the design in terms of technology improves. They just had to pick up whatever junkers they could get anywhere because they were rebels.

That kind of detail gets lost. It was sort of almost like a historical film. So we did a lot of research into all sorts of cultures, peoples, sculptures, woodcrafts, paintings, textiles, anything.

Influences could come from anywhere and they did. Doug Chiang: George surprised me on many levels. His tastes are exquisite in terms of fine art. I thought that was my job, that I was going to present a design and I was going to sell it to George, and he would approve it. And it was the other way around! And George cut through all of that. One of the most impressive things is that he could do that very quickly at many levels.

He had a way of looking at a whole bunch of different images and then really pulling out, very quickly, the handful that he liked. I was always impressed at how he could do that. I remember asking him once, finally, why and how. His answer was very simple. It was because he could understand those designs very quickly. From a sort of graphic logo silhouette point of view, he could read what that is and he could understand it.

And his whole point was, when these designs show up in a movie — and this is where my three-second rule came about — the audience is not going to have you there to explain it. They have to understand it quickly. That transformed how I approached design because it applies not only to film, it applies to all kinds of other designs as well.

He wants to understand it clearly. A kid could draw them. Now with a solid grip on the design approach for The Phantom Menace , Doug Chiang and his team got to work. Doug Chiang: There were no scripts when I started work. It was basically just ideas, and he would just throw out things. So a lot of it was just fragments of ideas.

I love the process of working with George. As he was writing, we were in there drawing and designing. Sometimes what I drew would inform what he would write, and vice versa. Every week it would change. And he would push me in a new direction. It grew very organically that way. At that time, George, I think, deliberately wanted myself and [principal creature designer] Terryl Whitlatch during that first year to just kind of explore.

Because he just wanted food for thought. I just went in and just designed it. You really feel that you want to do justice to something that looked that beautiful. What am I going to do? Do you mind? The podracer was one of the first things that I really jumped onto as a design. I liked car racing, I liked the idea of technology, I liked the idea of where he was going with this mess of engines.

When he equated it to a horse and chariot, then it made complete sense. The horses are the engines. I was trying to put too much logic into it at that time. I wanted it to make sense. How would they tie to the cockpit? Where would the fuel tank be? I finally decided to do research and went to the maintenance bay at the San Francisco [International] Airport.

Seeing these giant engines stripped of their cowling, hanging in these spaces, I was just awestruck. It was just amazing. We were taking something very ordinary and putting it into a new context and creating something new from that. Once that idea stuck, it was a matter of coming up with different configurations of these engines.

That became a real challenge because it was going to be a very kinetic race. George was very keen on making sure that each of the podracers were easy to distinguish and identify. He had the cheapest version.

He just found an engine, he had a very simple cockpit. It would be the most plain and the most ordinary so he would be distinctly an underdog. Later on George decided that maybe Anakin should have an even smaller engine. That was really nice because then, definitely, it made Anakin an underdog.

George decided he wanted it to have a little bit more personality. He asked us to reference the Birdcage Maserati, the Birdcage. It looked really great. The idea then was to take the essence, the spirit of that design with the big fairings, and just lop off the underside of it and turn that into a cockpit. It worked out really well, because that, in combination with the two engines and the flaps, makes for a very iconic design.

Doug Chiang: The battle droid was actually the very first drawing that I drew. I think that was my first failure because I took what I heard from George too literally when he described that he wanted a robotic stormtrooper. I drew that — a guy in a costume, but made it look robotic.

It was my first big lesson where I was designing something completely out of thin air, just making it up trying to fit the design brief. I found this one photo book on African sculptures and that inspired me to lean toward them, because those sculptures have this wonderful way of stylizing the human form. It was very elegant and almost looked mechanical. Naturally, everything he said was a lie.

To prepare for the role, Serafinowicz said, he moved to Tunisia and opened a shoe-repair shop, before coming to blows with director George Lucas on several occasions when filming began. The feud eventually boiled over into a violent medieval jousting match that culminated in the death of two elephants. The year was Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi brought to a close the most influential and highest grossing film trilogy of all time, Lucas was reviving the Star Wars saga and all that went with it.

Jedi knights! The Force! Lightsaber duels and dynasties torn between good and evil! The Phantom Menace had those things. Where did it all go wrong? The Phantom Menace was the biggest event in film history, the long-awaited continuation of a series that changed the face of cinema. The original Star Wars trilogy recalibrated almost every element of American movie-making. Following it up, every exec in Hollywood assumed, would be like shooting womp rats in a barrel.

Instead, The Phantom Menace confused audiences. How did the most anticipated movie of all time end up on the dark side of fans and critics? Was it really that bad? The Phantom Menace was announced in One tusk was broken off and his lopsided smile was born. Watto was also the first CG character that the effects team went to work on. Through his design and motions, the team quickly learned how to achieve what they wanted on featured digital characters.

Even just the cord on his tool belt had to have its own computer program written to simulate its movement properly. Some of the audience members at the Boonta Eve Classic podrace crowd are colorful cotton swabs. Sometimes practical effects work best to achieve just the right three-dimensional look for faraway shots, and a model maker had the creative idea to use the swabs in the arena models. Some of the cheers and jeers emanating from the audience at the podrace are from a San Francisco 49ers game.

Sound designer Ben Burtt recorded crowd reactions at the football game himself. Want even more behind-the-scenes from The Phantom Menace? Kelly Knox is a freelance writer who loves creating Star Wars crafts with her daughter and spouting behind-the-scenes movie facts. Log In. Concept model by Tony McVey. Concept art by Iain McCaig.

Concept sketch by Doug Chiang.