Clone Wars--which is an expansion of the series of 2-D animated interstitials that ran in 2003 on the Cartoon Network--actually started life as the first installment of George Lucas' upcoming CG TV series of the same name. But George Lucas, who acts as executive producer, liked the result so much he decided to turn it into a feature film.The movie, set in the time period between George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones and Episode III--Revenge of the Sith, brings back familiar characters such as Anakin Skywalker (voiced by Matt Lanter) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (James Arnold Taylor). But it centers on a host of new ones, including Anakin's heretofore unknown padawan learner Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein) and the dark sorceress Asajj Ventress (Nika Futterman), who is known to fans of the Star Wars comics and books, as well as a new member of the Hutt clan, whose voice sounds oddly familiar.
George Lucas, Filoni and producer Catherine Winder spoke with reporters recently at Lucasfilm Animation's headquarters, Big Rock Ranch in Marin County, Calif. The Clone Wars opens Aug. 15.
The Star Wars saga has always been steeped in mythology and Jungian archetypes. What sort of mythological territory will the Clone Wars TV series and the proposed live-action Star Wars series deal with?
George Lucas: The mythological arc of the saga doesn't really continue into these other things, because that is a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a story of one man's struggle against evil and the redemption by his son and that sort of thing. This is ... more episodic. It's more like Indiana Jones, actually. ... You have themes and things that still go through it, and there are things like that, but [myth is not] not what it's based on. This is bigger, and we get to more places. And the fun thing about animation, especially, and The Clone Wars in particular, is that we're allowed to go and do stories about clones, get to know them, and find out what they do for recreation, and what Jabba the Hutt's family is all about, and, you know, do all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with the main character. The [live-action Star Wars] series itself, the epic, is basically about one man, so it's very, very narrow, and you pass through a lot of things and you look at "What's that over there?" but you never got to look at it. So this allows us to go and look at all of that stuff. Which means we're not encumbered by this mythological uberstory of the psychological underpinnings of why somebody turns to be a bad person.
Why an animated movie now, and also, can you talk a little bit about the stylized look of the characters themselves, and why you chose to go with the stylized characters as opposed to making them look realistic?
George Lucas: Photorealistic is what live-action movies are. Animation is an art. ... This is an art-philosophical discussion. You either like photorealistic art, you know, that looks exactly like a photograph, and you like to hang that in the museum of modern art, or you like something that actually tries to find the truth behind the realism. And, to me, animation is an art. It's all about design. It's all about style. It's not about making it look photo-real. ...
When we did Revenge of the Sith, I lamented the fact that ... I had to jump over the Clone Wars. And I jumped over the Clone Wars because it had nothing to do with Anakin Skywalker. You know, I mean, he's just another player. ... We had a very narrow focus on talking about him personally, and I said, "Too bad we couldn't do that, because ... it's like World War II. It's a huge canvas there to be mined." ...
We decided we would do a little five-minute animation series for Cartoon Network, using anime and manga and those kinds of ideas that I've always wanted to work in. And we hired a really great director, Genndy [Tartakovsky], to do it for us. But that sort of got me going to say, you know, "We could do a ... regular TV show, a big one. A half-an-hour show, and it could really be great, and we could use all the new techniques we've developed in CG animation and that sort of thing." And I said, "When I finish Star Wars, I'm going to go and start this. And I'm going to do it." And so that's basically what happened. I got to fill in a blank and go around in a universe that is not restricted and therefore not quite as dark. We can have a lot more fun with it. We can enjoy it. [It's] just a little bit more lighthearted.
We ended up doing the TV series. The first few shots came back, and I looked at them on the big screen, and I said, "This is fantastic. This is better than we ever imagined it would be, and this is so good it could be a feature." So I said, "Why don't we make a feature?" ... We've got Ahsoka, one of our main new characters, and I said, "Why don't we just make a feature that introduces her [as] ... one of the main characters?" So we did that. But it's purely something I wanted to do in terms of exploring animation and doing something that I enjoy doing. ...
What about the design of the movie?
Filoni: Really, it was a stylistic choice, knowing that the time we were going to have and the speed we were going to move at, I instantly knew that photorealism wasn't an area that we were going to go to. ... As George Lucas said, [that] had already been covered massively in the live-action features. And I came from a 2-D-animated background, where we use design and shape and color to just make animated characters all the time. I wanted to apply that type of thinking to the computer animation, which, largely, even in a lot of big features that are done in computer animation ... the goal is photorealism. And that wasn't really interesting to me. ...So I talked to the crew and I talked to George Lucas about "Well, let's just forget that, and let's go in this direction and force the style." And that happened to be what George Lucas really wanted to do. We talked about sculpting with light and shadow, and that's where you get the angles on the characters' faces. And I was aware and really afraid of the kind of lifeless CG that you can wind up with. ... So I thought that by having artists hand-paint a texture all over the characters, that that would somehow keep the spontaneity that an artist provides, the fallibility, you know, a [flawed] feeling, a little bit of painterliness on everything, even right down to the eyeballs. ...
It kind of came together with this new technology and my thinking from an older style, and, in the end, the computer just becomes another type of paintbrush or drawing pencil. ...
What was the biggest challenge of doing this movie and the upcoming animated TV series?
George Lucas: Probably the most daunting thing we were trying to do, because we wanted to ... really push the limits and make what just started out as a TV show [go], really, beyond anything you've ever seen on television: to take feature animation--which costs 20, 30 times what TV animation costs--and do that for television. To make it actually look like feature animation for television. That was a challenge. ...
We had to build studios. We had to build the studio from scratch, train people from scratch. Artists. Develop new techniques. We did not make this in the normal way that you make an animated feature. ...
I'm trying to take Star Wars, which is ... a $50-million-an-hour adventure, and do it for, like, $2 million an hour. You know, that's a trick. That's a hard thing to do and have them look the same.
Winder: It was definitely challenging, but ... the great thing is that the parameters, as George Lucas was saying, were limited. And I think that makes people be far more creative than if you have all the resources in the world and you don't have to think differently. And the great thing about working with George Lucas is he pushes us really hard to never settle and think differently, and I think the results come out far better than you'd expect.
A lot of the actors who've appeared in the live-action features--such as Samuel L. Jackson, Christopher Lee and Anthony Daniels--reprise their roles in The Clone Wars. Why weren't some of the other primary actors in this film? Is there any trepidation about doing this without having them participate?
Winder: When we started the project, it was, as George Lucas said, initially a television series, and we needed to be able to work at a pace [that] was pretty rapid. And the way that we write this is we rewrite, we change it, and we need to be able to access our actors pretty regularly. So it was hard to get all the actors that would be off on set, because this pace is pretty intense. ...
George Lucas: You need people available every week. And you can't really afford ... multimillion-dollar actors to do a television series. ... The license fee on your average television series is about $200,000. You know, it's nothing. So those guys make more during their coffee break. ...
When we decided to do a feature--when I said, "Hey, this is great, let's do a feature"--then we went back to the actors, and we said, "OK." We told them we were doing the TV series, just so they knew, as a courtesy. But then we said, "Look, we're doing a feature. Would you like to do the voice in the feature?" And some of them said yes. Some of them were off doing [other] features, because this all was, again, done fairly rapidly. It wasn't like we said, "OK, next June we're going to do this." It was like, "Could you come in in a month, in four weeks, and do this? Could we have two days?" Some of them were all over the world, and some of them said, "Yeah, that'd be great. I'll come in and do it." And some of them couldn't, you know? ...Can you talk about the inspiration behind Ahsoka and Ventress?
George Lucas I wanted to develop a character that would help Anakin settle down, because, ... at the end of Episode II, he was kind of a wild child. ... He and Obi-wan don't get along. So the idea was to see how they become friends, how they become partners, you know, how they become a team. ... One of the ways to do that [was], when you become a parent, when you become a teacher, you kind of have to become more responsible. It kind of forces you into this adulthood thing. And so what I wanted to do was take Anakin and force him into this [situation]. "Now I have to teach somebody, and now I have to be slightly more responsible." And so it was that juxtaposition. I happen to have a couple of daughters, so I have a lot of experience with that particular situation, so I just said, "Rather than make it another guy, why don't we make her a girl?" Because that's fun, and I have a lot of girls, and they're just as hard to deal with when they're teenagers as boys are. ...
Filoni: Ventress is a character that was actually developed for early concept art of Attack of the Clones. There was the idea that maybe the Sith apprentice, the new one after Darth Maul, would be a girl. That got abandoned eventually in favor of Count Dooku and Christopher Lee's character, but the concept art existed, and the comic books and novels on the Clone Wars that were done before had utilized that character, that concept art, and created this new character, Asajj Ventress. So when it came time to develop the idea of The Clone Wars as a series, we thought, "Well, that's a big fan-favorite character. Let's draw her out." And it just so happened we were introducing Ahsoka at the same time. So here you had these two new girls coming into this story at the same time. ... There's kind of an advantage to [that], because you have one that's the apprentice of Anakin Skywalker, trying to be trained in the traditional ways of the Jedi, and you have one that's the hidden apprentice of Count Dooku that's the evil opposite end, so that actually works really nicely for the stories that we're trying to tell.
