Still strong the Force is with Dave Filoni.
Filoni, who directed the recent animated feature film Star Wars: The Clone Wars, remains a key figure in the Star Wars galaxy, serving as supervising director of the upcoming animated TV series, also called Star Wars: The Clone Wars
During a Sept. 18 conference call, Filoni joked that he was Star Wars creator George Lucas' padawan learner, said he understood the mixed reaction to the Clone Warsmovie and previewed what fans can expect to see on the weekly series when it premieres next month on Cartoon Network.
The Clone Wars is set between the events of Star Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones and Episode III--Revenge of the Sith and includes such familiar characters as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Padme Amidala, Yoda, Mace Windu, Palpatine and Count Dooku. Newcomers, introduced in the movie, include Ahsoka, a teenage, orange-skinned Togruta girl whom Yoda assigned to serve under Anakin as the Clone Wars worsened, and Asajj Ventress, a dark sorceress and Dooku's apprentice.
Lucas has said that much of the Star Wars mythos is in his head, but that even he needs to turn to a Star Wars encyclopedia sometimes to keep track of the timeline and the finer details. So what are the challenges for you and how much freedom do you have to explore what interests you?
Filoni: It's a really interesting collaboration. In the beginning, Henry Gilroy and I--Henry was the story editor of season one--came up with a whole bunch of premises for stories that we might like to see in Clone Wars period. We sent those all to George, and he either said yes or no, and that's where we got a lot of the early stories from. And I think that as George was seeing what we were doing with an animated series called Star Wars, and the level of detail and what we could do visually, he got more and more interested, and he came up with more and more story ideas of his own. Probably he was also just finishing Revenge of the Sith when we started. Literally, my first week working on the project that movie was in theaters. So that gives you a sense of the timeline of when we started developing this thing. So I think George needed to cool down from all that big media of Revenge of the Sith, and then we got him really interested in this. And now he's very involved with all of the stories and coming up with the ideas. But if I say, "Hey, I'd like to do an episode like this," based on this other movie or particular thing, he'll always consider it and come back to me with ideas based on that. So it's turned it out to be a really interesting collaboration based on that.
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Star Wars creator George Lucas with his latest creation, the padawan Ahsoka.
The Clone Wars movie elicited a lot of debate over how well it did or didn't do. Was it for kids or adults? What are your thoughts on all the debate, and in what ways does the film set up the series?
Filoni: I found it really interesting. As a fan of Star Wars for so long, I always knew there was going to be debate, you know? No matter what you do with Star Wars you're going to have a huge debate about it, which is actually part of the fun of being a fan, having the big arguments over "I liked this" or "I didn't like that," or "This aspect fit with what I thought, but that aspect didn't." I think that one of the greatest things is that people are still talking about Star Wars, you know? "Anakin has a padawan; I've never heard of that." But now everybody is talking about the fact that Anakin has a padawan, and the movie introduced that idea. And it didn't just introduced ideas about who these new characters are, but it introduced this whole other look for
