Rick McCallum:

One of the most incredible people who worked on the film is Trisha Biggar, our costume designer. Sadly, she's in Scotland and she couldn't make it here today. Family matters prevented her from coming, but she truly is one of the most talented people. I urge you, at the end of tonight, to take a look at some of her materials and costumes. She's just an extraordinary lady. She designed almost 750 costumes, she traveled all over the world to find the most unique fabrics, and I have a little film that will show you part of the process that she goes through.

Rick McCallum:

Since Trisha thinks I'm truly one of the worst-dressed people she's ever met, there's only one person left to talk to you about the costumes - the Jedi Master himself, ladies and gentlemen … Mr. George Lucas.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Before we get into the Q&A with the two of you, I did want to take a second and ask you about Trisha, because the costumes really are extraordinary. We heard you on the tape, but maybe a personal reflection about working with Trisha.

George Lucas:

Well, she's extremely talented. Any good wardrobe designer has a certain knack. She's also Scottish, so she's really sort of the James Bond of the costume design world. (laughs) Don't mess with her!

She's definitely a force to be reckoned with on the set. Wardrobe people are very protective of their costumes because the actors, especially, have a tendency to run around in them, go swimming in them, play pool, play rugby out on the front lawn. It takes a lot to keep them nice and looking decent

And then there's her talent, especially in terms of putting all of the designs together and making them actually work in the real world, which is a miracle. Again, unlike most movies, on this, everything has to be designed from scratch. I insist that everything has to look realistic so it's not overdone. It has to have a certain elegance and a certain depth to it, and that's a hard thing to get somebody to do. Trisha really knows how to make something look real, even though it's not.

It can be a completely fictitious thing and she can make it look like it belongs where it is and it's real. It doesn't call attention to itself, and if it does call attention it does it in a way that's it's supposed to, because it's a senator's outfit or the Emperor's outfit or something is supposed important. She really understands how costumes fit into the environment and not be the star of the show.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

That was the great thing, even going back to Episode IV A New Hope: your attention to detail. The spaceships were dirty, they had been lived in, they were real.

George Lucas

The interesting thing is that the costumes in IV, V and VI were specifically created not have a lot of design involved. We had stormtrooper outfits, we had Imperial uniforms, and then we had our main cast, which was all very, very simple. There was no fashion involved at all. It was a place in the far reaches of the universe, so we didn't have to go to the opera, we didn't have to go to into a city, and we didn't have to go to a lot of different planets. It was very, very limited in what had to be designed, and that was done on purpose, because I just didn't have the resources to do a full blown alien world.

It really fell on Trisha on Episode I to move into the real world of society and fashion in this fantasy world we created. That was very hard, to still keep that, "Let's make this all look realistic, and let's not make it look corny and phony." We have to take a lot more risk. I would say I, II and III have 100 times more creative risk going on than IV, V and VI do. Episodes IV, V and VI were minimalist in the way the costumes were presented - this is not.

There are a million challenges that we had to overcome every day. Trish ultimately was the one responsible for making those costumes fit into the environment, she was the one who actually pulled it off.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Just amazing work. You've spent more than 10 years now developing the digital pipeline. Why was it so important to change the paradigm of how movies are created?

George Lucas:

In order to do something like Episode I, II or III, I had to create worlds in ways that I couldn't do in the old-fashioned way. I couldn't build sets that big, I couldn't have that many extras, I couldn't create that many costumes.

Financially, I'm a little tiny company - I'm not like these big studios here. For me, doing a $100-million movie is a really big deal. I mean, that's as much money as I can pull together. You know, I couldn't possibly produce a $300-million movie, it's just not possible for me to do that.

So, I have to be able to create a big world for a very small price - using a lot of tricks. Primarily, it was digital technology that allowed me to move to that next level. I started using it on the Young Indiana Jones TV series. We experimented with it, and then we moved into doing it in features.

That's another thing about the costumes and about digital technology - we have digital costumes. A lot of characters are wearing digital costumes, which are really amazing, and Trisha was involved in those designs. Supplying ILM with the cloth to say, "This is what that cloth looks like. This is how it moves," so they could replicate it and do a simulation of the actual cloth the digital characters were wearing.

The other part of it is shooting digitally. Even though we had to dumb it down quite a bit, so that it looked like film - it's really overly sharp - it put a bigger demand on costumes and on make up. Those are the two main areas, and the sets have to be a little bit flashier too. The sets are in the background a bit, but the costume is right there, three feet away from the camera, so it has to be right.

Trisha couldn't skimp on anything. It had to all be very, very detailed. It was the one thing that was closest to the camera - closest to the hi-def camera, which is was more hi-def than anybody is used to using in movies. So she really had to make sure that everything was perfect.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

The advances in the camera system that you used on this last film: How did that enable you and Rick to settle on this film, as opposed to Episodes I and II? What was different?

George Lucas:

Well, we were designing cameras three years before Episode I. We didn't get it finished for (Episode) I. We did get it finished for shooting our delay unit, which is a two-week shoot we do a year after we shoot the regular movie. We shot two weeks of it digitally with a real big, huge, funny prototype camera. It sort of looked like an old Technicolor camera with cables all over the place. Then, when we got to Episode II, … (to Rick McCallum:) was it about three weeks before we started shooting that we got the camera?

Rick McCallum:

Finally got the cameras, lenses, but we didn't have a server and the projector wasn't ready at the time …

George Lucas:

It was real beta-testing movie making. We got the first set of cameras off the production line, which we'd been working on for six or seven years. Everybody was kind of like, "What are we doing?" We were experimenting. We hadn't quite done this before. We were learning as we went along and made Episode II.

The great thing about Episode III is that I used the same crew, same cast, same equipment - same everything, and it's great because then we all knew what we were doing. It took me one movie to figure it out. On the second movie, everyone was very comfortable working in the medium, we all knew all the tricks, we'd been through this before, so it was very fast, it was very easy and it was fun.

It was fun to be able to use this new medium, and we pushed it much further because on the first film we had maybe 25 percent digital sets, the second film we had maybe 50 percent digital sets, and in this film I'd say there's 85 percent digital sets. We were able to push the limits of what we needed and what we built, which allows you a whole different kind of flexibility. I had a five-page scene and I said, "I can't do five things in this set." Unfortunately, I didn't figure this out until about two days before we were going to shoot it.

Rick McCallum:

It was the day we shot it. (laughs)

George Lucas:

But it was like, you know, you get in there and you rehearse it on the set, thanks to our very efficient production department, who were painting and drawing as I was shooting.

My crew was fantastic. Everyone relies on a grew crew. I mean, a crew makes everything run, and we had been together since Young Indy, so we really knew each other and how to do stuff. It helps to have a crew that's used to working together and used to working with me and my psychotic behavior. But I don't think my behavior is that much different from other times. (laughs)

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

You and I have talked before about pre-visualization, and way back in the day there were simply storyboards, then animatics and other advancements. What was unique about pre-visualization on Revenge of the Sith?

George Lucas:

When we did Star Wars we used old documentary movies to create our pre-viz because I couldn't afford to do the animation. As we moved along, I did this on every single Star Wars. When we got down to Episode III, it got to the point where we pretty much pre-viz'd the whole movie.

So, I cut the whole movie, then worked on changing it, rewriting it and adding sound effects, figuring out what we were going to do - all before I started shooting.

As a result, it allowed me to have a much better vision of what was going to happen. Instead of having storyboards on the set, we could just turn on the monitor and say, "This is the scene we're shooting. This is what it looks like, these are the angles and this is how long the shots are gonna be."

Of course, as any reasonable director would, I threw all that out and did whatever I wanted. I came back and then tried to figure out what it was we actually did. (laughs)

It's very hard because you're cutting a film before you're shooting a film. It's the same thing with lighting. We're lighting the movie before we're actually making the movie.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

You have this incredible art team who are the first ones to start. Can you tell us a little bit about that team?

George Lucas:

The design group starts out being as three or four people and ends up at about 10 to 11 and we have a pre-viz crew of about 10 to 11, and they start pretty much as I start writing the screenplay. They give me about three weeks to figure out what I'm doing. Then, as I move through, I tell them what each scene is going to be and what I need: I need this alien and that alien and this vehicle. There are so many things we have to design - there's hundreds and hundreds of things that need to be designed from scratch. It takes automobile manufacturers two or three years to design a car, and we design two or three hundred cars in the space of a year. And they're from different cultures and different times and different technologies. It's a huge amount of work.

Rick McCallum:

Ten thousand pieces of artwork.

George Lucas:

We've got a great group of guys, and then we bring in more people because I like to get a lot of different views on what we're doing. We start right from the beginning. I start writing the script and they start doing designs.

A couple of months into it, John Knoll and all they guys from ILM and David and Trish and everybody all come in and all look at where we are as I'm writing the script. Everybody puts their input into that. This is a year before we are going to shoot.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

From your perspective as a director, what were the two biggest challenges for you on Revenge of the Sith?

Goerge Lucas:

It wasn't a challenge - it was a cake-walk. (laughs) There's a lot of work.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Was there ever a scene or a sequence that you weren't sure of?

George Lucas:

Well, the volcano was a bit of a challenge. I'm sure everybody had challenges … I know they had challenges.

We started working on a digital Yoda in Episode I; Rob was working on it, but we couldn't get it to happen on Episode I. Jar Jar Binks was the first animated character that had dialogue and was an actor using motion capture, which was very experimental at the time. Yoda was based on a puppet. One version was based on an actor running around with little polka dots and the other was based on a puppet. We photographed Frank Oz doing the part, we studied the puppet and how it looked in the other movies. It took four years of research to get to a point where we had a digital character that looked like the puppet. The biggest problem was that he came out better than the puppet and I said, "No, no, no, no. We've got to tone it down, we can't do that." So, there were a lot of challenges there.

Rick McCallum:

I'd just like to say one other thing about pre-viz. One of the really interesting things about the process is that George actually sits down with Ben and our pre-viz group - which was started by a young man named David Dozoretz 10 years ago. He's here somewhere - a fantastic talent. What happens is, they sit down in the morning and George comes up with five, 10, 15 shots, and the pre-viz group goes off and within a day or two they get the 15 shots.

Ben starts to cut that together for George and they start to think about the sound. So, pre-viz is not just some weird thing that you do very quickly and you've suddenly got a movie. It takes just as much time as if you were in the editing process and you actually shot with 150 or 200 people on your crew - but you get to do it with four or five people. The opening battle, I think, too, God … six months?

George Lucas:

Yeah, it took a while. The last year in pre-viz, I would go up at lunch for two hours to the pre-viz department and I would stage a scene one day. I would say, "OK, he comes in the door, he goes over here, he picks something off the desk, goes over here begins his dialogue, does this thing and then he walks out." We even have the dialogue, the stuff that the talented group you saw earlier does. (laughs) It's brilliant sometimes, and sometimes it's just something you have to live with. (laughs)

But you have the whole thing - all of the voices and everything you need. I can do a whole scene in two hours. Then, almost before I can get down to the editing room, they've shipped it down there and Ben's already got it. We sit down in the afternoon and cut the scene I just shot at lunch - and it's great because I can cut it and say, "Oh, we forgot something. We forgot the medium two-shot." It's a great way to make a movie. You're really cutting it. You're making a real movie, you're not doing an estimate.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Do you shoot in order now?

George Lucas:

No, not really. It all comes down to -

Rick McCallum:

It's about resources and such.

George Lucas:

When you're turning over every day on the set, you shoot one day on the set and then the next day you're on a different set … how many stages did we have?

Rick McCallum:

We had eight stages, seven sets, 55 days - so every day we were moving stages sometimes two, maybe even three times. The great thing about digital, too, is you know it's in focus, you know you have it, so there's no wait for dailies. You strike (sets) immediately because the space is so desperate for us.

George Lucas:

As soon as I'd walk off a set, it would be struck. Practically overnight. They would strike it overnight and if we came in in the morning and had a second thought it was like … (laughs)

Rick McCallum:

You're paté, you're toast!

George Lucas:

The reality is that when we shoot, we also shoot a still mosaic of the entire set, so if I do need to come back, even a year later, and I need that background, I can recreate it. I can find any piece of background on any set and say, "OK, well do a close up here," and they just add the set behind them. The sets are all stored in the computer.

Rick McCallum:

Before we do a shot with a real actor, we'll come up and shoot 360 degrees of every angle so we always have virtually every single square inch of that set.

George Lucas:

This especially helps if the director doesn't know what he's doing. (laughs)

Rick McCallum:

That's why we shoot absolutely everything. (laughs)

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Well, I do think we have some questions from the audience. There was talk of releasing the original trilogy in 3-D. Is that a reality? Is that gonna happen? And what kind of 3-D is it gonna be?

George Lucas:

When we do it, we'll probably release all six of them in 3-D, starting with Episode I and working our way through in the right direction. This comes out of a lot of development and experimentation that InThree was doing with us way back when. Then a couple of years later, Jim Cameron got into it - he's also a 3-D guy, and Bob Zemekis and Robert Rodriguez. A whole group of us got together, and since I've been pushing digital in theaters for 10 years now and with very little luck, it seemed like an interesting thing. Everyone said, "Well what's the advantage to the fact that it's better quality?" (laughs) And I said, "Well, people do actually care about quality."

All you have to do is walk into a movie theater somewhere in the Valley three weeks in to the run and you'll see what the problem is. That's what people are seeing, and you don't want that to happen. I had a company, THX, that was just dedicated to making quality in the theaters. That's what digital will do. It's the same image on the first day as it is tenth the tenth week. There are no scratches, there are no tears, it's all perfect - the way you shot it. Three-D gives people an impetus to say, "Gee, here's this whole new thing we can do in digital, it doesn't cost anything more, and it's the exact same set up. All you have to do is pop on some glasses. But t otherwise it's a no-brainer. You can show regular movies, you can show 3-D movies, you can show advertising. You can show whatever you want - boxing matches or whatever.

From my point of view, the only thing I care about is quality. I just want my films to be seen with the highest level of quality. I'm just not ready to have it be degraded during the first week.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

We have some questions that aren't as technical either. One person says, "My friends and I need closure. How old is the Emperor?"

George Lucas:

Not as old as I am. I don't really know. This is the first time anyone's asked me this! I would say, when he dies he's maybe 120. How's that?

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

We are going to ask another question that we asked Rob earlier. Rob said he's been asking you for years as to what kind of alien Yoda really is.

George Lucas:

You know, I've never really gotten around to figuring that out. There is no answer. I just never gave him a planet to come from. I like him to be a mystery. He's the little frog prince of the movie.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

George, I've heard rumors that Star Wars was originally written as three trilogies. Was it difficult to fit the saga into six films?

George Lucas:

That's the way I wrote it. There were never three trilogies. There was really only one film. It started out as one simple film, Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. That's all it was, and it was based on Saturday matinee serials, where you come in on a Saturday matinee, you see chapter four, you have no idea what came before or after - you just see chapter four. that was the whole idea.

In the beginning, it was one film. It was a kid on a planet who gets involved in the great galactic battles going on. He discovers that the archvillain is his father and then in the end he redeems him. That's the movie.

But, when I wrote it, the script it was 200 pages. Obviously, when we started, I just wanted to get the film done.I'm sure everyone is familiar with the story that he deal was for a $3.5 million movie, and I looked at that and thought, "Well I can do a lot, but I certainly can't make this movie for $3.5 million." So, I had to cut it down, and I chopped it into three pieces, because it conveniently fell into three acts. I said, "Well, I'll take the first act and make that. And I swear I will make the other two acts and that will be a trilogy."

That was the original movie - the tragedy of Darth Vader. So that's how it grew into three films. In order to write that one movie (A New Hope), I had to figure out what happens before Episode IV, even though we were never going to find out. I had to know who these people were, where they came from, what happened to them, etc.

So, before I wrote that, I wrote the back-story. I'd been through a number of scripts at this point, and then I finally put it all down and said, "OK, this is the story." I went back and wrote the back story about who everybody was, were they came from, where the Emperor came from and all the other stuff - and then I wrote the first movie. Then it grew into three movies.

When I finished Return of the Jedi, I figured that was it for me, I'm out. I was very happy to be out. I had a new daughter and I was going to raise my daughter and be a parent. That was more important to me. I'd produce a few movies as executive producer - but that's hard work. It's probably twice as hard as being a studio executive. (laughs)

So I did - I raised my daughter. I'd go to work at 11 a.m. and come home at 3 p.m., take whatever days off I needed for my daughter. I basically was retired for 15 years. It was very worthwhile and it never occurred to me that I would go and make the prequels because the prequel was written as a book, as a literary thing, it was not as a movie.

Star Wars, as I was saying, was very, very carefully written around the technology. I knew what I could do and what I couldn't do, and each movie had a challenge in it. Like with the first one there was panning with spaceships. Most people think that isn't hard, but it was hard. It was a really difficult thing to pull off. We had $2 million for special effects, and I said, "We've got to invent new technology." We were going to have to make a model version of an animation camera and somehow make that work so we could do repeat passes like we can in animation. But it was all completely new stuff, and it had to be run by computer. We accomplished that - barely.

Then in the second film I said, "We are going to have a two foot tall green character who has to act - who's a main character in the movie. How can I make that be realistic?" He'd have to do a performance, he'd have dialogue and lines. How could I make that be real and make people actually believe that exists?

I talked to Jim Henson, who was a friend of mine, and he recommended Frank Oz and we said, "Can you take a Muppet and make it look real with the crude servo technology that existed in those days?" It's one thing to do a man in a suit; it's another thing to do it when he's that tall. So, that was the challenge on the second film.

On each one I had this thing I that had to overcome, but it was only one little thing. Everything else was within reach. We could cut down on the sets, cut down on the costumes, cut down on the extras. Everything was done to save money and to do things that I knew I could get away with and it could actually happen.

The next three films weren't written like that. We'd go to the center of the universe and there's a capital and there's thousands of people, there's space battles, Yoda fights in it. I couldn't even get Yoda to walk!

I have one wide shot in all the original films where there's a midget walking in a suit and it was shot from all perspectives, but I couldn't do a fight that way. The set for Coruscant would have been as big as this room, and we couldn't afford that. So, we decided to do it in little chunks that we could mosaic together - but it was only that technology that allowed me to do that.

By the time I got back, my kids were old enough, and I thought, "Why don't I go back and direct?" But I was on two paths. I was either going to do my artsy-fartsy movies, which I've said I was going to do since I got out of college, or I was going to tell the other part of Star Wars.

When I did the original Star Wars, the whole concept of the tragedy of Darth Vader kind of got lost because it was broken into the three different movies and the arc of that whole story got dissipated to the point where it wasn't as strong as I'd hoped it would be.

So I said, "Maybe I will do those." After Jurassic Park, I realized that we could create real characters and have them run around and do all this kind of stuff. So, then I decided I'd go back and make the three movies.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

Rick, any final comments before we say goodnight?

Rick McCallum:

No - just that it was a lot of fun tonight. That's all it was.

Bruce Carse, Below the Line:

One final question for George. What was it like for you the first time that you watched all six movies in order?

George Lucas:

Oh, I was gonna do that over Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving caught up with me and I wasn't able to do it. I'm looking forward to that experience.