스타워즈 클론의 습격 스토리보드 일부 공개본

에피소드2 개봉 20주년을 맞아 스타워즈 스토리 보드에 참여한 작가가 그 당시 작업 비화와 같이 본인이 갖고 있던 스토리 보드 일부를 공개 했네요. 참고로 이 작가는 일과 중에는 죠지 밀러와 매드맥스 퓨리로드를 작업하고 저녁과 주말에 스타워즈 에피소드 2를 진행했다고 합니다. 재밌는 이야기네요. 아래로 비하인드 스토리 영어 원문입니다.

 

 

Happy birthday to Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones!

 

(You know you're getting old when it's the twentieth anniversary of the release of a film you worked on...)  

 

 In celebration, I've dug up the boards I did for the Asteroid Chase sequence on the film, in all its unedited, never-been seen before glory. Completed over five nights, working from the classic line in the script - "There is a space chase." 

 

 The originals were seemingly lost when the Lucasfilm folks packed everything up after filming finished in 2000, buuuut I maaaay have been a little bit naughty and got copies of the boards before handing them over to George Lucas... thank goodness I did, otherwise they might have been lost for ever.

 

Anyway, here they are. A fair few differences between the boards and the final sequence, but the DNA is there...

 

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 For those who are interested in such things, there's a story that go with these. There's always a story...

 

  It's a fairly standard part of any film employment contract you're given that you will work exclusively on that project for the period that you're employed by the producers. In other words - no moonlighting on other projects.

 

  I'm not sure how many of you folks out there stick by that. These days I do - probably because I'm a lot older now, and a lot more knackered, and those all-nighters just kill me. But back in the Noughties - well, let's just say I was younger, single and had a crapload more energy.

 

  About six months into boarding MAD MAX: FURY ROAD - waaaaaay back in early 2000 - I received a phone call from the production manager I'd worked with on an earlier film. He was wondering if I might be available to help out on a bit of boarding for the fight designer on the film he was doing at Fox Studios in Sydney. I groaned inwardly - I hated saying no to a job, but Fury Road was proving to be fairly intense. "I'm not sure if I can, I'm flat out working with George Miller..."

 

  "It'll only be a week's work," the production manager pleaded, "and the fight designer's all ready to go. Nothing too difficult!"

 

  "I don't know... I'd only going to be able to do it at night, so it might take me too long..." I was casting around for a really watertight excuse to get out of it, but I wasn't coming up with anything. So I went for the last gasp - find out what the film is and then sound disappointed, like it's not worth your time. "What's the film, anyway?"

 

 "It's the new Star Wars film."

 

  I was at Fox Studios at 5:30pm that afternoon, half an hour's walk from George Miller's offices. I was introduced to Nick Gillard, a short and rather cheeky Englishman, and we quickly talked over a shot list he'd put together. "I want to pitch this fight to George Lucas next week - it's Wednesday now. It'd be fantastic to have it all done by Monday morning... can it be done?" 

 

  This was STAR WARS - I'd grown up with the toys and the books and even the Howard Chaykin comic adaptation. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was the first complete film I'd seen in a cinema. As a early teenager, I'd fastidiously whittled and carved down duplicate Star Wars figures in order to make other alien characters from the movies out of plasticine and model paint, so that I could populate a scale model of Jabba the Hutt's palace. I even wrote to George Lucas to ask if I could get some reference photos of the background aliens in the RETURN OF THE JEDI (he didn't write back). This was STAR WARS!! I was being asked to board a fight between Obi Wan Kenobi and a character who looked like Boba Fett! What would you say in those circumstances?

 

  So I did Fury Road during the day, and I busted a gut with every spare moment I had outside of working hours to board that fight. I had a reference photo of a rough foam-core and kitbashed model of a landing platform, and I knew that there would be a spaceship like the one Boba Fett flew in EMPIRE involved. I knew it was on a planet covered in water. Other than that, I was on my own, with no context as to where it fit in the film...

 

  It was STAR WARS. I boarded the crap out of that fight. I threw everything at it, far and beyond the shot list Nick Gillard gave me. Usually I have a working rule: give them everything they asked for, and 10% more. For this, it was 50% more. I went to town. I worked every night that week and the whole of the weekend, and I dropped the finished boards to the Star Wars production office at Fox Studios at 8am on Monday morning. Nick Gillard met me, flicked through the boards and seems very happy, so that was nice. "I'll be faxing these over to the Ranch today," he said. "Wish me luck!"

 

  And that was my STAR WARS experience. Spaceships! Lightsabers! Blasters! A lot of fun... but I was done. Back to Fury Road...

 

  And a week later, my phone rang again while I was doing some Fury Road boards. "Is this Mark? This is George Lucas' assistant. He liked the boards you did for Nick Gillard, and was wondering if you'd be available to work with him on some sequences for Star Wars. Can you come in on Saturday?"

 

  This was STAR WARS. Of course I could.

 

  I put down my mobile in a bit of a daze... I was being asked to work with George Lucas. But right now, I was in the middle of MAD MAX, and I did not want to leave it and disappoint George Miller. How could I make this work and keep everyone happy?

 

  I decided that honesty was the best policy. I told George Miller what has just transpired. "Oh - you're not going to leave?" he asked. 

 

  "Not if I can help it," I replied, "I love working on this film. But I honestly don't want to lose this chance of working on STAR WARS - it's been a dream of mine that I never thought would actually ever happen." George nodded in sympathetic but slightly wary understanding. "Would you be okay if I were to do the MAD MAX boards as we're doing now, but do the STAR WARS work at nights and on weekends? I promise not to let the work interfere with this..."

 

  George looked me with a touch of dubiousness, then nodded. "Okay - but on one condition. I'd like you to tell me how George Lucas works - what his methods are. Everything he's using to make the film. How's that?"

 

  So on Saturday, I drove into Fox Studios and was met by George Lucas' assistant. She ushered me into an editing suite above one of the new sound stages that had only been recently completed. Everything still smelled of paint. Sitting there was George Lucas, watching a sequence of shot cribbed from various movies interspersed with shots of model spaceships and action figures moving around. Another fellow sat driving the editing suite. George's assistant introduced me, and I found myself shaking hands with the legendary Ben Burtt, who appeared to be working as editor on the film.

 

  George did not shake hands. He sat there quietly and reservedly, and didn't exchange pleasantries, clearly wanting to get right to work. "I liked the fight boards," he said quietly. "The guys at the Ranch are doing another pass." He picked up a single piece of paper that appeared to be from a script, and cleared his throat. I readied myself for the oncoming Lucas brief...

 

GL: "Today we're going to do a space chase."

A pause. Blink.

MS (excited): "Okay, great! Ummm... who's involved in the chase?"

GL: "Oh. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Jango Fett."

Another pause. Blink.

MS (uncertain): "...Who's Jango Fett?"

GL: "Oh. Jango Fett is the clone-father of Boba Fett."

Pause.

MS (hesitant): "Okayyy... Who's chasing who?"

GL: "Oh. Obi-Wan Kenobi is chasing Jango Fett."

Pause.

MS (puzzled): "Right... is there anything special I need to know?"

GL: "Oh. There's asteroids."

Pause.

MS: "...anything else?"

GL (wryly): "I was hoping you could tell me..."

 

  After some encouragement, Ben Burtt joined in and together we spent a few minutes thinking of a few gags that could work in the sequence; methods and weapons Jango Fett (apparently the clone-father of Boba Fett??) could use to shake Obi-Wan's spaceship off his tail as they weaved through an asteroid field. George came up with a droid homing missile; Ben suggested a smoke screen (in space?) and I proposed rapid-fire cannons like WW2-era anti-aircraft fire, and depth charges, which eventually got turned into sonic mines. George's assistant was able to get some printouts of photos of Obi-Wan's spacecraft, and off I went.

 

  I worked all that weekend, going to sleep at around 2am. Then on the weekdays I'd get up around 5pm, shower and eat a rapid breakfast then take public transport to George Miller's offices, do another couple of hours work before everyone else arrived, and work through from 9 to 5 with George Miller on FURY ROAD. Then I'd go straight back home, order takeaway food from a nearby Chinese restaurant and then do more Star Wars boards until 2am. Rinse and repeat until Friday night, when I worked all the way through the night, finished tweaking the boards by 8am, showered and changed, then drove to Fox Studios (via a Kwik-Copy store where I got really high-end photocopies of the boards I'd done, ooooh naughty) and met Lucas at 10am in Ben Burtt's editing suite. Thank god for coffee.

 

  George Lucas never looked at the pile of boards that I handed over, he just tapped them together into a nice neat pile, put them to one side and then started with the next brief.

 

  And so that's more or less how it worked, for four months. In addition to the asteroid chase, I worked on sequences involving droid factories on Geonosis and the battle in the Geonosis arena (focusing heavily on Samuel L Jackson's character and the death of Jango Fett (apparently the clone-father of Boba Fett)). I revisited the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Jango Fett fight on the landing platform at Kamino (basing the shots and action off a montage of shots from Hong Kong martial arts films and Wrestlemania action supplied to me by Ben Burtt). And lots and lots of suggestions for background action by Jedi, droids and clone troopers in the Geonosis battle. It was a busy time...

 

I had my first exposure to previs when Dave Dozoretz's team assembled a version of the Asteroid Chase sequence from my storyboards, which George Lucas and Ben Burtt showed me about three weeks after I'd handed the boards in. It was stunningly well executed and realised for the speed at which it'd been put together, but it was also very noticeable how closely they'd stuck to the storyboards. There had been some wise editorial choices - the smokescreen idea had been dropped - but in essence everything was as boarded, and as a result the sequence was really tight. It was a good first lesson in how important storyboards can be to previs, particularly in how efficient they can help the process to be. Hilariously though, there was still one entertaining misinterpretation of a board - I'd drawn a shot close behind a droid missile chasing Obi-Wan Kenobi's spacecraft. Because of my lens choice and camera position (travelling with the missile), the missile was big in shot, the spacecraft was small but increasing in size as the missile caught up. But the previs artist has misread the frame, so somehow the missile had become about twenty times the intended size, and was locked onto a very tiny little spaceship that was completely dwarfed by the enormous missile.

 

I kept in touch with Nick Gillard, the fight designer, as a bunch of the sequences I was doing intersected with his area of expertise. Nick was not exactly a fan of what had been done with the Obi Wan Kenobi/Jango Fett (apparently the clone-father of Boba Fett) fight sequence on the landing platform - he thought the reworking of the fight by the artists at the Ranch and the inclusion of the Wrestlemania piece weren't the best, so he was determined that we'd give George Lucas watertight ideas that couldn't be faulted. We worked together quite closely on the ideas, and I'd go over to his accommodation overlooking Bondi Beach on Saturdays after meeting with Lucas to talk over the briefs and formulate some ideas. We were sitting in his kitchen thumbnailing an idea when a water balloon came sailing through the window and burst everywhere. Nick ran to the window and yelled "right, it's fucking war then!" He handed me a bin that was filled with already filled water balloons and hissed "get to the bathroom, they won't know you're there - you'll get the drop on them! Quick!"

 

I skidded around into the bathroom - the window was open and peering through it, I could see a couple of young guys, partly obscured by pot plants, pelting water balloons at the window where Nick was hiding. I hurled two balloons and miraculously both were dead-on, straight through the pot plants and hitting the young guys... 

 

...and that's my proudest accomplishment on STAR WARS EPISODE 2 - hitting the future Darth Vader right in the side of his head with a water balloon. Hayden Christensen and a mate were being put up in the building next door for the duration of the shoot, and they were clearly involved in a long-running mock-battle with Nick Gillard. This particular episode went for about twenty minutes, only coming to an end when security from the rather posh Bondi Icebergs Club, which happened to be on the other side of Hayden's flat, came out and started yelling that we were soaking their well-heeled customers with errant water-filled missiles.

 

On a less fun note, at some point during shoot, a bunch of shooting boards from the film appeared on the internet, which at that time was just becoming the thing that we know and love/fear today when it comes to gossip about upcoming films. Unfortunately most of the boards were mine, and once I found out about it, I thought it'd be only a matter of time before someone wearing a lawyer's suit came knocking and asking me to explain. For a bit there I thought I was about to be kicked straight out of the studio and never allowed back... 

 

But not one single person on STAR WARS ever even mentioned the leak of the storyboards, which I was absolutely surprised by as security was so tight on the film (though clearly no-one was checking the bins). In the end, it turned out that someone on the second unit crew had made a rookie error and thrown a wad of shooting boards into the bin at the end of the day. Apparently they were picked up by a cleaner who took them home, and shortly afterwards they were all over the internet. My first and only brush with leaks of boards onto the world wide web. I don't recommend it. 

 

At the end of four months of double duties on FURY ROAD and STAR WARS, I was understandably shattered. I had managed to not go to sleep during the day at George Miller's offices, but only just. I was feeling decidedly detached from reality - a lack of sleep over an extended period will do that. 

 

On my last Saturday, having gotten a brief from George Lucas, I was dazedly walking back towards where I'd parked my car, with every intention of having a nap before leaving as once again I'd done a Friday all-nighter and didn't trust myself to drive now that the adrenaline was wearing off. As I walked along, I heard a voice with a distinct American accent yelling "Hello! Hello! Can you hear me? Ah, goddamnit!" 

 

Turning a corner, I beheld an older gentleman sitting on a low sandstone wall, dressed in a hideously colourful Hawaiian shirt and bellowing into what I can only describe as the biggest mobile phone I had ever seen. The phone itself was the size of a man's shoe, but the antennae was as thick and longer than the phone. I was drawn to the phone - I needed to see it in greater detail - so I walked over and plonked myself on the wall next to the man in the Hawaiian shirt. He lowered the phone and looked at me warily. "Hi."

 

"Hello," I attempted to smile in a nice friendly way at him, but it probably came across as completely unhinged. "I'm sorry, I just saw your phone and I just had to have a closer look..." 

 

...and I proceeded to babble at the man in the Hawaiian shirt for about ten minutes. I cannot remember what I said, for all I know I was speaking Aramaic at him. Whatever language it was I was speaking, he continued to look at me with some trepidation, clearly uncertain which way his fight or flight reaction wished to take him. But eventually I regained enough self-awareness to realise I'd interrupted his phone call ("It's okay, the goddamned signal isn't getting through") and I apologised ("I'm sorry, I've been storyboarding on STAR WARS and I haven't had a lot of sleep lately"), wished him a good day and got up to leave. "Get some sleep," the man grunted, and turned back to his phone. I heard his voice bellow as I walked away - "Hello... hello! Ah good, you're there... Yeah, it's Francis... Francis Ford Coppola!"

 

Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

 

Two minutes later, Rick McCallum, the STAR WARS producer, spotted me reeling in horror in the direction of my car, and came barrelling over in his golf cart, as per usual skidding to a halt right nect to me. "Sexton! Oh man, it's been going great, you're part of the Star Wars family now and we're gonna keep you there, in fact Francis Ford Coppola's in town checking out our digital cameras to shoot his new movie CENTROPOLIS and we're gonna hook you up with him and you can board that sucker and it's gonna be fuckin' great man!"

 

I gave Rick a wan smile and shook my head. "Y'know Rick, I don't think that's going to happen..."

 

It didn't. I know, shocking, right?

 

In the end though, despite the lack of sleep, I did actually quite enjoy myself on STAR WARS. Watching it being shot was strange, as nearly everything was green screen. That's pretty standard technique today, but back in 2000, it was ground-breaking stuff - but rather boring to look at. It was the quintessential "we'll fix it in post" movie experience. I learned a few valuable lessons too. Obviously one was not to talk to strange men about the size of their phone. But another was subtler. One day, after a brief with George Lucas, we were waiting outside the sound stage for a car to pick him up, and I tried to engage him in conversation. "George, can I ask you a question?"

 

Pause. Blink. "Sure."

 

A completely nerdy question came to mind - one that always bothered me from a film design point of view. "I was wondering - in The Phantom Menace, you had battle droids for the enemy's soldiers. It's always puzzled me why you'd give them separate weapns. Surely you'd build the weapons into the droids, so that they can't be easily disarmed?” 

 

The big issues, right? So nerdy.

 

George looked at me steadily for a moment, then off into the middle distance. "Well, you see, the Trade Federation were really cheap, and when they went to war, they had all these droids that worked on assembly lines in their factories, so they just reprogrammed them and gave them guns..."

 

At the time, in my thirty year old arrogance, I thought "wow, you've just completely misunderstood what I was asking. You're dodging around the fact that it was a nonsensical design choice by the filmmakers..." It's taken me quite a few years to realise that George Lucas answered me in completely the right way that the director/writer/creator should have - in terms of story, and mythology.

 

It's actually a really powerful lesson. When you're making any sort of creative decision in the process of making a film, always take the time to think about the solution in terms of story. Everything - everything - should serve the story. An important one to remember, and something that has served me well ever since I realised what Lucas was actually saying.

 

If ever I get to see George Lucas again, I'm going to thank him for that lesson.

 

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EDIT: Another interesting anecdote that another talented storyboard artist, Warren Drummond, reminded me of. Back in 2013, Lucasfilm Publishing announced that they were bringing out a book of some of the storyboards from the prequel trilogy. I hadn't heard anything about it, but I was excited to see if any of my boards would appear in there - I'd been working as a board artist for 17 years at that point, and I'd never had any of my film work appear in printed form. I ordered my copy and waited...

 

Months later the book arrived! I opened it up, and flicked through the lovely boards for Episode 1 by such luminaries as Benton Jew, Ed Nativadad and Iain McCaig. On to Episode 2 - and what the hey? There were boards for the Obi-Wan Kenobi/Jango (apparently the clone-father of Boba) Fett fight on the landing platform at Kamino - but they'd been drawn by someone else! It was bizarre - clearly they'd had a similar brief, as many of the beats were the same - it was like looking at an alternate universe version of my boards. They had been credited to a guy named Warren Drummond. I didn't know Warren, I was based out of Sydney and had only got to meet a handful of board artists from outside Australia.  

 

None of my work appeared at all in the book. Naturally, a thousand thoughts ran through my head at that point... maybe the Lucasfilm guys thought my boards were crap, or someone there was pissed off that I didn't do Episode 3 (more on that in another upcoming "One that got away" posts). But a sequence that read like the one I'd done, but imagined through another set of eyes - it was freaky. And, to be totally honest, super-disappointing - I had been really excited about the chance to see my name mentioned in a STAR WARS book. But them's the breaks.

 

Fast forward a few years, and through the wonders of social media, a lovely Facebook group known as Frame Dump appears, created by Chris Pechin with the aim of featuring those storyboards which no-one ever gets to see outside film production. Back then you had to apply to be let in to the closed group. I was a very early member, and one of the first things I posted was a couple of my STAR WARS boards.

 

Imagine my surprise when a familiar name crops up - Warren Drummond. He related a story of how he was asked to do some boards on STAR WARS EPISODE 2. Warren reminded me of this after I posted this, so I've taken the liberty of quoting what he wrote here by way of explanation...

 

"so Nick Gillard and I became friends while filming SHAFT in NYC 1999. He knew I was a Star Wars nut, so in 2000, he contacted Rick McCallum. I believe Nick mentioned the dearth of Black people working on Star Wars. So I get this free try out at Skywalker Ranch. I don’t get paid but they flew me up, paid for my rental and put me up on the ranch in a suite with a piano!! The next week I am drawing in the Main house. The main scene I am on is Jango Fett vs Obi Wan. Months earlier, while still on Shaft, Nick let’s me in on a secret. A Boba Fett like guy will be in the next Star Wars prequel (it was Clones, but there wasn’t a title yet). He told me there will be a fight on a platform with this “Fett”!and a Ewen’s Obi Wan. There will be rain. So he wanted ideas!!! So I wrote out an entire fight synopsis with some sketches. Even my Star Wars fan niece (who is now in the biz 20 years) gave a synopsis. So when I am on the Ranch and Doug describes a scene to draw, I have to act like it’s all new to be. Doug shows me his painting of the scene and I am off to the races. This is why my Jango Fett drawing is on the cover of the Star Wars Storyboards Prequel Trilogy book. I called Nic later to see if my boards helped. He said that he was working with a storyboard artist over there (Australia). I wonder WHO that was, lol."

 

Mystery solved! But now there's more questions. Why on earth was I asked to board the sequence again? Warren's version looked great. And whatever happened to my version? It seems to have vanished into thin air, along with the rest of he boards I did for the film. Who knows? It's weird. Anyway, happily, as I mentioned earlier, I had taken the naughty liberty of making copies of the boards I drew for the film at a Kwik-Copy store on my way to see George Lucas every Saturday - so I do have good quality copies of everything I drew. One day, it'd be fascinating to see Warren's version and my version side by side, to see how the two of them match and differ. It should be quite educational.

 

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Anyway, I've ranted enough. I could talk for much longer about working on AOTC. I learned a lot, met some lovely people, and fulfilled a childhood dream of working in the world of Star Wars.

 

Happy birthday AOTC!