- #Star wars episode i the phantom menace darth maul full#
- #Star wars episode i the phantom menace darth maul series#
Sure, there had been lightsaber fights in the original trilogy, but only with the ancient Obi-Wan, the lumbering cyborg Darth Vader, and the barely trained newbie Luke Skywalker. It was a tall order from the very beginning: “They said, ‘George wants you to come up with a new kind of martial art.’” I’m looking at these storyboards and thinking, That looks like Star Wars.” He kept mum but soon afterward was asked to come aboard the nascent project. Nobody knew that Star Wars was going to get done again. “I think it was the storyboards for the pod-race. To his shock, he found preliminary art for what would become The Phantom Menace. “It was an open envelope so, of course, I looked inside there,” he recalls with a laugh. During that last job, he was asked to carry an envelope to producer Rick McCallum and stumbled across some extremely valuable information.
#Star wars episode i the phantom menace darth maul series#
He went on to work repeatedly with Lucas on Willow, Labyrinth, and the Indiana Jones films and by the late 1990s, he was working on the TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Born in Brighton, he ran away from military school as a youngster and joined the circus, then started stunt work at age 18. Gillard was a veteran of the stunt world by the time he got the gig. And he’s skeptical that we’ll ever see anything like it again. Gillard wanted to make a sequence unlike anything before seen in Star Wars.
#Star wars episode i the phantom menace darth maul full#
In order to get to the finish line, Gillard had to invent an entirely new form of sword fighting, map out minute after minute of steps and swings, rehearse for three exhausting weeks (a full one-fifth of the total rehearsal time for all the movie’s stunts), and execute part of it in reverse. The end result is seamless and smooth, but it was far from a cinch. The final product is intimately familiar for Star Wars nuts: While John Williams’s “Duel of the Fates” plays, noble Jedi ascetics Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi go up against the sinister Sith lord Darth Maul, who wields a truly badass double-bladed lightsaber. Operating with that kind of carte blanche, Gillard acted as choreographer and trainer for the tussle, as well as de facto writer and director for much of it. It would say something like, ‘A vicious lightsaber battle ensues - seven minutes,’ and you could fill in the gap there.” Gillard pauses for a beat. “So he didn’t bother, really, writing it. “George has never been in a fight in his life,” says the trilogy’s stunt coordinator, Nick Gillard, his English drawl rising into a chuckle. That said, when he was preparing what is perhaps the trilogy’s most iconic scene, the three-way lightsaber battle that acts as the climax of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, he had a problem that he couldn’t solve on his own. He had final say in every aspect of the mythology, from tie-ins to toys. He directed all three of the installments. The Star Wars prequel trilogy was, for better or worse, driven by a single man’s vision.
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In the lead-up to Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we look back at the first Jedi (narratively speaking) with a series of stories about the much-beloved and never-disparaged prequel trilogy.