'Star Wars' Creator George Lucas Finds His Fantasy Come True By Sharon Waxman Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, May 12, 1999; Page C1

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Lucas was astounded.

"'I've just seen a hand-held shot of a T. rex charging Jeff Goldblum.'" That was Lucas calling his producer Rick McCallum, off on a TV project in the Czech Republic, to give him the groundbreaking news. Recalls the producer: "It was a defining point for him, that he could create the digital characters he wanted." And it inspired Lucas to set pencil to yellow-ruled paper and write "The Phantom Menace."

It has been 16 years since Lucas left behind his three phenomenally successful "Star Wars" films, movies that left an immediate, indelible imprint on the popular culture and set the standard for the cinematic sci-fi epic. Fans who have faithfully – and for many years futilely – waited for the writer-director to find a reason to return to the Skywalker saga and the meaning of "the Force" will finally be rewarded next Wednesday when "Phantom Menace," the first of three planned prequels, unfurls on some 5,000 screens across the country. Washington fans started camping out this week in front of the Uptown Theatre, hoping to be first in line when the box office opens.

But why now? For years Lucas, a 54-year-old megamillionaire and single parent of three children at his ranch north of San Francisco, has been content to produce movies directed by others and oversee his computer and sound effects companies.

The answer is technology.

"This was the one time I was able to sit down and let my imagination run wild and not feel hampered because of technology," Lucas explained last weekend in New York. "I didn't have to say, 'Oh, we can't go to Coruscant because I could never pull it off.' I could dream whatever I wanted and had the technology to create it, and I think by and large, it was successful."

Coruscant? That would be the Jedi Knights' home planet, a gleaming, futuristic society of endless skyscrapers and massive hovercraft. It is one of five civilizations that Lucas and his computer wizards created for "Phantom Menace," including an art nouveau underwater city and Renaissance-influenced architecture on the elegant planet of Naboo – all of it drawn digitally, inside a computer. Likewise, most of the animals that inhabit those planets exist only in virtual space.

The $120‚million film required plenty of tangible things too: more than 60 sets and 1,000 costumes, including eight elaborate outfits for Queen Amidala (played by Natalie Portman) that took months to hand-sew. (One dress has a half-dozen floodlights sewn into the hem; another was stitched onto a fabric that melted in water, leaving a spiderweb of thread.) There are dozens of new spacecraft designs and a Podracer made of discarded 747 engines. There is also a symphony of new sounds to go with the new creatures, including a much-magnified baby's burp (from sound designer Ben Burtt's daughter) that belongs to a Gungan, a computer-generated creature that hides underwater.

But the biggest movie of the year is really the spawn of the computer. And it was a fantastic new playground for Lucas, a virtual universe that did not exist when he created the original "Star Wars" in 1977. "I'm like a kid in a candy store," he acknowledged last weekend. "At this point I have managed to overcome creative roadblocks . . . and move the medium of work onto a new level."

Behind the Blue Screen

Actor Liam Neeson plays Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn and Ewan McGregor is his Jedi apprentice, Obi-Wan Kenobi (played in the original by Alec Guinness). They are sent to the planet of Naboo, ruled by Queen Amidala, to help resolve a trade dispute. As the dispute escalates toward war, the Jedi bring the Queen to their base at Coruscant, but first are delayed by engine trouble on the desert planet of Tatooine, where Qui-Gon encounters a slave boy in whom he senses a mysterious inner depth.

That's right: The Force.

The slave boy is Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), a clever and good-hearted 10-year-old. Much of the dramatic interest in him must come from the audience's knowledge (does anybody not know?) that the boy later becomes the dreaded Darth Vader, evil prince of the Dark Side, and father of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. In "Phantom," Qui-Gon takes the boy to teach him the ways of the Jedi despite some ominous signs.

But these are just the bare bones – too bare, in fact, for some early critics who found the film emotionally lacking, missing – as Variety put it – a "sense of wonder and awe." Fans who slipped into preview screenings complained on the Internet that the film was too child-oriented.

But no one is arguing that "Phantom Menace" fails to deliver a visual feast and an imaginary wonderland, from its adrenaline-pumping pod-engine derby race to a battlefield covered in droid foot soldiers.

To provide all that for $120‚million is, these days, pretty reasonable. That is probably because "Phantom Menace" was funded entirely by Lucas, making it the most ambitious independent movie ever made.

The director made sure his crew maximized every cent. Location shooting was kept to a manageable 65 days. Lucas rolled the camera at the frenetic pace of television production, setting up as many as 35 shots a day. Rarely did he shoot more than a couple of takes per scene. Even an unexpected sandstorm in the Tunisian desert that destroyed the set of Tatooine, Anakin Skywalker's village, did not derail the shooting schedule.

Lucas planned the movie meticulously, as he has all the "Star Wars" films. "Phantom" was not only detailed in advance on storyboards, but he had his techies create computerized mock-ups of every scene. "When George walks on the set he knows exactly what he's going to do," McCallum says.

McCallum estimates that 60 percent of the budget went for special effects. The film features more computer-generated characters, backgrounds and effects than any other to date – almost 2,000 computer graphic shots used throughout about 90 percent of the movie's frames. But Lucas also relied heavily on miniatures, animatronics and traditional matte paintings to achieve the desired effects. A great deal of the script was shot in a void – against a "blue screen" that can later be filled with computerized graphics. Actors had to imagine entire settings, characters and props that were nonexistent during the shoot.

Apparently this took its toll. In an interview with Redbook magazine this month, a frustrated Liam Neeson said he had had it with moviemaking. "I'm retiring from movies next year," he said. "Honest to God, I don't want to do it anymore. I'm not happy doing it. Film is a director's medium, it has nothing to do with actors. We are basically puppets, walking around, hitting marks, saying lines. Producers earn all the money, and you get the sense that they hate actors." At the press event for the film last weekend, Neeson assured journalists that he was only joking.

Right. Of course.

But Lucas has never been known as an actor's director. During the making of "Phantom," discussions revolved around whether it was more economical to build 20 more feet of a physical set – such as with the vast arena for a sequence featuring a race between pod-engines – or to create it later in the computer. In this case, computer artists made digital copies of the couple of hundred local extras and altered each one slightly to create a crowd of thousands.

Most unusual, however, was Lucas's ability to assemble and reassemble the movie in the editing room. The director could more or less create the take he needed within the computer by plucking an actor's expression from one scene and seamlessly pasting it onto another.

Said production designer Gavin Bouquet: "There was a boldness in using the blue screen, and accepting what we could add later. It's very simple in concept, but technically it's hugely complicated. We could change eye lines, or move the eyeballs. We could move heads around. There was a lot of cut-and-pasting."

He went on: "George would like to have a completely non-live shoot, in a funny way. In a pixel world, he could have complete control." Pause. "I think there will be probably be even more blue screen in the next one."

Seeing His Opening

His perfectionism will extend into the cineplexes. The theaters where "Phantom Menace" plays must have certain kinds of projectors, can't show more than eight minutes of previews ahead of the feature, and cannot move the film for at least eightweeks.

Of course, Lucas's preference would have been to show the film only in the 350 or so theaters across the country that have state-of-the-art THX sound, a system developed and owned by George Lucas.

Said the director: "I want good projection and good sound. I don't want it moved from the best screen to three or four smaller screens one week later. I want the most for the audience, to make sure they have a good time and are able to see the film as it's meant to be shown. It doesn't mean any more money for me."

But if "Star Wars" has succeeded in touching a broad audience over the past two decades, it has been less because of the incredible visual effects than because the story and characters seemed real, not unrelated, somehow, to our everyday human experiences.

The first films were "about the anxiety you face as you achieve your dreams," McCallum says. "Of fate, of destiny, of yearning to be the person you want to be. That's what translates without any effort. This is a voyage that everyone has to take." The prequels, he believes, are slightly different. The great mystery will be what turns innocent Anakin into a soulless Darth Vader. "It will be: Why do we lie? Why are we greedy? Selfish? Why do we hurt people? How do we stop from doing horrible things?" he says.

But Lucas said he never really aimed that high, despite the near-religious ardor with which fans have embraced his vision. "With Star Wars, I wanted to create a modern mythology, a Saturday afternoon serial for kids," he said last weekend. "I'm a little surprised at the amount of attention the film has gotten. . . . 'Star Wars' is a big, consuming thing, like a tar baby. I stuck my fist in 23 years ago. I'm a little surprised at how big it got, at how much it consumed my life. But I don't regret it."

The Game, Waiting

Inside the leaky tent, Antony Daniel, the actor who plays droid C-3PO in all the "Star Wars" movies, is shouting, "Are you excited?" A deafening cheer rises. "Are we going to kick 'Titanic's' butt?" More screaming.

"Those of us who have loved it from the beginning have been dying for this," burbled Charles Byrne, 31, dressed as an Empire guard in Colorado. He was flanked by his two sons – Zach, 4, wielding a light saber and dressed as Anakin, and Chaz, 7, dressed as villain Darth Maul, his face painted red and black, his head covered in horns.

"It's insane. It's absolutely insane," says McCallum, shaking his head at the crowd. "I could cough and get a standing ovation."

"I think I just decided not to understand," says a genuinely bewildered Pernilla August, who plays Shmi, Anakin Skywalker's mother. "It's a shock to see all the people, and the queues. But it makes me happy." The Swedish actress usually appears in Ingmar Bergman films; a fan wearing a Shmi costume – a Ford worker from Toronto – approaches to ask for a photo. She obliges with an embarrassed shrug.

Good or great or mediocre, the "Star Wars" juggernaut is about to launch. Why fight it? At a time when the common cultural experience is disappearing into a hazy ether of cable channels, niche magazines and Internet sites, "Star Wars" brings us back to a comforting, oddly familiar place.

And there's more coming. Two days after "Phantom" opens McCallum is leaving to scout locations in Portugal, Italy, Tunisia and Australia for Episode Two. Lucas is already working on the script.

McCallum, for one, is tired. But happy.

"It's hard for real people to understand what this has been like – 4½ years, 14, 15 hours a day, seven days a week. Maybe you got Christmas off. And we have another six years to finish the next two." He sighs. "It's relentless, the force of them."

Lucas, at least, is having a good time. And he doesn't plan to get caught up in the frenzy on May 19.

He'll be "on a beach in the South Pacific somewhere, as far away as I can be, with no phone."

Staff writer Liz Leyden contributed to this report.