I just would like to take a moment to comment on the below test footage in which - as part of the pre-visualization of the force choke/let her go scene in RotS - choreography is being fine tuned with Hayden and two stunt doubles.
(The video was originally uploaded to the Saberproject YouTube channel, and they had gotten hold of it in 2016, directly from Nick Gillard, the stunt coordinator and creator of lightsaber duels seen in the prequels movies. According to Saberproject, the video was shot to give Lucas an idea of how the final battle might play out.)
The actual scene in the movie does play out differently. In the finished film Padmé stays on the ground, Anakin is staring only at her the whole time, then when he releases her from the chokehold, Padmé simply collapses. What we see in the BTS footage is different.
Here, when Obi-Wan calls on Anakin to let her go, Anakin turns around, fixes his gaze at Obi-Wan, and with a cruel, twisted, cold and determined expression on his face (while still looking at Obi-Wan), he lifts Padmé up in the air, then releasing her, lets her fall back onto the ground from a rather unsettling height. Then without a split moment to spare on her, Anakin turns his whole body towards Obi-Wan, ready for the confrontation. When the camera cuts to the Obi-Wan stunt double, we can see him with his lightsaber already drawn, switching his attention from Padmé on the ground to Anakin, who started to walk towards him in the meantime.
Since it is an aided rehearsal, we can observe only Hayden’s acting. There is a lot in Anakin’s eyes, but my impression is the following. At this point he is already beyond reason, blinded by rage and the sense of betrayal. It seems that in this version, he is not punishing Padmé for siding with Obi-Wan, but rather, trying to punish/provocate Obi-Wan by deliberately hurting Padmé. There is an element of defiance, some pettiness, and a cold-hearted, calculated attempt to make both of them suffer. The chocking probably starts as retaliation against Padmé, then in a glimpse of time, she gets reduced to a tool against Obi-Wan, and it shows how far Vader drifted from Annie.
RotS gives us the impression that Anakin - almost by default, instinctively - obeys Obi-Wan by letting her go, and almost immediately (for a moment) there is confused regret on his face. In the rehearsal bit, it is the opposite. In fact, he obeys, but in the meantime, he also does the most damage he can, and the entire action is performative and cruel. And on his face, there is anything but confusion or regret. This is Vader through and through. A Vader, who very likely believes that the other two’s betrayal stretches beyond conspiring to kill him.
Mind that RotS was created and shot with the idea that Anakin suspects/fears, then as a result of Palpatine’s cunning manipulation, believes that his ex master and his wife have been having an affair. (See some of my previous posts for more details.) Chocking the woman who loves him and is pregnant with his child and dropping her from about 10 ft is unthinkable and too brutal, you say? Well, I am almost certain that in that scene Anakin believes that the child is not even his, that Padmé is indeed lying to him about her love, and that she has indeed brought Obi-Wan with her to kill him. In his rampant rage he is unable and unwilling to think rationally, and he does not give a damn about the baby - potentially Obi-Wan’s child. (I still think that with the deletion of the Obi-Wan/Padmé/Rebel Alliance background storyline, there are (not so) subtle plot holes, and the ‘why would Anakin try to physically (and possibly fatally) assault his pregnant wife’, is one of them. Especially, because his main driver throughout the movie has been to save her from death.)
But back to the BTS footage. What we see in it is hardly experimental, because pre-visualization (as shown in one AotC webisode) is a multiple-step process with a well thought-out sequence of motions and choreography, so that the visual effects team could build the world around them as precisely as possible. It already has a rather strict choreography, and serves the purpose of seeing what the scene will look like on screen, in order to make some final tweaks before shooting it.
As far as I know, this particular one was not among the reshot scenes, so the above seen choreography was either changed before the cameras started rolling, or multiple versions were filmed, and the milder one was kept. (Then Lucas cushioned it further with cutting out entire lines from the dialogues Anakin has here with Padmé on Obi-Wan, then with Obi-Wan on Padmé, causing strange glitches if one looks a bit closer, but I might make another post about it later.)
Since RotS already has some brutal elements if you think about it (massacre of children; burning the skin and flesh off of Vader; painful childbirth scene ending in death; master cutting off the limbs of one-time apprentice and leaving him to die amid unthinkable suffering), it could be that Lucas eventually shied away from other heavy themes (adultery and ambiguous paternity; performative physical abuse of an expectant mother; wife attempting to knife her husband). The irony is that all the above mentioned themes would have come to a crescendo in this ‘let her go’, and the subsequent confrontation scene.
But there is more to this scene. When I wrote in the previous paragraph that ‘wife attempting to knife her husband’, I was not (only) referring to backstabbing. Padmé was supposed to arrive on Mustafar with Obi-Wan hidden on her ship, and a knife hidden in her sleeve. They originally were there to kill Vader. When Padmé failed (unable to bring herself to kill the father of her child.), Obi-Wan stepped in. The evidence behind this is there. The “Star Wars Storyboards: The Prequel Trilogy” book, a collection of official concept artworks, edited by J.W. Rinzler and Iain McCaig, and published in 2013, is one of them. See two examples below.
Also, at a speaking event at the Academy of Art University in late 2016, concept artist Iain McCaig confirmed that Padmé was well aware of Anakin slowly becoming a monster, and was secretly building the rebellion behind his back to overthrow her deranged husband. And so she showed up on Mustafar with a knife, fully intent on killing him, but she could not bring herself to do it. Then, at that point, Obi-Wan was meant to appear, causing Anakin to violently turn on Padmé. Much more violently than what we see in RotS.
Whatever reasons were invoked when deciding against certain choreography choices, I still think that it is interesting to see that the idea at one point was to get Anakin trying to hurt Obi-Wan by hurting Padmé.
And although Lucas changed quite a number of things along the way, even when breaking down the final Vader v. Obi-Wan duel we see in the movie, Nick Gillard reasoned in 2019 (here at 01:06 - 01:11) that the choreography had been put together with the following in mind:
‘Anakin thinks Obi is maybe having an affair with Padmé at that point.’
