#i114

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BRINGING BACK THE BOUNTY! (#114, JANUARY 2010)

Supervising Director Dave Filoni how Season 2 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars is bigger, bolder and better! Words: Jonathan Wilkins

Star Wars Insider: The first season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a massive hit that defied everybody's expectations. Did that help you with Season Two, or did that add pressure?

Dave Filoni: I think that the main thing for me was I knew that we would have an audience, and I just wanted to find a way with my team to meet that audience’s expectations. I think that’s the hard part.

I know Star Wars is going to grow a new audience in addition to the fans that it already has, and that makes it difficult because we’re serving these two different groups. I think the entire audience likes all the action, adventure, drama, and characters that Star Wars has presented fans with for over 30 years. It wasn’t going to be a problem; it was just meeting the expectations and maintaining the quality. I think that as a crew we had our own expectations having grown up with Star Wars, and we wanted to push things. And really, because we work so far ahead, by the time we saw the first audience reactions we were well on the way with Season Two. It was validating because people were talking about things that they might like us to do better or that they were confused by and we were already improving that stuff, so we knew we were on the right track going into Season Two.

Was there a lot in Season Two that you couldn’t have done in Season One?

Technically and story-wise, absolutely. Mainly because we have more action figures—so to speak—at this point [laughs]!

You know, when they released the original set of action figures, you had Luke, Han, Leia, a stormtrooper, Darth Vader, C-3P0, R2-D2 and maybe Chewbacca. Actually, it was kind of exotic as a kid if you even had Chewbacca! You could only do certain types of stories. When the TIE fighter pilot came out I almost fell over! It’s been the same working on this show. For a while all we had were clones and battle droids for the most part. While getting a whole cast of individual characters like Cad Bane or Robonino into one episode was a really big challenge, it opened up tons of possibilities for us story-wise, tons of possibilities for us in the environments, and it’s really improved a lot of things we can do.

Why did you choose the theme of bounty hunters for Season Two?

It was the main element that we really didn’t have in Season One. Season One was very focused on good guy/bad guy, Republic/Separatists, battle droids vs. clones, with the Jedi in the mix. I think that the bounty hunters are such a stand-out, that when you say “bounty hunter” everybody goes “Boba Fett,” “IG-88,” “Bossk,” “4-LOM,” “Zuckuss,” “Dengar.” We all knew them by name and they didn’t do anything in the movies, so it was really exciting to include the bounty hunters and say, “We’re going to do a whole episode with these guys and they’re going to do a whole lot more than you ever saw them do before!” This is one way of illustrating the big difference in Season Two. And they’re nasty customers, too! There are some pretty intense storylines in Season Two.

Was it fun to make the IG-88 robots more agile than the audience anticipated when they showed up in Season One’s “Downfall of a Droid”?

Oh yeah, that was brilliant! The animators just went to town. They’re droids, so they should be able to do things people couldn’t do. Their ambidextrous nature as they were fighting and their front-to-back orientation worked really well. It’s always fun to expand that, but then you always have to be careful with the expectations, too. Bossk has been in a lot of the press coming out. I know there’s a whole fever built around Bossk, which is incredible for a character that basically just wiggles his toes! You start to get a little worried about those expectations. It’s the same thing as when we developed Plo Koon and Kit Fisto. The first thing is always the voice and what that’s going to sound like. That’s a huge expectation right there, but you just have to hope you make as many people happy as possible. It’s a challenge, but it sure is a fun challenge.

How many variations on the voice of Plo Koon, for example, did you go through before you arrived at what you wanted?

With Plo Koon, we basically wrote him three different ways before we settled on a final version of how he would speak. For a while our natural inclination was that he was going to speak an alien language. The problem there was that we weren’t going to subtitle a major character for a whole series, and he had to have a lot of intelligent stuff to say, just like Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope. So, it became clear that he was going to have to speak Basic, or English. For a while, he was very abrupt and a bit more samurai in his delivery. And then eventually I just realized that I wanted him to be more like Gandalf the Grey, and that’s where the Ian McKellen inspiration came in. I think I had two different people try out as Plo Koon before we got James Arnold Taylor, and it was just all experimenting. I had some of my different stable of actors try stuff because I was searching for a voice. I was probably pretty extreme with Plo Koon, especially because he’s obviously an important character to me, but that being said I still wanted to get something that I thought would universally be liked by fans, not just my own preconceived notion.

With Kit Fisto I went to George a lot more for his advice. He has an input on all the Jedi voices and I always ask him about it to make sure I’m on the right track. We had some ideas for the character and he said to go in a different direction with Kit Fisto. With Plo Koon he kind of left me alone on that one [laughs]. He gave me some suggestions and then I think he was pretty happy with whatever I came up with. I don’t think he wanted to listen to me complain if I didn’t like it!

So I guess that George knows that Plo Koon is your favorite?

Well, insofar as I like to bring up things about the character. I guess it’s at the point that if I really didn’t like something George would maybe listen to me. It depends on his sense of humor that day. He might just keep going on something I didn’t like just to mess with me! He’s got a good sense of humor, so ifs hard to predict.

Obi-Wan's character is developed quite a bit more this season. Why did you think this is necessary?

It was one thing that a lot of people asked questions about in the first season. We have these characters and we know what happens to them. When it comes to Obi-Wan in the prequels, he does what’s required of him to meet up with where we are in A New Hope, but it wasn’t his story, so we didn’t really get a “behind-the-scenes” look at Obi-Wan Kenobi. Now we have a whole series to explore his character!

In Season One we didn’t really deal that much with Obi-Wan. He had a larger role in the Ryloth story-arc, but he was never a major focal point other than playing off of Anakin’s banter. In Season Two he’s a great character, and we had an opportunity to really talk with George about some opportunities for him. George had some ideas that he wanted to explore, and I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out. I think it’s exciting to fans that they’re going to get some more insight into the background of Obi-Wan Kenobi and his thought processes. We’re always used to seeing him in relation to Luke or Anakin. But Obi-Wan Kenobi is an interesting character to explore.

Are there any other characters that you'd like to explore in the show?

Padmé’s always an interesting one. We’ve done more with her in Season Two. It’s really tricky. When you get into the Padmé/Anakin dynamic there’s a lot defined in the films, and she has a role in Revenge of the Sith that I have to make sure that we meet up with. When I deal with Anakin in relation to Ahsoka, I have a lot more room to play, because obviously nobody knows what happens to Ahsoka. So how he reacts to her and how that relationship builds, gives us a lot more room to grow. I would still like to see more stuff involving Padmé to get a better sense of who this person is on a more intimate level.

You have all these episodes you do for every season and you can fill them up before you blink and go, “Oh my gosh, we didn’t do anything with that character or that group. Well, next season....” Then you create a whole bunch of new things that season and you go, “Well, I want to keep going with that.” Cat Taber [the voice of Padmé] is always on me to expand the role, so it’ll never get left out because she constantly reminds me that we need more Padmé!

So we can expect an episode centering on Padme for Season Three, perhaps?

Oh yeah, absolutely! Nothing wrong with that.

What's the biggest misperception people have about making animation?

I just don’t think people realize how long it takes and the amount of detail that goes into everything we do. And why should they? It’s hard for people who don’t draw to understand how much work goes into every single second that you’re watching. In our show, for example, everything that you see on screen had to be designed, built, textured, and rigged. There’s a tremendous amount of work, be it a plate on the table or some new type of walker that’s running around or a whole planet. On the planet you need the landscape; are there trees, or is it barren? Grass? Bushes? And it all needs designing. It’s always been that way. That’s not a problem that’s exclusive to The Clone Wars.

It’s just amazing to me, when you watch something like Coraline, to think that they built all of those beautiful sets, and put all those details into the sets. It gives you a real appreciation for the artistry going into everything. The end result is that you shouldn’t realize it, which is why the audience doesn’t need to be aware of it. All they need to be aware of is the story and the characters, ultimately. But I think it’s a misperception that somehow it just happens, or that it’s easy to redo stuff because it’s animated.

Do you have to ever redo things or go back and change things?

Oh yeah! I work with George Lucas. Of course! He is constantly improving stuff. For me, it’s actually a lucky situation that I work with someone that produces the show that wants it to be constantly better. No matter how small the detail, when he and I watch the final color version, he’ll say, “I love this episode, it’s great, but let’s go take a look at it and see if we can improve anything. For most people it would just be, “This episode is great, we can put it on the air, let’s go.” But for George, it’s always a matter of, even incrementally, getting something better up there. As an artist you learn a lot by watching him maneuver and tweak tiny things, and all these little things make a big difference in the end.

Can you talk a little bit about what comes up later this season?

We’re going to have some massive battles in Season Two, on a scale much larger than anything we had in Season One. For example, at the end of the Ryloth trilogy it would have been fantastic to have had a battle at the capital city with gunships firing, bombardments from above, and Separatist ships countering. But it really wasn’t a possibility for us to get that rendered at that time. I like that episode very much; I just wish the city had been more fortified when they attacked it, but we didn’t have the ability to do that.

I guess in some ways it’s like seeing the attack on the first Death Star compared to the second Death Star. You’re never lacking for the presence of a Rebel fleet or an Imperial fleet in A New Hope, but if you think about the giant logistics of a war, you do kind of wonder, “Well, if there’s an Imperial fleet and their main engagement is the Rebels, then why aren’t they jumping in from all over the place?” So you have to suspend that disbelief when you make stories, which I think we did pretty well with the Ryloth episodes. But when you’re aware of it you want to then later attack it head-on and say, “Okay, let’s do a battle, let’s do a landing, let’s do this in a massive way.” That’s a heavy task for a film, let alone a television series. We’ve got several arcs of episodes that I think are more emotional in tone and that delve into deeper layers of characters, and that’s going to be fun for people to watch. I’m very excited by Season Two as a whole. We have a nice gamut of episodes. Each week there’s going to be something different. Not to say that Season One was bad, but we looked at it and wanted to improve on what we did—and we have.

Who is the unsung hero of your team on the show?

That’s so hard to say, but I think for animation in general, a lot is always going to be made about the directors and the artists. It’s easy to see the tangible work that we do creatively on the artistic side of making a series like The Clone Wars, but the production staff behind the series, the people who have to sit down and figure how we’re going to get all this done, do a tremendous amount of work; it’s not glamorous work that gets written about much, if at all.

For example, if we have five new characters to build in a couple weeks, how are we going to budget an artist’s time? How are we going to get that done? How do these people manage all their time, my time, finding time, making time when there is none? The production staff does a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to make sure this series gets done. It’s always very impressive to me. I just say, “This needs to happen,” but they actually have to figure out how. There are a lot of unsung heroes there. They’re here late making schedules, dealing with hundreds of assets, planets, and bizarrely-named things. And you know, they’re just as big fans as the rest of us. They’re huge Star Wars fans!

My associate producer Athena Portillo worked for Lucasfilm Licensing long before she ever worked on The Clone Wars. She actually wrote for Star Wars Insider, I think. [Ed: Athena wrote for issues 32, 34, and 35 in 1997.]

I get a lot of talk-back about being a fan, but the fandom of the crew of T The Clone Wars runs deep, so I think it’s in the production staff, it’s everywhere, in the rock, in the tree, in the grass....

You've kind of become a Star Wars celebrity. Could you say a few words about the fan response to the show, and what it's like signing autographs?

Well, I’ll tell you that it’s bizarre signing autographs, that’s for sure. The fan response, the fans themselves, have been nothing but fantastic. I’ve never had anything but great interactions with them. I always hate to say “with them.” I don’t feel any different today than I did when I was standing in line for The Phantom Menace—I honestly don’t. I feel incredibly lucky to have the job I do. I’m incredibly flattered that people want to talk to me about Star Wars and ask me questions about it, and I understand why. I wouldn’t have this job without people watching the show and wanting us to make it, so I do whatever I can when I’m at events and talk with them and say as much as I can without spoiling anything. That’s always hard! But it’s a real privilege to be this involved and to be a part of Lucasfilm.

I feel that so much has been made of me being a fan for so long, I’m just trying to represent that well. I mean, you can be a fan of this stuff and actually go on to make it. Peter Jackson was a big fan of the Lord of the Rings books, so who better to make those movies than Jackson because he is a fan? I think it shows when you have someone behind a project who really cares about it and can discuss it with fellow fans in a way they are passionate about. It’s always fun. I’ve been going down to Star Wars Weekends at Walt Disney World for two years and I always enjoy that. I recognize and know a lot of these people. It’s fun to represent them and to be involved. It’s always funny when people ask me though, “Can you sign something?” and I go, “Sure.” I see no value in that whatsoever. So I try to give them something more, which is a little drawing or something, because I feel that has more intrinsic value. I give them something other than my poor scribble! My grandmother would not like that signature at all!

[syzygy-002]

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