DOCUMENTARY
When George Lucas began filming Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1997, the custom-set builders and mold makers who'd polished their craft on the original Star Wars trilogy referred to newer crew members as "the digital boys." The introduction of CG artists to the process has been bittersweet: Many of the elder craftspeople are convinced they'll be pink-slipped within the decade, as the techniques pioneered by Lucas turn the big-screen birth of a planet into a desktop operation.
Watching Industrial Light + Magic's Dean Yurke whip up a churning waterfall out of "fuzzy particles" on the DVD special features for Episode I - a two-disc package hitting the racks mid-October - one is tempted to agree. An extended pod race scene serves up a new bevy of uglies from ILM's CG bestiary; another bit shows the director erasing an actor's miscue in post-production. Those who are interested in mere human beings and their earnest struggles to serve the muse, however, are advised to click past the THX-enhanced trailers and "Duel of the Fates" music video to "The Beginning" - a blessedly low-hype, CG-free, behind-the-scenes look at the making of Episode I. Sans the portentous voice-overs that make most other making-of documentaries excruciating even for fans, "The Beginning" marks an artistic victory for Jon Shenk, an independent San Francisco filmmaker who found himself with the job any lightsaber-rattling Jedi wannabe would have died for.
In November 1996, Shenk - then 27 and fresh out of the Stanford documentary film program - was given an all-access pass to Lucas' creative process, including the director's own writing room at the Ranch, the 850,000-square-foot set in a converted Rolls-Royce aircraft-engine factory in England, and the Tunisian oasis that plays the role of the planet Tatooine in the Star Wars neomyth. Initially, Shenk was hired to feed footage to the marketing department, and Lucas considered using his interviews as course material for an online film school. It was Shenk's idea to weave excerpts from more than 600 hours of filming into a 65-minute cinema verité examination of life on the set of the most anticipated movie in history.
With a Sony digital Betacam perched on his shoulder, Shenk filmed auditions, script readings, tense budget meetings, and orchestral sessions at Abbey Road Studios. His fly-on-the-wall cam captured Lucas micromanaging Ewan McGregor's Jedi haircut, a freak storm in Tunisia that nearly wiped out six months' worth of scenery, and Ahmed Best humming the Star Wars theme to himself to stay psyched in the scorching desert heat.
"I didn't want to make a Hollywood puff piece - I wanted to pull together a series of living moments," says Shenk. "I have faith that if you show people reality, they'll take their lives more seriously, and that will slowly change the world." Shenk's camera captures what Lucas' digital dream factory missed: the engaging human chemistry among the cast.
Best, whose irrepressibly animated movements furnished the motion-capture data for Jar Jar Binks, is revealed as the kind of magnetic screen presence who could have slugged down a Tatooine lager with Harrison Ford before kicking Imperial Stormtrooper ass. Natalie Portman, liberated from her cocoon of pancake makeup and high-opera gowns, is a disarmingly witty and professional 16-year-old, while McGregor bursts with a vitality muted in his young Obi-Wan role by the self-referential solemnity of the script. "Do you want to be in the next Star Wars? Too fuckin' right!" he bellows after a take, with a Highland insouciance that defeats the bleeping of the PG-minded censors.
Lucas himself comes off as an astute, affable but emotionally unreadable father figure who compares his oeuvre to rhymed poetry. He blandly informs old pal Steven Spielberg that the climactic battle of the droids is "literally War and Peace." Tellingly, Shenk caught the moment when Lucas decides it is less expensive to replace Best's image with a purely digital Jar Jar. In the flashy context of the rest of the DVD, the human focus of "The Beginning" is nearly subversive. When Frank Oz, the master puppeteer who furnishes the voice and movements of Yoda, tells Lucas, "You don't need me," after viewing the latest Watto upgrade from ILM, you want to scream, "Yes, he does!"
Shenk says that even when his employers believed he was just churning out images for electronic press kits and Web shorts, he shot with a longer narrative pace - and a historical perspective - in mind.
"My mantra was 'documentary footage plus time equals genius,'" he recalls. "Everyone felt we were on the verge of another tectonic shift in the way that films are made, and that Lucas was the guy who made it happen last time. I kept asking myself, 'What will people want to see in a hundred years?'"
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