“ Star Wars is a place where everyone can go, regardless of their particular perspectives or politics, and take something home from the stories,” Filoni told Wired.com by phone.
The Clone Wars ‘ thematically complicated and visually impressive tales annihilate the tidy binarism of George Lucas’ original Star Wars trilogy.
With the underwhelming Star Wars prequel trilogy, Genndy Tarkakovsky’s stunning 2003 Clone Wars miniseries and now Filoni’s sprawling CGI series all anchored to Darth Vader’s compromised moral axis, the Star Wars universe is steeped in volatile, and infinitely indefinite, shades of good and evil.
Whether the hot potato is terrorism, governance, procedure or the-personal-is-political gravitational pull that binds most of us, Filoni’s Clone Wars hasn’t been afraid to explore heady sociopolitical concerns. That the show has done so in the guise of a so-called kids’ cartoon has got to be a coup of some kind.
Wired.com picked Filoni’s brain on The Clone Wars, the forthcoming Star Wars live-action series, his previously awesome animation work on Avatar: The Last Airbender, the stigma of animation, and lots more in the wide-ranging interview below.
Dave Filoni: I think it’s a great compliment. It’s a very difficult thing to take what’s seen as a predominantly children’s medium and tell thought-provoking stories, without switching on the lightsabers every other minute. It’s one of the challenges we face, but I think we’ve gotten better at it as we’ve gone on with the series.
Wired.com: Did that challenge originate with the Star Wars mythology? After all, its greatest galactic evil is hiding in plain sight as a politician.
Filoni: Right. Even in the early novels, Palpatine is described as corrupting the tree by rotting it from within. And the way he does that is by working in politics, where he can operate, double-deal and disguise the fact that he’s an evil, manipulative person.
I usually play upon the mythic ideas with which I was raised, where adults would say, “Oh, of course he’s evil. He’s a politician!” Back in the early days of Star Wars, a throwaway line, like, “The imperial Senate has been dismissed; the regional governors will now maintain the bureaucracy,” was in the backdrop.
When you get to the prequel era, you really see the espionage takeover of Palpatine. As George has explained it to me, it’s much more in the front of the wars rather than just in the backdrop, as Han, Luke and Leia dodge imperial stormtroopers.
Wired.com: Have you talked with George about how to finesse such volatile subject matter for younger audiences? Episodes like “Heroes on Both Sides” — which include domestic terrorists and demythologized enemies — contain pretty heady stuff for adults, much less impressionable kids.
Filoni: I really enjoyed that episode, mainly for the perspective it gave Ahsoka Tano, who had been raised as a Jedi and always seen the separatists as evil aggressors. Once she got into the outer rim, Padme showed to her that separatists had once been a part of the republic. That challenged Ahsoka’s perspective of the popular dogma, and gave her a chance to find out what individual people think, which is important.
I can remember when I was a kid hearing about the Soviet Union as an evil empire from far across the ocean. But there were kids across that ocean who didn’t know enough about their own politics, as I didn’t know enough about mine, even though we both liked ice hockey [laughs].
Wired.com: You make it easier by disrupting the absolutes of good and evil. The recent episodes with the lethal assassin Asajj Ventress (seen in the video clips above and below) unwind her more-innocent back story, revealing her as just another cog in Palpatine’s machine.
Filoni: And that’s Darth Vader. When the prequels began, he was just a boy in a pod racer.
You know how you can wake up in the morning and feel that it’s a great day, but then you can walk out your door and not really know what’s going to happen to you? That’s how I’ve always thought of Darth Vader.
You’re on the quick and easy path and, by the end of the day, you’re a completely different person. You can lose yourself, if you haven’t been raised with a strong sense of what you’re inflicting on yourself and the world around you.
I think that’s what George was getting at. Anakin wasn’t always this Dark Lord drowning puppies [laughs].
Wired.com: There’s a visual!
Filoni: Same goes for Savage Oppress (seen in the video at top), whose origins are explored in our three-episode arc concluding Friday [with “Witches of the Mist“]. He’s a much more layered character than I think fans first thought.
At first, they thought he was just another Darth Maul. But in the episode “Monster,” he was actually very protective of his friend.
He tried hard to do what’s right and save him. But, in the end, he committed a great evil by murdering him, because he’s so lost and manipulated.
Filoni: Well, George and I will talk about current events when they come up, but I try to take The Clone Wars out of the realm of being too ripped from the headlines. George and I don’t talk about what character or event will represent what’s happening in the real world. The Clone Wars is more about dealing overall with life during wartime, in which there’s always political strife.
But a lot of the soldier stories we tell tend to be very popular. I’ve had many current and ex-military officers come up and talk to me and my crew about how much it means to them that we tell stories about the front-line clone troopers.
And I’ll tell you right now: Nobody on my crew has any experience on the front line. We’ve all seen war movies. But The Clone Wars seems to be touching upon what’s in the now, although we’re not re-creating or retelling any particular story.
It’s part of the public unconscious. We’re telling war stories.
Wired.com: Given all that’s happened, where does the series go next?
Filoni: It’s exciting. We have a lot of it figured out, but I’m always personally projecting the end of the war. Especially dealing with the major characters, like Ahsoka and Rex.
But I will say that the second half of this season, which I think really began with the “Nightsisters” episode (view clip above), is where we really get into the large arcs of the show. We start marching in a much more chronological order than before, where we were jumping around from character to character.
We’re going to have a major clone arc coming up, as we develop Rex’s character, and the same goes for Ahsoka.
Wired.com: What about the series itself? Are you stopping after 100 or so episodes, to bleed into the live-action series? Or are they going to be airing simultaneously?
Filoni: Luckily, I don’t really know much about the live-action series, as much as I know about The Clone Wars and talk to George.
Wired.com: Luckily?
Filoni: [Laughs] At heart, I am a fan, so I try not to find out about that other show. So I can watch it when it comes out. It’s nice to have some parts of Star Wars remain a mystery.
Wired.com: Somehow, I find it impossible to believe that you don’t know everything already, my friend.
Filoni: [Laughs] Well, I do know certain things, and that’s cool. But George is still the Jedi master. He has his secrets, which I’m all for. It’s a very tricky thing to know all this sensitive information and not say anything, actually.
But we have a good plan for the next season, and what we’re going to do beyond that. George always talks about The Clone Wars as if we’re going to keep making it, which is incredible job security for someone in the animation industry, I can tell you that right now.
Filoni: With Airbender, we really felt that we had the opportunity to tell stories based on things we loved when we were growing up, like Lord of the Rings and … Star Wars! How ironic is that?
We set out to tell sweeping tales of action, adventure and romance, and it didn’t really matter to us that it was a cartoon. We loved anime, we loved Hayao Miyazake, and we weren’t going to let television limit us. And we wanted to develop characters that stuck with you.
Airbender was also a super fun show from a group of people who knew each other well and came up in the industry at the same time. I was always impressed by its creators, Michael DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. A lot of what I learned there I was able to transpose to The Clone Wars, which is fun and exciting television that happens to be animated.
I think that’s something the animation industry is doing more and more. Look at Toy Story 3, which was one of the best pictures of 2010.
Wired.com: The line between animation and live-action has been annihilated this century. But do you think animation still bears a stigma?
Filoni: I don’t know why people would still consider animation children’s fare. Perhaps they think that fables, stories and fairy tales are things you’re supposed to grow out of as you get older. But I was playing with Star Wars figures when I was a kid, and now I’m playing with digital Star Wars figures and giving them to your kids.
But I think it’s changing, especially since live-action films have so much animation. Revenge of the Sith had proportionally more animation that it did live action. I’d say the same goes for James Cameron’s Avatar . It may be motion-capture, but viewers consciously know that animators are going over it. So at what point do these films become animation rather than live-action?
Wired.com: I find it far more interesting to capitalize on that “indefinition” to kill the stigma.
Filoni: We’re entering a time period when the difference between live-action and animation has become nebulous. Which gets us back to the point of asking: Is it a good story or not? We’ll see.
We’ll just keep making exciting programs that challenge viewers, and find out.
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Star Wars: The Clone Wars airs Fridays at 8:30 p.m. on Cartoon Network.
