Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian (2020–…): Season 1, Episode 5 - Practical - full transcript

Rick's first day.

My first day.

After how many months of me hanging around in the office?

Exactly.

It's the second chapter,

so people will be learning what this show is by this one.

You're probably destroying more Jawas than describing the whole...

All the nine episodes combined.

Exactly. Exactly.

Cut! That's good.

It's gonna be great. Good luck.



Alright. Thanks.

- Alright. - I'll see you soon.

Alright. See you soon.

This is what was causing all the fuss?

What makes Star Wars Star Wars is that

it's the cutting edge of this technology,

but it's used to bring things down

to a personal and relatable and human level.

And so, you know, when you talk about the mix of

puppetry, animatronics, the volume

and these great actors that we all had to work with,

it's like it's the mix of all of that that makes everything feel real.

One part doesn't dominate the other.

Doesn't feel like the technology is overwhelming,



it doesn't feel like, "Well, that's quaint and primitive, so I'm not buying it".

It's the perfect marriage of that and I've always felt that, for me,

that's what always made Star Wars different

than most of the other big-effects shows

is that there was always a real human, down-to-earth quality

of how it was made and how it looks,

so when I'm watching this as an eight-year-old, I'm going,

"This is real. This is a real world and one day I'm gonna be in it".

We come across R2-D2 and C-3PO in the beginning of Star Wars.

How did we get into this mess?

They've already been around for years, and R2-D2 is, like,

he's dirty and dusty and he's got scuff marks and stuff.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

There's this whole other history that I'm unaware of

when coming into the first movie.

And I think it was a very smart move to continue that in Mandalorian.

There is a realism to this series that exists

because so much of what we shot ended up being practical.

The actors are not in Mocap suits just surrounded by green and blue,

it's not just a totally imaginary world.

Hold on. We bring it in alive.

That's pretty good.

That's what I'm saying.

Dave Filoni and I talk a lot about, you know,

like we're playing with our Star Wars toys.

You get your Boba Fett figure and your Jawa and you get them to fight,

or you pull out the Sandcrawler or the TIE fighter,

and so, we're having a good time. We're having a lot of fun,

we're letting our imaginations fly.

We're very much pulling in stuff trying to use all parts of the buffalo.

And then also taking characters that are the D-list from Star Wars,

'cause the fans know and love them and see a way to give them stories,

like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kind of way.

As I was writing it, I was like, "Uh, an Ugnaught".

'Cause Ugnaught was sort of a secondary, tertiary character in the background

working for the Empire in Cloud City,

but I said, "Oh, make one of the characters that".

I will help you.

I have spoken.

With the Ugnaught, it straddles in between,

you know, a performer in a prosthetic and bringing animatronic,

I mean, that head, you couldn't do it as a pure prosthetic.

The Ugnaught is Misty Rosas.

Misty is a unique performer.

She knows how to work in a suit,

knows how to perform, you know, wearing elaborate masks or prosthetics.

But I'm proud to say that I paid out my clan's debt,

and now I serve no one but myself.

In a lot of ways, it's choreography. It's fusing me,

my puppeteer that triggers when the talking happens,

and then I have another puppeteer that is working in doing the eyebrows,

and then also hitting marks.

So it was challenging 'cause they didn't have the ability to hear during blocking.

I would do my best to try to give them physical cues

so that they know when I would want to say a certain line.

It hasn't grown much.

It's not easy to wear something like this,

'cause you're inside and you've got this whole face.

Servers are going off in your head

when you're trying to hear the dialogue and perform.

She's such a trooper with all these things.

They really don't like you for some reason.

Nick Nolte, who voices the character, would do two to three takes

varying the way he would read a line,

and I'd, like, go through it and listen and listen and listen.

It was imperative to have that,

to really be able to embody the whole character simultaneously.

I have a name. It is Kuiil.

Most scenes were mixing a combination of, sort of, like,

the Mandalorian with a puppet with live action, so it's a real balance.

And directorially, working with them as actors, it's really different.

You're looking for these gestures they do with their head

to try to physicalize that emotion, which is difficult sometimes

to find the balance without it getting big.

It's quite a different approach, depending on who the cast member is.

Do you trust me?

From what I can tell, yes.

Then you will trust my work.

Something for me that I was really worried about

was that with, kind of, all this emerging technology and whatnot,

that those kind of, like, essentially practical effects would go away.

Like, Stan Winston and everything that Legacy is doing and whatnot,

it's really incredible, because it is the experience...

You get to have the experience live

of what the audience experiences when they're watching a movie.

You're like, "Oh, my gosh, that's a baby".

I don't...yeah, how do we describe baby?

I don't know how to talk about baby.

Or that's a dinosaur, or a sea creature, whatever that is,

but it's real. It's bringing that magic to life,

right here and now, and you're just capturing it.

It's not rendered afterwards.

And so the fact that baby was a huge part of this and that there were animatronics

and I was getting to work with a team

who I've, as an actor, worked with many times,

was so perfect, because it's the convergence of the art form,

of a very old art form with a very new art form.

And it's like keeping it a part of this

and allowing it to evolve and not be like,

"Oh, we're gonna do everything on computer from here forward".

That's awesome. I was so happy about that.

Probably the best and the weirdest moment was when I was shooting three

and I was doing a scene in the safe-house with Werner and the baby,

and it was one of the weirdest and best things that ever happened,

where Werner, he was acting against the baby,

which was the puppet, obviously.

And I think at some point, he forgot that it was a puppet,

and he got so into the baby that he started directing the baby directly

as though he was talking to a person.

I'm trying to direct Werner, who's now directing the puppet,

and the puppeteers seemed to...

He doesn't realize the puppeteers are actually the ones.

And then he fell in love with it.

And then Jason Porter and I, when we went to do the plate shot,

he basically was calling us cowards and telling us

that we need to commit to the magic and don't give them the plate shot.

Make them use the puppet. And it was amazing.

Turns out he was right.

- He was right. - He was right.

We use the puppet all the time.

Even when we have a CG version of it, we have them match what the puppet can do.

Yeah.

We don't have them do things that the puppet can't do.

Film-making now, all of a sudden, is back to almost "old school".

Technology becomes invisible, and that's a great thing.

Yoda baby, beautiful, and it moves in there, too.

The guys who are moving the eyes and the lips

and the facial expressions, phenomenal.

And they filmed it one-on-one. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Fantasy has no bounds.

There's no boundaries in what you can do here with the new technologies.

It's simply extraordinary, very much to my liking.

We all, I think, had a vision for what bad version of it was.

And what was written in there was just that it was

a little baby of Yoda's species.

When Dave first read it, I know he did a little drawing on the flight home.

And then that went over to Doug Chiang,

and Doug started doing some works on not the baby,

but the pram, that egg-shaped pram.

The reaching in, the kind of Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, ET imagery,

which started to develop.

At the same time, the look for the baby itself,

the look of the big ears, we had inherited that from Yoda,

and I had already been preoccupied with the look of big eyes

and using ears for motion

'cause I had been working on a VR project called Gnomes and Goblins for many years.

And so, the idea of the face not being that expressive,

but everything was about the eyes looking at you and about the ears moving

was something that I had wanted to try.

And we got lots and lots of drawings.

Some of them were too cute, some too ugly,

some were the wrong proportions.

But they were all informing, as we gave notes on each drawing,

Dave and I started zeroing in on what it was.

And then finally, it was one image that Chris Alzmann did that had him wrapped up

in what looked like a piece of a flight jacket, we didn't know,

and his eyes were weird.

He looked out of it, something a little off with it.

But we found it charming, and that became the rallying image that we said,

"This is good".

And it developed from there.

And then, once we had that, then they started to do maquettes of that,

but the maquette wasn't cute.

We started to work through it,

and that's when the people from Legacy came in.

That's really when it became the baby.

We'll start with left. Ready?

Good.

Left. Right.

Left. Right.

The team at Legacy probably spent at least three months on it, building it.

They wanted it to be great.

And it started to take on a life of its own.

Yeah! I'm very happy with that.

It's like a highchair. Oh, my God. That's great.

It's totally captivating, and takes your breath away.

All of us that are on set, the puppeteers,

we go into our performing mode,

because it won't be any good,

no matter how beautifully it's painted or sculpted, if it can't perform.

But it had a little extra spark that just happens sometimes.

You can't always explain it.

Sometimes it just becomes extra magical.

And it comes forward.

Tilt the head up a little bit. Yeah, now reach.

Oh, my God, yeah. That's the stuff.

I puppeteer the eyes.

I control his gross body moves and his head.

Do the ears...

and the mouth.

I do a lot of the gross body movement,

a lot of times, some of the walking sequences and a lot of arm movements.

I rotate in with the other puppeteers as needed.

Also, I made the costume.

We do have a script ahead of time, but just...

This is just another character on the set, so as the director just directs it

like it's just a single character.

We always do the direction,

but you take the part specific to what you operate.

It's just like the band jamming,

how you start to get into a rhythm, and you know

when the head turns left, and I'll try to beat it leading with the eyes.

And the ears will go up. It starts to work itself out.

We're using advanced technology just to build this guy

and to run him, but we're still going old school

and close to what the original puppets were back on Empire.

Even though there's maybe a person wearing a suit,

or it's actually a robot covered in silicone,

it's still a creature that we all want to relate to

and the audience will relate to, so you shoot them like any other person,

any other actor that's acting in a scene, where they have intent and meaning,

and a purpose, and have their own arc.

You want to be able to photograph that in the correct manner,

so it's great that these creatures were fantastic.

Amazing.

The baby was incredible.

There was a moment one day where we were on set,

and the little hand was sitting here, I reached over and picked up the hand

and I just did that to Mando's jacket.

And the little hand just holding on

made everybody on set just like, "Oh, boy, that's fantastic".

How cool is baby?

He's so cute!

Cute!

Right? Right?

It's a cliché, but acting is reacting.

And us being there with the actors,

and the baby cocks its head or its ears come up and it does something,

it evokes a reaction from them. And then we play off of that.

It's really disconcerting and very effective when you see it.

Even just directing,

setting up the shot and I'll be right next to it,

and then those Legacy guys will just make it turn its head and look at me...

Uh...

Even just that stuff, knowing there's some other people behind it

and they're doing that, makes a difference.

You can see that with the actors as well, whenever they see it.

They're more delicate with it, when you hand it over.

They're really caring more for it.

This little bogwing is what all the fuss was about.

What a precious little creature.

Oh, my gosh!

Working with that little puppet was like working with a little baby.

It was kinda funny because everybody,

even hair and makeup, would walk up and talk to it.

Like, "Oh, look at the little baby today. How's the baby feeling"?

In the back of your head, "It's not real, but I'm talking to it, too".

It was just so real.

If you're in a scene with that little baby,

you're completely gonna lose the scene, no matter what.

Well, this has been a real treat,

but unless you wanna go another round,

one of us must move on, and I was here first.

Jon Favreau came up to me and he was like,

You did pretty good that time.

That was a pretty good scene. But, uh, the baby kicked your ass.

And I was like,

"I'm never gonna beat this baby in acting. Look at it".

You don't even need a story. Just put the camera on the baby.

It wins your heart over.

He's number one on the call sheet today.

Yep.

Let's take the time to do that right. Let's give ourselves plenty of footage.

Seeing him on camera and seeing him in person...

The way that it activates your primal childhood dreams,

we're all gonna be second fiddle to this little guy.

That's how cool he is.

Sort of builds into the moment where he looks, gathers himself,

and then holds up the two hands forward.

We drew upon influences from other Star Wars properties,

from the first episode, from "Chapter I".

We have, what? We have IG-11, which was...

He was a bounty hunter from Empire Strikes Back based on IG-88,

that never really did anything.

He just stood there and looked amazingly cool,

so generations of fans believed that he would kick ass.

He's only kicked ass in the expanded universe.

- Never moved... - Video game.

Or a videogame, books.

And then, Hal, how did you bring IG-11 to life?

'Cause it definitely has a very distinct way of moving around.

Yeah, he was a lot of fun, because he's...

We did, um, K-2SO for Rogue One,

and that was a droid that we wanted to be driven very much by an actor,

Alan Tudyk. So that was one kind of thing.

But with IG, we didn't want an actor driving him with motion capture

because he's so linear and weird-looking.

We just wanted to take advantage of that

and have him do things that a human body couldn't do.

It was a part of the coolness of him.

It was super fun to figure that out, like how...

You know, what looks good on him,

keeping these angles very...

His elbow's always either at 90 degrees or his arm's straight.

And shooting a puppet a lot of the time.

Yeah.

So mixing it up.

We built a practical puppet.

That was one...I think one of the many, uh,

happy accidents on the show

was that Josh in props built a wonderful stand-in for IG

that was really for lighting reference.

And it was on a base with four wheels.

It was really heavy and rickety.

We'd get close-ups on the head, because they could rotate the head around.

And we realized that it actually looked a lot better than we expected.

We got more than we expected.

So all of a sudden, he was in medium shots.

They would push him in, or rotate him around in camera.

And he would just rock and roll like this.

Really awkward-looking.

I think when Hal saw that,

where we could capture this animation, that could be part of this character.

It was exactly the right awkwardness.

Yeah, 'cause he's not too cool.

It really speaks to the value of maquettes.

Absolutely.

It is really, you know, is still so important to what we do.

And we did some stop-motion blurrgs, too,

with our friends over at Stoopid Buddy, right?

Yeah.

So we said, "Hey, could we work some of that in"?

When's the stop-motion blurrg?

It's in the shot where Mando's sighting up for the first time

when he arrives on the planet, and he sees them through the scope.

That's when I thought you're jumping off this deep end

where we're going all the way back in the time machine

and we're doing stop motion.

I'm always game for all of it,

but I was like, "I don't know how that'll work".

But I know those guys, I knew Matt...

You gotta try.

...would give it everything.

It's amazing how well it works.

Who built that puppet for us?

Tony McVey.

Tony McVey, what's his...

He goes all the way back...

He sculpted Salacious Crumb or something.

He did. He built the original of Salacious.

He's got Star Wars pedigree.

Speaking of Salacious Crumb, he got a cameo, too.

And Tony built him, the same as he built...

The same one. He built us an exact same one.

That's when everybody realized...

A great day...

We showed this thing with him walking by it

and the Kowakian monkey-lizard on a spit, and there was, "Oh, no".

Well, that was because...

That got one of the biggest reactions.

We were gonna cook it,

and I said, "It'd be funny if we had a live one sitting there "laughing at it".

Yeah.

Originally, he was laughing at the one being cooked,

people thought that was too mean.

'Cause eating them wasn't too mean.

So then they made him have sad sounds, like...

I'm like, "Is that better...he's depressed that his friend is being eaten"?

Well, that's what happens after the...

after the Empire's gone and after Jabba's gone.

That guy's not gonna have a good...it's probably not the same guy.

But it does speak to the way the whole hierarchy gets upended in times of chaos.

Everybody loved that little puppet.

I mean, it is funny. A puppet brings just the set to life, too.

If we just had like a green thing there

it would look good in the end,

when the crew's at home watching and go,

"Wow, that's what that thing looks like".

But we had a guy underneath that cage.

Mike was crammed in there and his arm's just...big guy.

That was a big guy under there,

and doing the little puppeting of Salacious.

- So great. - So cool.

We're referencing George's world. George created all this, right?

If you're living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,

you can't just move the walls around.

You can replace the pipes and the fixtures,

you want to keep it still being the essence

of what was created by that visionary.

And so part of what gives us freedom is that there is an amount of fun

you're allowed to have on the margins of Star Wars,

back to the holiday special and the Ewok TV shows.

So there's always been room in Star Wars to mess around,

and then there's the big movies.

The big movies are the main attraction.

We're happy to pull it together and do the stuff that's fun,

that still feels like it's part of it.

The first Star Wars films have a low-tech kind of grit,

where the costumes are presented and a lot of the look of things.

I think it was born out of necessity,

probably, on the first one, in the sense of like,

"Well, let's re-purpose this aircraft, this and that".

They crafted it in such a way that it just has an iconic look now.

And so you cannot stray from that, you have to make sure that you're operating in that world.

And you want to, because it looks amazing.

Pick one.

One thing that was a challenge for me with this project was,

how do we make the props feel like they fit in the right timeline?

We're very close to that original trilogy,

and I did the research to figure out,

how did they create some of these iconic blasters?

They rented surplus weapons from World War II and modified them.

'Cause they were a rental, they could do certain modifications.

They couldn't completely change the blaster.

We went with that same technique in our design.

I found vintage weapons from World War II that had shapes and unique stuff

that I thought would work for this universe.

We presented the illustrations with those weapons,

and they were ecstatic.

And I knew we're on the right track.

Play it like it's twice as heavy as it is, maybe,

and then you...doing all that.

When it hits you, you see him, it doesn't feel like you just whip around.

I went home for Thanksgiving,

and I was just talking casually with my family.

I said, "Yeah, I have one blaster",

then I'm carrying this massive blaster, which is pretty cool,

and my little sister was like,

"Gina, did you say you're carrying blasters"?

And I was like, "Yeah, okay, I'm carrying blasters, all right"?

And I was like, "I'm so proud of that".

Give me the pulse rifle.

We always talk about it like we're the AV club.

Yeah.

And what's interesting about it, too, is that we started just with a story,

and here's the basic concept, and here's the format.

But then we start asking questions,

and it's almost like finding out,

"Are you as nerdy as I am about this"?

'Cause it's like, I think it might be good...

I learned from Guillermo del Toro,

if you build a miniature, you can have it in your house.

You'll have a prop.

- I told you. - Yes.

That's why we do the MoCo.

Kinda was. But also, I love MoCo, and for Zathura,

we wanted to do stop motion or go-motion.

Very hard to get people to do that at that time.

And we did motion control miniatures for the ships and give it the aesthetic,

'cause it was meant to be a nostalgic type of movie anyway,

but really just an excuse.

Just like with Jim Cameron doing Titanic

so he could do submarine stuff, you know.

It's usually something that's really a curiosity that you're trying to indulge.

And so, when we were talking, we were like,

"What about just having a reference Razor Crest for some of the lighting"?

And it was like, "You know what might be nice is just to have a shot, just to see..."

For the trailer.

Yeah.

It started off with,

if we are gonna do some miniature work on the show,

how do we make that work inside very tight budget constraints?

Because all this work had already been budgeted and approved...using computer graphics.

Right.

And as much as, you know, my background is miniatures

and motion control, it's a comfort zone, I love it,

but the reason why it doesn't get done as much anymore is

because it's more expensive.

And so we had to figure out, is there a garage-operation style,

quick and dirty version of this

that could do the shots that we needed to do?

And John's thinking, "I've got a garage".

It's like mini Kerner.

It's like how they started.

We wanted to do just one shot, and it's turned into quite a few.

- 14, 13... - Yeah.

Around 14, 15 shots.

In addition to that, you used it as reference for lighting for the CG work as well...

And you had already done research for how we move the ships from the shots,

so you had compiled...

What was the reel you compiled that you showed us?

It was shots all from original trilogy, mostly from New Hope,

but some shots from Empire and Jedi as well,

to just kind of illustrate the vibe of how ships move in those films.

It's before the miniature work.

This is for the CG you compiled.

Yeah...

You compiled this before we worked,

'cause it was interesting to you.

For me, it was a style guide,

and it kinda went back to Rogue One.

During Rogue One, there was a side project,

not directly related to Rogue One,

but because we were doing so much Star Wars stuff,

to take shots from the original trilogy

and examine them for what makes them look the way they do

and to do things like, if there was a Star Destroyer in the shot,

we'd put in a CG Star Destroyer next to it and try getting an exact match...

Try to match it.

...versus kind of,

how do we modernize it a little.

Um, and so it started there, and then with this project,

it kind of accelerated for me, just really diving into,

you know, how much of it was intentional creative choices

about the way that the work looked in the original trilogy

and the limitations of the technology at the time.

Limitation of the camera movement.

Not a lot of shots where it came in and went out.

Exactly.

In CG, you do that a lot, but with motion control, miniatures, you're limited by the platform.

There's physical constraints, you know.

How big your stage is sort of sets how long your track is,

'cause your camera's moving along a track rather than a model moving.

So it's...the camera's giving the impression of motion.

But you can only get so far back from a model.

So, for instance, on New Hope,

the model of the Falcon they had was as big as this table.

It was six feet long.

And so you could only get so far back from that, you know,

and using a wide lens to really give it a sense of distance.

None of the shots in New Hope

have a lot of travel that way with the Falcon.

On Empire, they built smaller scale version

so they could get more shots with a lot more sense of travel.

So all those things kind of informed what they could do.

But also, there was a whole stylistic component that came from George,

you know, famously taking scenes from Battle of Britain and Dam Busters

to build, you know, his version of pre-vis of the Battle of Yavin.

And the shot design of those films,

which were using real photography of plane shots,

air-to-air, also informed the style of the shots...

And create limitations, de facto limitations,

based on emulating things that were shot from real platforms.

It was genius, too, because if you're in a physical space

with a model and a camera and you can't move either of them all that far,

how do you get dynamic shots?

If you look at real photography of an airplane,

for instance, flying across the sky but you're using a long lens

and so the plane isn't moving very much within the frame,

but the background is just whooshing past,

then you get that super dynamic, fast-paced...

Well, it was interesting...as far back as Iron Man,

we were trying to create those limitations,

we actually shot for the sky plates.

And so we sent trainer jets up there,

and we filmed plates using, trying to line them up

and create the limitations that you're talking about,

that you inherited from Battle of Britain.

It's hard to get two planes in a shot,

which means you have three planes.

You have the camera plane and then the other two,

and you're framing all that together, talking over radios.

Very hard. Usually the shots are very short and compromised.

And so it has that look, and the big breakthrough

that I thought really made it look like Star Wars was,

I guess, 'cause you couldn't track the background so well.

They would always slide the star field.

And that's when I started to feel you're pulling Gs

and all that dynamic quality, I remember from the old films.

And so you apply that even to our CG shots now.

Even our CG shots, give them that same feel.

It's interesting listening to you guys talk

and it's a thing that I always feel,

and why I went to Lucasfilm in the first place,

is that everybody loves Star Wars

and knows a lot about it and can read a lot about it.

But there's an actual, literal history of Star Wars at the company,

'cause it's what built the company. It's the foundation.

And there's this knowledge,

just like with Jedi in the story, that's passed on, that people know.

And when you get that first-hand knowledge of people that worked with the actual people,

that we can go back and grab people and say,

"Come on back. We'd like you to build a Salacious Crumb again".

You know, stuff as simple-seeming as that,

but the legacy of it and what it means to them to see the enthusiasm of people, like,

it's hard to believe, all these years later,

there's such energy around new stories in this world that George created.

But there's such a responsibility to always remember

where it came from and yet to now push it forward in ways.

And that's what makes Star Wars unique,

'cause you can buy into it, the magic of it,

the mythology that supports it.

That history is so important to me,

and I think it's important to Star Wars, which is, you know...

And you guys being involved in this made this, I think, more special and connected for it.