When Disney’s streaming platform Disney+ goes live this November, The Mandalorian — the first-ever live-action Star Wars show — will make its much-anticipated debut. A sizzle reel for the show — which features Game of Thrones star Pedro Pascal in the title role — aired back in April during the Star Wars Celebration in Chicago, but it wasn’t released to the public, much to the chagrin of fans not in attendance.
With The Mandalorian’s premiere just three months away, you might wonder if Disney is even going to bother releasing a trailer. Well, wonder no more, as The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed that Disney will drop one at this weekend’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, California.
Speaking with THR, showrunner/creator Jon Favreau talked about the advanced technology he used on the project, which he’ll use together with the same virtual camera and production programs he employed to make his live-action Lion King movie. “My fascination is with where technology and storytelling overlap,” he said. “Méliès, the Lumière brothers, Walt Disney, Jim Cameron. It comes from the tradition of stage magic. When you have a tech breakthrough like Star Wars, like Avatar, like Jurassic Park, people’s minds go into a fugue state where they just accept this illusion as reality.”
"What’s also enjoyable about it for me is that you’re not being tricked by it, you’re complicit in that you are agreeing to suspend your disbelief if the spectacle is sufficiently enjoyable. That’s why Star Wars is so enduring and why we’re surrounded [here] by artwork for Star Wars, why that’s a world I want to play in because it’s tech and myth coming together in a perfect way."
That line of thinking is what has endeared directors like J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson to Star Wars fans, some of whom may still have been smarting over the abundance of digital effects George Lucas used in the prequel trilogy.
Still, you won’t catch Favreau demeaning Lucas’ work. “Well, I would argue that the prequels are — and Lucas in general is — the bedrock that all of this is built on,” he said. “He is the first person that had digital photography, he was the first person to do completely CG characters. The whole notion of not having even a print , of having everything be 0’s and 1’s, was all George.”
"Not to mention EditDroid, which turned into Avid, Pixar was spawned out of their laboratories at LucasFilm, so he is arguably the center of the Big Bang for everything that I’m doing. It’s building on the shoulders of what he was able to innovate."
Above, we see a character model from The Mandalorian — that’s a creature called a blurrg walking next to an alien known as an ugnaught. To bring these creations to live, Favreau is using real, practical effects — the bluurg will be a puppet rig and the ugnaught an actor in makeup and costume. Also, both are from the original trilogy — you might recognize the beast from Return of the Jedi where it served as a caravan animal for the Ewoks, while the ugnaught made its debut in The Empire Strikes Back. Ah, nostalgic feels, take me to a galaxy far, far away.
Anyway, those characters were created by George Lucas. When he visited the set of the new show, he was all too happy to reminisce. “When George came to our set and visited The Mandalorian, he said, ‘Oh, we did this,’ and what he meant was, ‘We had green screen and we were building small sets and expanding upon it,'” Favreau explained. “Now, we have video walls, NVIDIA video cards that allow a refresh rate that allows you to do in-camera effects, we’re in there taking advantage of the cutting-edge stuff.”
But not all modern Star Wars productions are created equal. The upcoming The Rise of Skywalker also had a technologically advanced set, but there will be little overlap between it and The Mandalorian from a technology standpoint. “The way I work and the stories I’m telling are geared specifically toward what this technology has to offer, so I could not make Episode IX using these tools,” Favreau said. “If you notice, there’s a certain look that the Mandalorian lead character has, there’s a size that the spaceship is, there’s a scale that lines up with the original trilogy.”
"I’m trying to evoke the aesthetics of not just the original trilogy but the first film. Not just the first film but the first act of the first film. What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child, and I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars."
So far as we know, Tatoonie is a prominent location in The Mandalorian, which should give Favreau plenty of opportunities to explore the dark, freaky side of Star Wars. There’s a reason Obi-Wan Kenobi called the Mos Eisley Spaceport a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
You can read loads more from Favreau here!
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