The annual ATX Festival celebrates the past, present and future of television, bringing the biggest names in the business together in Austin, Texas where fans can get an in-depth look into some of their most favorite shows. This year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival is happening online, meaning there will be virtual panels for all the world to see.
And that’s where we find creator Jon Favreau and the directors from The Mandalorian season 1: Bryce Dallas Howard, Dave Filoni, Deborah Chow, Rick Famuyiwa and Taika Waititi, all of them talking on a panel moderated by Vanity Fair writer Anthony Breznican. Favreau kicked things off by describing the inspiration for The Mandalorian. “It was specifically doing a version of Star Wars that felt small and felt like it reflected the genres that influenced George originally: space adventure, westerns, samurai films, WWII adventure films — those are the genres that inspired the tropes.”
The other directors brought their own influences. Chow talked about her dad’s love of Hong Kong action movies and Chinese soap operas, and how they influenced her episodes. “It wasn’t intentional, I absorbed it by default.” She referenced John Woo’s 1992 Hong Kong action-thriller Hard Boiled as a particular inspiration for her:
Incidentally, Chow is also the showrunner on an upcoming Obi-Wan Kenobi series starring Ewan McGregor back in the role he played in the Star Wars prequels. All she would say about it is that it’s still in development. Taika Waititi also offered an update about his upcoming Star Wars movie. “It’s all finished, I’m done,” he said. Very funny.
One of the best things about The Mandalorian is that it gave us new characters to obsess over, like the titular Mandalorian warrior — real name Din Djarin — played by Pedro Pascal. Showrunner Dave Filoni had created Mandalorian characters for Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels, with this as his biggest challenge yet.
And then there was Baby Yoda. Rick Famuyiwa talked about how they used the beloved little guy as a reflection of the Mandalorian, who didn’t remove his mask on camera until the final episode. “To me, it was all about this young child’s face and his discovery of the world along with Mando re-discovering who he was.”
Bryce Dallas Howard had the responsibility of introducing Gina Carano’s character, Cara Dune, in the fourth episode, “Sanctuary.” Cara is a touch cookie who takes on Mando in combat minutes after they first meet, and Howard was excited to play around with that. “It’s not a new female archetype, but it is definitely one that is getting more real estate in a story,” she said. “A lot of thought went into that.”
Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi helmed the final episode of season 1, as well as voicing the assassin-turned-nanny droid IG-11. It was he who finally revealed to us the Mandalorian’s face.
“I just came in at the end after all these guys did the heavy lifting,” he said. “There were so many things happening all at once in that particular moment. I think I was more stressed out about getting something on camera. I knew it was supposed to be an emotional moment. It struck me at that moment that we haven’t seen the main character’s face and you have to create an emotional bond with the character and the baby.”
The second season of The Mandalorian is scheduled to drop on Disney+ in October, and it sounds like the team is sticking to that schedule. “We were lucky enough to have finished photography before the lock down,” said Favreau. “Thanks to how technology-forward Lucasfilm and ILM are, we have been able to do all of our visual effects and editing and postproduction remotely through systems that had been set up by those companies for us.”
"As we explore partnering with new filmmakers and having new characters and going deeper with the characters we already have, it’s really been very fun and fulfilling and I hope people are having as much fun seeing it as we are having making it…We are building what people loved about the first season. It doesn’t feel like the next season, it feels like we’re continuing."
The Mandalorian season 2 hits Disney+ this October.
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