Nick's goal in choreographing the action for Episode I was to create stunts that flow from the story. "You can't just think, 'I'm a stunt coordinator, I'm going to make a big stunt happen'," he says. "It's all about making it tie in nicely with the film so that you don't notice the stunts." Creating narrative through physical expression, Nick wrote each fight as an individual story that supports the overall structure of the movie. "All the fights have a beginning, a middle and an end," he says. "I worked hard to write them like a story."
To create fight choreography that would demonstrate not just Jedi swordsmanship but also the individual characters of the fighters, Nick studied the Episode I script and storyboards carefully. No two sword masters have exactly the same style, and Nick has woven the subtleties of distinct identities into the choreography of the lightsaber battles. "It was important to me that each character in Episode I have a distinctive fighting style," he says. Some of this shading came from the classic Star Wars Trilogy. For Obi-Wan, he took into account the lightsaber fighting style used in the original trilogy because Obi-Wan Kenobi trained both Anakin and Luke Skywalker. Some of their methods should be reflected in the style we see Kenobi use as a younger man, he says.
To keep them alive in the dangerous world of Episode I, Nick had to give his Jedi Knights a unique and powerful style of fighting. "I call it 'Jedi Style'," he says. He explains that having chosen such a short-range weapon to use against blasters, the Jedi would have to be well skilled in all manners of fighting and defending themselves. Combining a variety of disciplines from various fencing styles to martial arts "with a touch of tennis and tree chopping," he created the distinctive 'Jedi Style' seen in the Episode I lightsaber battles. Each fighter's moves are 'for real' rather than for cinematic flourish, and the battles demonstrate the fighting prowess of trained experts. "I wrote them very much like a game of chess played at a thousand miles an hour. And every single move is check," he says.
Nick wasn't sure whether his intense approach was what director George Lucas would want for Episode I. So, he shot a test fight with his team of stunt doubles to demonstrate this approach about three months before shooting began. George liked what he saw, and so the "Jedi Style" lightsaber school began in earnest.
When safety permits, Nick likes for actors to do their own stunts. "It adds to their performance," he says. He didn't have a lot of time to train Episode I stars Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor in the art of Jedi Style, but says they both picked up the moves very quickly. He would break the fights up into small sections, and teach them segment by segment, slowly increasing the pace as the actors learned their parts.
With his assistant Andreas Petrides and martial arts expert Ray Park, Nick would practice the fight scenes and stunts for hours on end so they could train the actors quickly. "By the time we got to Liam and Ewan, we had run through the choreography at least 500 times ourselves," he says. "We've hit each other so many times, we know where it's going to happen."
The lightsaber battles end up very fast on film. "It's probably so fast that you'll hardly be able to see the little touches we put in," Nick says. But he still feels that all the effort was worth it. "It's Star Wars," he says. "We had to do something special."
