The M-Pire is coming soon to your galaxy, and director Jon Nowak is bringing it to a television near you.

With the debut of the new dark chocolate M&M's this spring, television stations around the world will be airing a new ad campaign that crosses the popular M&M's characters with the Star Wars universe. Jon Nowak, a 28-year old self-taught director from Minneapolis who grew up on the Star Wars phenomenon, has been charged with cinematically capturing the fall to the dark side--M&M's fall to the dark chocolate side, that is.

To many, Nowak's story may read like the ultimate fanboy pipe dream. Growing up a huge fan of the films and books, his home-grown Star Wars smarts ultimately rewarded him the chance to direct iconic Star Wars personalities within a bona fide Star Wars setting. Nowak says he owes much of his inspiration to his childhood love for the Star Wars saga. "I've been a fan my entire life," he explains. "I always had all the toys and all the magazines, all the books, everything. I was not only fascinated with the characters but how they created this world as well."

This behind-the-scenes fascination led Nowak to pursue a different form of enthusiasm for Star Wars early on. "I started out my career thinking that I was going to be a model builder at ILM. It wasn't until I got to the university and took my first film series class that I realized, wait a minute, I've been a director my whole life. What am I doing building models?"

Resolving to direct instead, Nowak decided to teach himself the technical aspects of the trade while pursuing an English degree in college. Why an English degree instead of film school? Nowak feels an essential aspect of filmmaking is missing from the modern day film school curriculum. "When Lucas and his whole gang of people went to film school, it was at a time when they were teaching them to be storytellers before they were teaching them to be technically savvy. Now it's to the point where film school is almost a trade school. It's so technical that people are forgetting the fact that you need to tell stories."

Opting to engage the age-old axiom of learning by doing, Nowak began making shorts to get noticed, which earned him small promo and commercial work. Money earned from these in turn funded his own shorts and documentaries, which eventually won him a spot in last year's Sundance Film Festival. "I've really been jumping back and forth between shorts and medium form and feature film script writing. There's been quite a variety, and my shorts tend to be a bit darker than my commercial work."

Finding Nowak's background and unabashed passion for Star Wars perfectly suited to the task, he was signed on to direct the ad that would finally turn M&M candies to the dark side. Revenge of the Sith would be the perfect backdrop to play against the launch of the dark chocolate M&M's.

Not just any backdrop would do, however. On a soundstage in Buenos Aires, the expansive interior of the soon-to-be-seen Mustafar conference room was exhaustively recreated in full, all the way down to the patterned floor tiles. "The set designers were just blown away by the amount of information that they had to work with as far as reconstructing this thing," explains Nowak.

For added authenticity, prequel trilogy Director of Photography David Tattersall was even on hand to shoot the footage. Nowak was excited to be working with the Star Wars veteran. "I understand why George has done as much work with him as he has," explains Nowak. "I mean, he's one of the most charming, collaborative, down to earth guys that I've ever worked with. You look at his body of work and you'd expect a serious ego-maniac to be walking out on set, but that wasn't the case at all. He's very informative and very funny. It was a blast."

Nowak discusses the collaborative effort shared with Tattersall on the shoot. "When I was picking angles, I would run it by David and ask if this was something in line with what Mr. Lucas would have done for the scene. He'd say, 'Yeah, this is probably the way George would have done it.' To be able to have one degree of separation to someone you've been reading about your entire life is surreal."

Fans will not only get to see an entire Star Wars interior recreated, but also the return of Star Wars' most iconic personality. Darth Vader will return in the commercial, and he wants to bring M&M's to the dark side.

Nowak recalls first seeing the costumed character on set. "The day before the shoot, we were doing a fitting with Darth Vader, and I had been talking to the actor who plays him beforehand and had kind of gotten to know him a little bit. I really did not anticipate the reaction I was going to have when he walked out on the set as Darth Vader. It was like my childhood immediately erupted up and I was very giddy. The first assistant director was a native Argentinian and he said to me in very broken English 'You are like a kid in a candy store.' And I said, yes, you're absolutely right."

Nowak is confident that fans will recognize the commercial as made by a fan for the fans. "Unlike the other Star Wars commercials that have come more recently, this one pays the most faith to the language of Star Wars, the world of Star Wars. This is the only one as far as I know that exists within the Star Wars universe. It's kind of a fish-out-of-water story that has a bunch of ridiculous little characters enter this very serious environment. It's funny because there's a lot of little Star Wars inside jokes -- enough to really keep the fans salivating."

The potential for film fans to create works of their own within the medium they so admire has never been greater. Nowak credits at least part of his success to the ability for him and others to easily access the materials and equipment needed to get their films made. Due in no small part to the digital revolution, Nowak also credits George Lucas, the leading proponent of digital cinema. "I think that what he's done is create an environment where you can choose your mediums based on your story. I mean, to quote the cliché, you now have watercolors and oils and chalk to choose from instead of just oils. Instead of learning on cruddy 8mm video, now you're learning on DV format so that if your experiment does actually succeed, it's in a legitimate format that can be seen by a wide audience. I've exploited that to no end."

"I don't know who said it," continues Nowak, "but someone said that filmmaking will never be a true art form until it's as accessible and inexpensive as a paper and pen. It's democratizing the art form. It's gotten to the point where you'd have to be fairly inept not to find free editing equipment and free video cameras, etc. There are tons of places you can go where you don't have to pay fees to get access to this equipment and be able to make films. It's on the cusp of revolutionizing the art form."

Jon Nowak represents the new generation of filmmaker who can, for the first time, conceive, shoot, and edit a movie with tools available to virtually everyone. For Star Wars fans with a cinematic glint in their eye, Nowak offers a measure of vindication for those who've been returning to the saga again and again for inspiration. "It's just amazing that all those thousands of hours spent watching and reading about Star Wars could pay off in this way. I called my parents and said, 'See, all those summers I spent watching Star Wars...they weren't all wasted.'"