When Jody Duncan (author of The Making of Jurassic Park and The Making of The X-Files: Fight the Future) set out to chronicle the making of Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, she faced a problem: In some ways, the digital wizards of Lucasfilm had more time than she did.
Duncan's new book, Mythmaking: Behind the Scenes of Attack of the Clones, features an introduction by Producer Rick McCallum and offers fans an insider's perspective on everything from the studio shooting in Australia and England and location filming in Italy, Spain, and Tunisia, to the visual-effects work in California. Because of publishing's long lead times, however, Duncan's manuscript had to be turned in last December, 2001. The movie wouldn't be released until more than six months later (May, 2002) -- and thanks to the digital nature of the filmmaking and its myriad possibilities -- tweaks were being made just weeks before Attack of the Clones hit the big screen. "One of the challenges of a Star Wars movie is that -- more than most movies -- they tend to evolve," says Duncan, the editor of the visual-effects magazine Cinefex. "You almost don't want to start writing a 'making of' book for a movie like this until the last minute, because you know so many things are going to change." The changes made to Attack of the Clones after Duncan turned in her first draft weren't just tweaks. For example, George Lucas dreamed up the scene on Geonosis in which Anakin and Padmé are trapped in the droid factory months after principal photography was finished, and the actors didn't step before the cameras for pick-ups until March.
So what did Duncan do? Pretty much what Lucasfilm always does -- she was flexible, working with Steve Saffel, her editor at Del Rey, and with Lucasfilm to provide the necessary updates for the manuscript, letting it take shape as the movie took shape alongside it. Because this is the most recent behind-the-scenes book on Attack of the Clones, Mythmaking is the only book to contain images from the Clone Wars and other last-minute ILM changes and additions to the film.
Mythmaking begins with Attack of the Clones' preproduction, in which the stage is set (quite literally) and the reader is introduced to the main players in both cast and the crew -- such as Lucas, McCallum, production designer Trisha Biggar. From there, Duncan walks the reader through the movie scene by scene, breaking up the narrative with "Notes From the Set" that offer snapshots of big days in filming. "I had to make these choices all the time as to what to include or what to leave out," Duncan says. Her method was to look at each scene and figure out what was most interesting about it in terms of the production process. If, for instance, what stood out was how Lucas struggled with the writing, she offered his thoughts on the scene and the creative process he went through. If what caught her eye was something about the set design, Bocquet took center stage. If it was the visual effects, she consulted with visual-effects supervisor John Knoll or animation director Rob Coleman. The book also offers a look at post-production on Attack of the Clones, including the pick-ups, editing, the recording of John Williams' score, and the tricky task of automated dialogue replacement, or ADR.
Duncan and Del Rey also found an interesting technique for offering as much information as they could about Attack of the Clones' visual effects -- namely, making full use of the captions that go with the book's spectacular imagery. (Captions are written very late in a book's development -- far later than the main text.) Still, she admits to some small frustration with having not been able to tell that part of the tale as fully as she might have.
"Fortunately, because I'm the editor at Cinefex, I was able to go back and get the story on the completed effects," she says, joking that "I sometimes wish we could insert a Cinefex with each copy" of Mythmaking. (Cinefex #90, released this past July, focused on Attack of the Clones and its visual effects.)
In all, Duncan says, she either interviewed or had access to interviews with nearly 50 people who worked on the movie. She didn't personally interview the actors -- "they'd been interviewed so often by so many different sources that it didn't seem necessary to ask them many of the same questions again." One highlight for her was going to England for reshoots at Ealing Studios in London. The day she arrived, she recalls, McCallum took her onto the stage, put a chair next to Lucas's and told her that was where she'd sit -- a generous gesture that let her see every problem that came up in filming and how the crew solved it, instead of leaving her stuck in the background struggling to figure out what was happening.
Lucasfilm's own sense of history was also a big help. As Duncan notes, crews shot video-tape of the production almost from the moment shooting started -- Duncan spent hours upon hours at Skywalker Ranch watching that record of Attack of the Clones' shooting and taking notes.
And like the filmmakers themselves, a lot of her most important work came in the writer's equivalent of the editing room. "It's unbelievable how much material you wind up with," she says, adding, "If I had included all the information that I had in the book, it would have been the Encyclopedia Britannica."
One thing Duncan knew she wanted to chronicle was the development of the new high-definition digital cameras by Lucasfilm, Sony, and Panavision. Shooting Attack of the Clones digitally allowed the filmmakers to skip the slow and expensive process of digitizing the film so visual effects can be added. "I thought it was some thing that would interest even the most technophobic reader," Duncan says, noting that one hallmark of Lucas' filmmaking is that he decides that making his next movie demands that technology do something that's never been done before -- and then he and Lucasfilm make it happen.
Duncan would like Mythmaking to appeal to Star Wars fans, movie buffs, and serious film students alike. She also hopes it will help fans consider things they don't always think about when critiquing a movie as it appears on the big screen.
"It's so easy after something has been created for people to say, They should have done this,' or, They should have done that; " Duncan says. 'They don't see all the work that goes into each moment of the movie. All the fans see -- all anybody sees -- is the final product."
Mythmaking, she hopes, will demystify that long process of bringing Attack of the Clones to the screen, letting fans see the countless little decisions that go into making a movie -- a process that for her calls to mind Thomas Edison's adage about genius being 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.
With Mythmaking, she says, "You see the perspiration."
This interview originally appeared in Star Wars Insider #63.
