Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, arrived May 16th, 2002, and StarWars.com is running a new series looking at Clones at 20, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the film, in a special series of interviews, editorials, and more.
Animation director Rob Coleman talks to Dan Brooks about the memorable characters, creatures, and sequences of Episode II.
On July 14, 1999, Rob Coleman attended the London premiere of the first Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace, before heading to an after party. As animation director on the film, Coleman led many of its innovations involving digital characters, including early uses of motion-capture for the fully-CG Jar Jar Binks, battle droids, and more. It was years of hard work, but now was a chance to celebrate the release of what was probably the most highly-anticipated movie ever at that point, and a significant leap in visual effects and animation.
Coleman was enjoying the gathering well enough when someone spotted him. “It was huge. There was sort of a VIP section on an upper level, all these security people. [Lucasfilm’s head of publicity] Lynne Hale saw me and she waved, ‘Come on, come on, you can come up here.’ So I went up there and inside was George Lucas, protected by a bunch of rugby players, is what it looked like,” Coleman tells StarWars.com over a Zoom call from Sydney, Australia. “And Lynne said, ‘You know, George would love to talk to you. He has no one to talk to.’ So I said, ‘Of course, I’d love to talk to George!’”
Rob Coleman with a mo-cap-ready Ahmed Best (Jar Jar Binks) and crew during the making of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
Coleman sat with Lucas, chatting pleasantly about the party. But the Star Wars creator had an ulterior motive. “That’s when he leans forward. He said, ‘Well, you’ll do the second one with me, right?’” Coleman says. “I’m like, ‘Are you asking right now?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’”
Coleman answered him on the spot.
“‘Well, of course I will! Yes!’”
So began Coleman’s journey on Episode II, which would come to be known as Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. And just like he did with The Phantom Menace, Coleman was determined to make even greater advances in bringing digital characters to life — including, for the first time entirely in CG, a little green Jedi Master.
“I felt we could take on Yoda”
In the original version of The Phantom Menace, Frank Oz performed Yoda as a puppet, just as he did in the first Star Wars trilogy. But in Episode II, Yoda would need to be a little more agile: in a big creative risk for the movie, he would have to fight. Initially, Lucas told Coleman that the beloved character would again be featured as a puppet, with the animators creating a digital version for his duel with Count Dooku.
Coleman didn’t love this idea.
“I thought, ‘I don’t want to be matching to the puppet,’” he says. “I adored the puppet in Empire when I was 16 years old. I mean, I was an audience member watching that thing and absolutely believed in that character. But when it came time to do Attack of the Clones, I felt that it would be really, really difficult, because we would have to match what they did with the puppet and interpret how that puppet movement would be put into a digital character running around. George did say early on in briefing us that we’d see him full-body, he’d have to run and jump and fight. So I did know that, but I thought after learning what we learned on Watto, Jar Jar, and Sebulba [in Episode I], I felt we could take on Yoda.” A digital Yoda, for every scene and every sequence, would be a new goal.
This objective coincided with another secret mission for Coleman. While The Phantom Menace was indeed innovative, Coleman wanted to lead Industrial Light & Magic’s digital animation to even greater heights with Episode II. “Well, from an animation director’s point of view, I was proud of what we did on Phantom Menace, but I had already recognized about three quarters of the way through that film that we needed to lift our game in terms of animators acting,” Coleman says. “And for me, that was specifically the non-verbal acting shots. We see them in live-action movies all the time. An editor will cut to a character reacting to, listening to the character who’s talking, and as an audience we’re very used to seeing that pattern. I felt that there was some resistance from George, and rightly so, that our digital characters were not as rich and not as nuanced as the real people. So I wanted to lift that bar.
“And one of the things I did to pitch the digital Yoda was to do three talking shots and three non-talking shots. It was, ‘Could we sustain that he was alive and thinking and reacting? Could we earn a closeup in Attack of the Clones?’ And we did. You see it early in the movie when the Jedi are in Palpatine’s office, surrounded by a bunch of people. Palpatine is saying something, and George, on purpose, cuts to Yoda, and you see Yoda look over his shoulder. And you can tell that he doesn’t trust Palpatine. I actually get goosebumps thinking about it. ‘Cause that was — if I could get us over that high bar, a self-imposed high bar, that meant that we could hold our own. And then because we delivered on that, George gave us more and more and more important acting moments.” The shot was so strong it eventually made it into the teaser trailer.
Coleman at work on the Yoda/Dooku duel.
But Coleman didn’t take switching Yoda from puppet to digital lightly, especially coming off the difficult reaction from vocal fans and critics to The Phantom Menace. “I was still stinging from — I was the guy who helped bring Jar Jar to the screen, and there was all the blow back from that,” he says. “I was probably close to terrified, but I’ve never been someone to back down from a challenge. Terrified, because I didn’t want to be known as the guy who wrecked Yoda. So that was absolutely in the front of my mind. What kept me on target was, I was able to remember what it was like to see Yoda the very first time in 1980, and what I had remembered before I went and studied it was this rich, nuanced performance. When I actually studied it frame by frame, it’s actually very limited. But what I wanted — for us collectively, when building the digital Yoda — was to honor the range of motion that I thought I’d seen when I was 16.”
Coleman worked with Oz himself to make sure his digital Yoda was as faithful as possible. He came to know exactly what shape Oz’s hand formed inside the puppet’s head, and how that impacted expression. Coleman made sure not to go too far in terms of movement. He even incorporated imperfections that added charm to the original puppet. “Frank, after seeing our initial tests, he was very supportive and said, ‘I love the restraint that you’re keeping on this and I love that you’re matching what I was doing.’ Like, in terms of the way the head moved. And he was laughing at me, because if you look at the puppet from 1980, every time he turns it, the ears do a little wiggle. I’d read that he didn’t like that, that it was the weight of the puppet and holding it above his head, and it just trembles because of his muscles. But when we didn’t put that into the digital character, he didn’t look old — it had become a vital part of the character. So we did this too, in the animated digital character, and he just looked the age that he should look. So it was a little step by step. That’s how we did it.”
Of course, getting the digital model to work was essential in pulling off Yoda’s climactic lightsaber duel with the secret Sith Lord, Count Dooku. In a movie filled with action set pieces it was the set piece, and one from which the entire feature could collapse if it didn’t look believable. From the start, most of the work would fall to Coleman and his team. “I didn’t get the script until a week or two into being here in Sydney. They were building sets and everything. No script, no script, no script. Finally, I got the script, sat down, and my memory of the first draft was, ‘In a fight that defies description, Yoda and Count Dooku battle.’ That was it. That was just one line.” Coleman scheduled a meeting with Lucas about that line, and laughs while recounting what Lucas had to say. “He just said, ‘Yeah, yeah. You gotta figure that out.’”
Coleman first went to stunt coordinator Nick Gillard, who was training with Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, and Christopher Lee. They talked about how someone would fight with smaller weapons, looking at real-world examples. And Jar Jar Binks actor Ahmed Best introduced Coleman to some anime that might help. But Coleman still needed to crack how to depict Yoda’s speed and style in a fight. Luck would strike when he attended a screening of the Jet Li movie Swordsman II at the San Francisco Film Festival. “In that movie there’s a nighttime scene in a bamboo forest, and the ninja are leaping from tree to tree, bouncing around,” he says. “And I thought, ‘Ah, all right. There’s the inspiration for Yoda to be able to jump around.’”
Once the duel was complete, Coleman tried not to get too excited. “George and I were both pretty happy with it. I was still internally terrified, because my worry was that we had convinced ourselves we had something pretty cool, and I was concerned that we had blinded ourselves and we were gonna be a laughing stock. Because George did want him jumping and leaping and flipping, and I thought some of that might have been a little too cartoony. But George wanted it. So I remember going to the very first paid audience screening on the first day that it came out in San Francisco. I was sitting in the middle of the theater. Nobody knew who I was. I was just sitting there and I remember sliding down in my seat as the scene was coming. I was thinking, ‘This could go really badly.’”
He needn’t have worried.
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