One of the great joys of running this site is to have the good fortune to not only visit iconic places such as the Presidio – where you can be sharing a lift with John Knoll one moment and eating lunch with Pablo Hidalgo the next – but to get to know super collectors like Gus Lopez, the man who owns the original, screen-used Death Star from A New Hope. So with the battle station safely encased behind glass in its Seattle home, how did ILM resurrect the Death Star for Rogue One?
Rogue One wouldn’t exist without John Knoll. More than a decade ago, Knoll—then the visual effects supervisor on the Star Wars prequels—had a simple idea: what if the rebels, Mission Impossible-style, stole the Death Star’s blueprints?
By 2012, Knoll had been promoted to chief creative officer for Industrial Light and Magic, which has orchestrated the visual effects for each film in the franchise, and Knoll pitched the storyline as a unique deviation from the Star Wars cannon.
In Rogue One the Death Star is as much a character as Jyn Erso or Cassian Andor. The battleship is ever present, this hulking and intimidating entity that looms over the plot, so with that much screen time devoted to the Death Star, it needed to look realistic. And therein lies the slight problem—the original Death Star model had been long lost to collectors.
