Lee Towersey, a great friend of Jedi News and previous guest on RADIO 1138, talks to the Official Site about how he went from being a member of the R2 Builders Club to being hired as part of the creature-effects team for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Since late 2013 Lee has worked on every new Star Wars film….
StarWars.com: When you were first hired to work on the new trilogy, you were just a fan like the rest of us. What challenges did you face in getting your droids ready for the big screen?
Lee Towersey: Well, thankfully, Oliver [Steeples] and myself had already built R2-D2s for our own purposes, which is ultimately what got us the job on The Force Awakens. Then, when it came to making a film droid, it was a little bit easier, in part because it doesn’t need to have as many bells and whistles on it as a lot of the builders make themselves for their home projects. Fan-built R2-D2s tend to have more gadgets on them. But, as we discovered early on into the job, the more gadgets that’s on Artoo, the more that can go wrong, which you can’t really afford to have when you’re filming. So we kept them basic — we copied them, as per the original R2-D2, to the best of our knowledge. We had the originals as reference, and the parts we pretty much built ourselves from scratch.
The first job that I needed to do for The Last Jedi was to get [actor] Jimmy Vee in there. For The Force Awakens, we didn’t actually have anyone inside R2-D2; for the movement, when he was in two-legged mode, it was all pneumatics in the feet to make him rock side to side. But for The Last Jedi, we knew Jimmy Vee was gonna be available, so I took the hydraulic system out of the feet and adapted R2-D2 to take Jimmy’s legs. Because his feet go into the foot gels of R2-D2, and you have to do some cutouts in the battery boxes, and then there’s some leg hoses which cover Jimmy Vee’s legs — which is the main method used for Kenny Baker in A New Hope. We had the option of putting Jimmy in greens, so that we could CG his legs out, but as a nod to Kenny Baker we decided to keep the foot hoses.
The first shot we did with the two-legged Artoo was on Skellig Michael. I’d done a recce in early 2015, with Rian Johnson and a few other people on the production, just to make sure, logistically, that we could get R2-D2 over there, and to visualize where the scenes were going to be shot. Getting on and off the island is always by boat, so we couldn’t just stick Artoo on a boat and take him over the sea for an hour. That wouldn’t have been possible, because the saltwater getting into the droid could have caused us problems, so we came up with a method of breaking him down into four parts: two legs, the body, and the dome. And we boxed them up and took them over to Skellig Michael when we started filming, and stored them on the island with all the props and creatures and so on.
We shot a gag scene where he’s trying to get up some steps, to follow Rey and find Luke — a bit of a comedy moment — and his middle foot’s trying to pull at the first step: “Hey, guys, I can’t make it up these steps.” Unfortunately, we tossed it and it wasn’t seen. But the work we had to do with R2-D2 back at Pinewood, knowing this scene was coming, was done with the help of [animatronic designer] Giles Hannagan. Giles came up with this mechanism for the foot to retract in and out, while Jimmy Vee was in the droid, which would go in between his legs. That was remote-control-operated. And then we have the dome, which we control as well, and we had to check the gears for the dome rotation to make sure Jimmy Vee didn’t get caught up in that at all.
The performance of Artoo, as far as the movement is concerned — wiggling from side to side, rocking the body backwards and forwards — is where Jimmy Vee comes in. So the preparation I had to do for The Last Jedi was basically converting the pneumatic R2-D2 to the Jimmy Vee version.
StarWars.com: During production on The Force Awakens, did you ever have a chance to meet Kenny Baker?
Lee Towersey: Yes, I did. I’d previously met him — we’d worked together in the past at comic-cons and so on a few times. But fortunately, he did come in on one day of filming. We were shooting the interior of Maz’s castle at the time, and Kenny Baker came along, and J. J. kindly stopped filming and made an announcement that Kenny Baker had arrived. And he got a round of applause from all the cast and crew that were on set, and then he came to the photography studio and had a few photos taken with R2-D2. So he did come in for the day, and I spent some time with him. He was in good form. He wasn’t very well at the time, but he still had his sense of humor.
Read the full interview here.
