ROgue’s gaLLerY
Star Wars production designer Doug Chiang explains how he went back to the future with Rogue One
MIND THE GAP
“When I was hired by George Lucas in 1995 to work on the Star Wars prequels, I did a lot of research. I went to the archives, I looked at all the original drawings and I got to know [original
Star Wars concept designer] Ralph McQuarrie quite well – that was invaluable for helping me to understand the design history of Star Wars. That foundation really helped because Rogue
One was going to bridge the prequel era with the classic era. In terms of the timeline, Rogue
One starts a month before Episode IV, so our designs had to fit seamlessly with that.”
WINGING IT
“The U-wing was a huge challenge. The vehicles and spaceships in Episode IV are classic designs, they’re perfect. Gareth [Edwards] raised the bar really high. He said, ‘We have to create a hero ship that’s on par with the X-wing or the Millennium Falcon.’ That’s a really tough challenge because the U-wing had to be a precursor to the X-wing; there had to be a reason why it didn’t exist after Rogue One. So the X-wings were the result of assembly line manufacturing, mass production, whereas
Episode III ships were more handcrafted, had more romantic designs. The U-wing bridges that: there are elements that feel a little more fine-tuned, that spoke of the earlier era.”
TEMPLE OF DOOM
“Darth Vader’s castle was grounded in early development art by Ralph McQuarrie. We had to figure out why he would build a castle like that. We decided that this was his private sanctuary, so his castle is all about his Bacta tank; it’s built around that. He comes back to heal. The idea of these twin towers spoke to Gareth because it reminded him of a tuning fork, so we said, for Vader that could be symbolically really powerful, that he’s ‘tuning’ the Dark Side. When we designed the Jedha temple and the city of Jedha, we decided to mirror that. I love the subliminal connections because it makes the universe very cohesive.”
STORM’S COMING
“If you look at the original Stormtroopers, they’re very simple, vacuum-formed plastic; they would never hold up today with our high-definition cameras. So our approach was to stay true to the design and replicate the material, [but make them] the way George Lucas would today. The Stormtrooper helmets, we went and put in bolts, so when you do the close-up, it looks like they were properly manufactured, like they could actually exist, but when you pull the camera back, they look exactly like the classic design.”
THINKING BIG
“The Star Destroyer bridge was only a partial set in Episode IV. With a lot of the ‘legacy’ sets, like the Star Destroyer bridge and the Yavin hangar, we approached them as if they were designed and built by George in ’77. We got the original plans, which gave us a framework to work within, and allowed us to expand those existing sets. Our goal was to take those glimpses from Episode IV and build upon them.”
Rogue One is out on DVD and Blu-ray now.