WHERE STAR WARS AND STAR TREK MEET
Edmonton ex-pat had key design roles on The Last Jedi and Discovery
Professionally raised in the city’s indie film scene, Edmonton-born Todd Cherniawsky has helped envision a galaxy far, far away, where no one has gone before.
If those mixed tag lines make your inner nerd twitch, don’t worry. They’re intentionally squished together.
In a demanding three-year period, not only was the filmmaker one of Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s art directors, he ended up being production designer on Star Trek Discovery, working early on at the core of the two most iconic sci-fi franchises ever.
Living in Hollywood since 1993, he’ll be the first to tell you screen entertainment is a fully collaborative art form, yet he’s proud of his personal touches that made it to the big screen, and can tell you from first-hand experiences about the differences between TV and feature film production.
In a long phone call about his work, Cherniawsky pulls back the red curtain a little.
And don’t worry, the conversation is spoiler-free.
Q How does it feel to see your name rolling up in the credits of a Star Wars movie?
A It’s a little bit of an out-of-body experience. If someone had told the 10-year-old Todd you’d be working on one of these, it would
have been a pretty unbelievable proposition. When I first got the call to interview for this, there was an hour of, ‘You don’t even have to pay me, I’ll do this for free.’ Q How did reality set in? A It becomes daunting that you’re helping shepherd in the next level of this canon. There were sleepless nights, but then the workload overtakes and you start bringing on other amazing art directors, and before you know it you have an amazing team. There was never an easy day, but it becomes a joy. Q How early on were you involved?
A I think I was the seventh or eighth person hired on the show, maybe one of the first 20 people to read the script. There were two of us, Christopher Lowe was the U.K. supervising art director who ended up doing more time. I started off with Rick Heinrichs, the designer here in L.A., so we had a little office in Burbank, with seven or eight illustrators, February to the beginning of May 2015, trying to take a stab at every concept.
Rick and I would draw quick sketches to pass off to the illustrators, but I would then spend two-thirds of my day trying to figure out not so much how to build all this, but more a chess puzzle of how do we do the 149
sets and locations in the script. Q Can you elaborate?
A Just an example: How do we do the two different bridges and Snoke’s mega-destroyer? How can we convert those as aesthetically clear so the audience knows we’re on three different bridges without spending an exorbitant amount of money?
On Day 1 and Day 2, we shot Hux’s bridge. Then we had two weeks to turn it over to Canady’s bridge. Then eight weeks to turn it into Snoke’s. So that’s going to suck up a stage for the better part of seven months. Then it’s going though the 13 other stages — just a crazy situation of what goes into what. Q What other sets did your team work on?
A The Jedi temple and the Jedi mirror cave. You can probably reuse a lot of that scenery, but it still requires a repaint, build a water dam. We wanted to give (director) Rian Johnson everything he was hoping for. That’s laying it out from an art standpoint; that doesn’t even take into account actor availability. Q The colours in this film, everything ’s so muted, except for all that red ….
A It’s probably the most stylized and theatrical. Credit to Rian for going for it, but Rick has done so many of Tim Burton’s movies,
and The Big Lebowski and Fargo. Snoke’s chamber, we probably struggled for four months (on) what that would look like. We started talking about Wagnerian opera, a minimalist set that focuses on Snoke’s throne and where the minions are standing. Without a doubt we were using Empire Strikes Back as the bar, unapologetically working towards that as far as the look, the feel, the tone. Q We’ve seen the footage of George Lucas approving designs on a wall. What was the version of that on Last Jedi?
A Rian, being an independent filmmaker, is so used to being highly involved in every division. On this film more than any other, he’s probably the director who spent the most time in the art department. He knew everyone’s name, almost to the point where he knew their wives’ names. He was friendly, very social. On the page itself a lot of things were pretty specific. As an example, that cadmium red mineral on Crait beneath the salty layer was right on the page. Q If you read The Art of The Force Awakens, J.J. Abrams had visual set pieces like the crashed Star Destroyer, which he then wrote a movie around. This sounds like Johnson had things figured out more precisely, its themes and so on.
A I do believe. We had the benefit of having something to react to. They definitely had a much harder task. Everybody was trying to figure out, are we just remaking Star Wars? Is this another chapter, or are we having to hit the reset button? Rian had the ability to go where he wanted. Q Is there anything in the film you can point to and say, the look of that is really me. I know it takes a village …
A I was going to say ... But one of my favourite sequences of all the films is in the utility hallway where Leia passes on the blueprints to R2, the droids escape, and the Stormtroopers come in and stun her. It’s always been one of my favourite sets, just a hallway, really. I worked with a lot of that architecture and inked it completely. The sequence where Finn is making his escape and Rose is crying, once he’s stunned and she’s dragging him around, all of those plans and elevations look almost exactly what I drew. Q Let’s talk about Discovery.
A That was my first TV show, a ‘welcome to the wolf ’s den’ experience. In hindsight, I can see not that you have so much more time, or so much more money — but in feature films there’s a better understanding of resources and a little more eloquence as far as approaching things. You have more time to think things through. Television is one step away from rushing all the time. In many ways, Discovery is the toughest thing I’ve ever done. Everything’s a build, in the same way the Star Wars universe is. There’s nowhere to get a phaser or a Federation table. Q I would say a common compliment of Discovery is that it looks great.
A There’s still a lot of blowback from the hardcore fans. I struggled for four months (on) whether we needed tricorders — but I’m talking to you on a tricorder. The communicators, Nokia mastered the flip phone by 1992. So people are saying it looks so much more technically advanced than the original series, but what, am I going to pull out CRTs? I tried to be really sensitive, less so to the hardcore fans and more so to my friends at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, because they’re working on this stuff. I had the privilege to visit them, and the future is now. Q So what’s the main difference in approaches between the franchises?
A Wrestling with that stuff is interesting, because Star Wars is science fantasy — it’s a period piece. Star Trek is science fiction, with a very different methodology approach, which was fun. Q How does Edmonton still echo in you?
A There’s something about growing up in the Prairies, there’s a real work ethic. Even working at my uncle’s machine shop building blowout preventers for the oilpatch. Every aspect of that became pivotal in Avatar (as a supervising art director). Once Jim (Cameron) knew where I was from, I was responsible for the whole mining sequence. There’s no way I’d be me without that Edmonton and Alberta experience.
Note: For the extended interview, go to edmontonjournal.com/ entertainment.