Five Takeaways From ‘The Beginning’

The Beginning was the original name George Lucas was going to give Star Wars Episode I before he changed it to The Phantom Menace shortly before the completion of the movie.

‘The Beginning’ is also the name of one of the greatest in-depth documentaries that has ever followed the making of a movie. It is hugely revealing and enlightening. You can find it on the special features of DVD of The Phantom Menace or on YouTube from the Star Wars official channel.

You may recognize clips from a number of online videos about the prequels, such as Red Letter Media’s reviews. If you haven’t seen it, enjoy its openness and honesty as Lucas and his team attempt to create the most-anticipated film of all time. Here are some observations from ‘The Beginning.’

George Lucas Had the Best Design Team Possible

Lucas really couldn’t have asked for a better design team in pre-production. Everything from the sketches, the models, it all looks incredible. He has such a wealth of options to choose from. The director can give a small brief about what he wants and then his design team will create about 50 original sketches to show him. He can then make his choice and they will carefully craft models and beautifully paint them to his specifications.

There is a great scene in the documentary when Steven Spielberg comes to visit the set and breaks the arm off a battle droid model. It’s pretty funny seeing a great model that has had so much time and effort put into it and Lucas babbling on about how big and epic the fight between these droids and Gungans would be that would all be done in post-production on a computer.

Although The Phantom Menace is known as one of the most digital-effects heavy films of all time, the number of miniatures and sets that are real is astonishing. It was a real labour of love from the production team and it’s a shame that their hard work is often hidden with digital effects. There was a lot of blue screen but also plenty of location shooting. You get the feeling that after experiencing how possible it was to do things digitally, when Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) came around, Lucas would lean more heavily on his blue screen and digital effects.

Casting Anakin was a Challenge

Casting any child for a role in a film is a challenge. But casting a character who was talked about in the original trilogy 22 years earlier and everyone has an idea of what he is like in their head is almost impossible. Because Lucas had decided on casting Anakin younger than expected, the talent pool for such an actor to take on that role is smaller than if he had been a teenager.

Lucas is known as a director who sees his actors as tools to tell the story like a visual effect or the music. They are just expected to read his dialogue and be done with it. You can see how an inexperienced actor would struggle with this kind of direction.

You can see in ‘The Beginning’ a few different young actors reading for the role alongside Natalie Portman. It was nice to see her attempt to coax up some on-screen chemistry from children who were obviously very nervous. They stutter and try to deliver pronunciations beyond their years while being watched by a large team of people.

As we all know, Jake Lloyd eventually got the role that would ruin his life. It’s sad watching the scene where he literally signs his life away on the dotted line. He is excited but his parents and big team of agents and coaches are even happier that they are going to get a cut of the proceeds.

To be fair to Lucas, he is seen to be supportive to Jake Lloyd who obviously struggled with some of the dialogue. Lucas doesn’t seem to let the frustrations get to him and just does more takes of the scenes. You see Lloyd play with sand while they set up the shot and remember that he is just a kid in the middle of a busy working day surrounded by strangers.

Jake Lloyd was bullied extensively at school for the role of Anakin and harassed by the press. He had severe issues with his mental health, most likely as a cause of this constant stress, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. It’s hard to say if this would have happened to anyone who got the role, but it certainly all makes us think about the aftercare needed when casting young actors.

They went all in on Jar Jar

It was not only Jake Lloyd’s Anakin that came in for a lot of critical flak. Ahmed Best’s Jar Jar Binks also experienced an enormous backlash from all corners. It is intriguing in this documentary how Lucas sees Jar Jar. At one point he says, “Jar Jar is the key to all this because he’s a funny character than we’ve had before.” I would love to know the rest of the context for that conversation because I want to know why Jar Jar?

Was he just a way for Lucas to show off what he could do with digital effects? You get the feeling that he wanted to pioneer the new era in filmmaking with The Phantom Menace and maybe that’s why Jar Jar was the key to him.

Whatever was the case, so much time and effort really went into designing the character, how he walked and talked and did just about everything. It’s nice seeing Best’s performance inside the suit and he truly seems like a great guy who didn’t deserve any hate. He was just acting the way he was told. There is also a part where Lucas is annoyed at spending $100,000 on a suit that the effects team didn’t actually need.

The documentary also lets us see how many hours of work it took to digitally develop Jar Jar. You think they focus a lot on him and how long that all took so it must have took just as long for Watto, Boss Nass, the Battle Droids, the huge army of Gungans. Did they give themselves too much to do with the visual effects and therefore unbalance the film?

Nature Is Cruel

I’ve talked about the ubiquitousness of the digital effects in The Phantom Menace and how they increase with every film in the trilogy. Well, part of this could be explained with the sandstorm that happened when filming in Tunisia.

Lucas and his team head out to Tunisia, the same county that was the location for Tatooine in the original trilogy. They are all ready to shoot the exterior shots of the Podrace when a huge sandstorm devastated the set and most of the pod racers that had been painstakingly crafted by the design team. It is heartbreaking.

Producer Rick McCallum is freaking out trying to figure out what to do next while Lucas is more stoic and saying how he has dealt with this before on the set of A New Hope. He is content that everything else can be made right with digital effects later in the production process. Could we have seen more practical effects in the next two movies if this storm had never descended upon Tunisia?

It’s a shame to see a set destroyed like this but it reminds us that when shooting on locations there are certain risks and you are at the mercy of the environment and natural elements. I wonder if the crew ever found Liam Neeson’s beard and wig that apparently had been blown away by the storm.

Lucas Was Perplexed by the First Cut of the Finished Movie

“I may have gone too far in a few places” was the response uttered by George Lucas upon seeing the first cut of his completed film. I love his honestly when he realizes that the four endings might be a bit excessive. “It’s bold in terms of jerking people around” and admitting it might make a normal person go nuts are his real assessments of the movie’s finale as he then thinks of ways to tone it down a bit.

We don’t know what was in that cut because it would have been changed in the editing room since, but you get the feeling it’s everything in the finished Phantom Menace with a few extra scenes like Anakin returning from the droid control ship and Padme and Panaka being told by the royal guard that the ship had been destroyed.

Here is a filmmaker who is confronted with a reality that I’m sure so many directors have had, although Lucas is being filmed and this footage will be around forever. He keeps his team motivated by saying everyone will be listening to John William’s excellent score anyway and not paying attention to what’s going on onscreen. However, it seems him, Rick McCallum and editor Ben Burtt are slightly worried about this screening.

I can’t believe that Lucas would allow this scene to stay in the documentary, let alone put it on the DVD. But it shows the real challenge it is to make a coherent film, especially one with lots of characters and threads. Lucas would limit the amount going on in the denouements of Clones and Sith and learnt his lesson from this cut.