Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian

Rick's first day.

My first day.

After how many months of me hanging around in the office?

Exactly.

It's the second chapter,

so people will be learning what this show is by this one.

You're probably destroying more Jawas than describing the whole...

All the nine episodes combined.

Exactly. Exactly.

Cut! That's good.

It's gonna be great. Good luck.

Alright. Thanks.

Alright. - I'll see you soon.

Alright. See you soon.

This is what was causing all the fuss?

What makes Star Wars Star Wars is that

it's the cutting edge of this technology,

but it's used to bring things down

to a personal and relatable and human level.

And so, you know, when you talk about the mix of

puppetry, animatronics, the volume

and these great actors that we all had to work with,

it's like it's the mix of all of that that makes everything feel real.

One part doesn't dominate the other.

Doesn't feel like the technology is overwhelming,

it doesn't feel like, "Well, that's quaint and primitive, so I'm not buying it".

It's the perfect marriage of that and I've always felt that, for me,

that's what always made Star Wars different

than most of the other big-effects shows

is that there was always a real human, down-to-earth quality

of how it was made and how it looks,

so when I'm watching this as an eight-year-old, I'm going,

"This is real. This is a real world and one day I'm gonna be in it".

We come across R2-D2 and C-3PO in the beginning of Star Wars.

How did we get into this mess?

They've already been around for years, and R2-D2 is, like,

he's dirty and dusty and he's got scuff marks and stuff.

We seem to be made to suffer. It's our lot in life.

There's this whole other history that I'm unaware of

when coming into the first movie.

And I think it was a very smart move to continue that in Mandalorian.

There is a realism to this series that exists

because so much of what we shot ended up being practical.

The actors are not in Mocap suits just surrounded by green and blue,

it's not just a totally imaginary world.

Hold on. We bring it in alive.

That's pretty good.

That's what I'm saying.

Dave Filoni and I talk a lot about, you know,

like we're playing with our Star Wars toys.

You get your Boba Fett figure and your Jawa and you get them to fight,

or you pull out the Sandcrawler or the TIE fighter,

and so, we're having a good time. We're having a lot of fun,

we're letting our imaginations fly.

We're very much pulling in stuff trying to use all parts of the buffalo.

And then also taking characters that are the D-list from Star Wars,

'cause the fans know and love them and see a way to give them stories,

like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kind of way.

As I was writing it, I was like, "Uh, an Ugnaught".

'Cause Ugnaught was sort of a secondary, tertiary character in the background

working for the Empire in Cloud City,

but I said, "Oh, make one of the characters that".

I will help you.

I have spoken.

With the Ugnaught, it straddles in between,

you know, a performer in a prosthetic and bringing animatronic,

I mean, that head, you couldn't do it as a pure prosthetic.

The Ugnaught is Misty Rosas.

Misty is a unique performer.

She knows how to work in a suit,

knows how to perform, you know, wearing elaborate masks or prosthetics.

But I'm proud to say that I paid out my clan's debt,

and now I serve no one but myself.

In a lot of ways, it's choreography. It's fusing me,

my puppeteer that triggers when the talking happens,

and then I have another puppeteer that is working in doing the eyebrows,

and then also hitting marks.

So it was challenging 'cause they didn't have the ability to hear during blocking.

I would do my best to try to give them physical cues

so that they know when I would want to say a certain line.

It hasn't grown much.

It's not easy to wear something like this,

'cause you're inside and you've got this whole face.

Servers are going off in your head

when you're trying to hear the dialogue and perform.

She's such a trooper with all these things.

They really don't like you for some reason.

Nick Nolte, who voices the character, would do two to three takes

varying the way he would read a line,

and I'd, like, go through it and listen and listen and listen.

It was imperative to have that,

to really be able to embody the whole character simultaneously.

I have a name. It is Kuiil.

Most scenes were mixing a combination of, sort of, like,

the Mandalorian with a puppet with live action, so it's a real balance.

And directorially, working with them as actors, it's really different.

You're looking for these gestures they do with their head

to try to physicalize that emotion, which is difficult sometimes

to find the balance without it getting big.

It's quite a different approach, depending on who the cast member is.

Do you trust me?

From what I can tell, yes.

Then you will trust my work.

Something for me that I was really worried about

was that with, kind of, all this emerging technology and whatnot,

that those kind of, like, essentially practical effects would go away.

Like, Stan Winston and everything that Legacy is doing and whatnot,

it's really incredible, because it is the experience...

You get to have the experience live

of what the audience experiences when they're watching a movie.

You're like, "Oh, my gosh, that's a baby".

I don't...yeah, how do we describe baby?

I don't know how to talk about baby.

Or that's a dinosaur, or a sea creature, whatever that is,

but it's real. It's bringing that magic to life,

right here and now, and you're just capturing it.

It's not rendered afterwards.

And so the fact that baby was a huge part of this and that there were animatronics

and I was getting to work with a team

who I've, as an actor, worked with many times,

was so perfect, because it's the convergence of the art form,

of a very old art form with a very new art form.

And it's like keeping it a part of this

and allowing it to evolve and not be like,

"Oh, we're gonna do everything on computer from here forward".

That's awesome. I was so happy about that.

Probably the best and the weirdest moment was when I was shooting three

and I was doing a scene in the safe-house with Werner and the baby,

and it was one of the weirdest and best things that ever happened,

where Werner, he was acting against the baby,

which was the puppet, obviously.

And I think at some point, he forgot that it was a puppet,

and he got so into the baby that he started directing the baby directly

as though he was talking to a person.

I'm trying to direct Werner, who's now directing the puppet,

and the puppeteers seemed to...

He doesn't realize the puppeteers are actually the ones.

And then he fell in love with it.

And then Jason Porter and I, when we went to do the plate shot,

he basically was calling us cowards and telling us

that we need to commit to the magic and don't give them the plate shot.

Make them use the puppet. And it was amazing.

Turns out he was right.

He was right. - He was right.

We use the puppet all the time.

Even when we have a CG version of it, we have them match what the puppet can do.

Yeah.

We don't have them do things that the puppet can't do.

Film-making now, all of a sudden, is back to almost "old school".

Technology becomes invisible, and that's a great thing.

Yoda baby, beautiful, and it moves in there, too.

The guys who are moving the eyes and the lips

and the facial expressions, phenomenal.

And they filmed it one-on-one. It was heartbreakingly beautiful.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Fantasy has no bounds.

There's no boundaries in what you can do here with the new technologies.

It's simply extraordinary, very much to my liking.

We all, I think, had a vision for what bad version of it was.

And what was written in there was just that it was

a little baby of Yoda's species.

When Dave first read it, I know he did a little drawing on the flight home.

And then that went over to Doug Chiang,

and Doug started doing some works on not the baby,

but the pram, that egg-shaped pram.

The reaching in, the kind of Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, ET imagery,

which started to develop.

At the same time, the look for the baby itself,

the look of the big ears, we had inherited that from Yoda,

and I had already been preoccupied with the look of big eyes

and using ears for motion

'cause I had been working on a VR project called Gnomes and Goblins for many years.

And so, the idea of the face not being that expressive,

but everything was about the eyes looking at you and about the ears moving

was something that I had wanted to try.

And we got lots and lots of drawings.

Some of them were too cute, some too ugly,

some were the wrong proportions.

But they were all informing, as we gave notes on each drawing,

Dave and I started zeroing in on what it was.

And then finally, it was one image that Chris Alzmann did that had him wrapped up

in what looked like a piece of a flight jacket, we didn't know,

and his eyes were weird.

He looked out of it, something a little off with it.

But we found it charming, and that became the rallying image that we said,

"This is good".

And it developed from there.

And then, once we had that, then they started to do maquettes of that,

but the maquette wasn't cute.

We started to work through it,

and that's when the people from Legacy came in.

That's really when it became the baby.

We'll start with left. Ready?

Good.

Left. Right.

Left. Right.

The team at Legacy probably spent at least three months on it, building it.

They wanted it to be great.

And it started to take on a life of its own.

Yeah! I'm very happy with that.