Star Wars - Making of

Dennis Muren, VFX Supervisor

"The combination of the two keeps you on your toes, is this fake or is this real?"

"There's less computer graphics than people might think, we did real explosions with real ships."

Rick McCallum producer of episodes 1-3

"The engines took 12 weeks to build."

George Lucas:

"Filming the Star Wars, every time you do one it's like a new adventure... There is no guarantee that you'll be able to pull it off at all... I get to do a lot of things now that I couldn't do before which is going to be exciting in terms of writing and creating things I couldn't create before. I was always at the limit of what was possible in terms of storytelling. Things have advanced so far in the last 20 years in terms of the ability to portrait things on the screen that were literally impossible before. And then very difficult in terms of cost, but even if you take that out everything just couldn't be done regardless of how much it cost" 

Then he talked about not being able to do much with Yoda, he was always to be shot from the waist up, couldn't move more than four steps etc etc. 

"It's a great asset to have a lot of the creatures that couldn't move before being able to move."

Hudgen Christensen - Anakin

"It's really hard because you take your attention off of the dialogue and sometimes off what you're doing and just trying to remember, right I've got so many markers and I wave my hand here and that moves there and that's really supposed to be a she and he's supposed to be something else and that's an alien. You've got so many more variables to play with. That's distracting. You sometimes lose your place."

Ewan McGregor

"It's really hard work, it's difficult to make that believable, I don't know if I have."

"It's difficult but they say it works, and it makes it worth while when you see a finished product."

Natalie Portman

"It's like being a little kid in a cartoon box, and thinking it's a spaceship."

Christopher Lee

"It's magic of course."