The Acolytemay have been controversial, but showrunner Leslye Headland has just revealed how she was focused on a single principle: What would George Lucas do?The Acolytewas easilyStar Wars' most controversial TV showto date, with the online fandom schisming over almost every element of the story.Some of the arguments seem frankly absurd when you look back at them; I refuse to believe anybody really caredKi-Adi-Mundi’s age, for example.
We’re coming up toThe Acolyte’s one-year anniversary, and showrunner Leslye Headland and cinematographer Chris Teague have conducted a new interview withGoldDerbyin the show’s honor. The interview focuses onThe Acolyte’s visual language, with Teague explaining that Headland was guided by a simple maxim:“What would George do?”
“[We adopted] what I like to call elegant simplicity: choosing the most direct, straightforward approach on the visual side of things, which does feel very George. Leslye would always say, ‘What would George do? What would George think?’ And that was our guiding principle…. [For instance,] if we’re going to move the camera, it needs to mean something. It needs to underline some part of the narrative, or it needs to be connected to some aspect of the choreography, or something like that.”
The Acolyte Honored The Original Trilogy Far More Than The Prequels
But which version of George Lucas wasThe Acolyte’s visual language actually inspired by? There’s a big difference between the Lucas of the original trilogy and the prequels, and deliberately so; Lucas intended the prequels to be ground-breaking in their use of CGI.The Acolytestepped back to the original trilogy, instead using practical sets. “We shot with all practical sets, which the other Star Wars shows don’t do,” Headland explained. “Almost every single scene you see is a set.”
The size of the sets posed massive challenges for Teague, notably the Khofar Forest, which he describes as the “biggest set I’ve ever lit in my life.”
“You walk in a few months before you’re going to shoot there, and it’s just a giant empty warehouse. You have to somehow imagine what 40-foot-tall, 12-foot-wide trees are going to look like in this space, [and figure out] “how to light that [and] make it feel like these characters are on a miles and miles long journey through this place.”
The Acolyte’s Phenomenal Action Scenes Made Shooting Really Difficult
They Were A True Challenge To Make
The Acolyte’s fantastic lightsaber duelscaused problems, too, even with a deliberately pared-down aesthetic. “The whole goal for us was, let’s have everything be there for a reason,” Teague explained when describing the stunning battles in episodes 4 and 5. “Otherwise, we’re just going to exhaust the audience, and they’re going to start to tune out. So we have to build the tension in a specific way over the course of the episode.”
The Acolytemay have been canceled, but we can only hope that the franchise learns some important lessons from these fantastic action scenes.Star WarsTV shows have often been criticized for poor handling of lightsaber duels, butThe Acolyte’s duels don’t just work because of fantastic fight choreography; they’re also helped by careful set design. Lucasfilm is pivoting back towards location filming after an overuse of CGI technology, and these principles will surely help with shows likeAhsokaseason 2.
