Word: script
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...Starwoids--the trilogy cultists who live in the world Lucas created--this anticipation may be too fevered. It sends a little shudder through the 54-year-old gent who wrote the script alone and, for the first time in 22 years, directed a movie as well as supervised it. "Expectations are so high that no matter what, for some people we'll never make it," he says. "Everybody is trying to steal information. But if we bring out the Episode 1 book early, people get upset that we're giving the story away." Mirthless laugh. "No matter...
Still, based on reading the script (hasn't everybody?) and seeing scraps of the film, we get intimations of something fresh, handsome, grand. Naboo's golden underwater city glows like an Art Nouveau chandelier, while the Jedi knights' home base, Coruscant, could come from a spiffier Blade Runner. The new sidekick, a computer-birthed frog boy named Jar Jar Binks, is a vexing, endearing mix of Kipling's Gunga Din and Tolkien's Gollum, and speaks in a pidgin English ("Yousa Jedi not all yousa cracked up to be!") that will be every kid's secret language this summer. Even...
...human characters are briskly developed in the script. And the cast is certainly tony: Neeson; art-house sex pistol Ewan McGregor as young Obi-Wan; Ingmar Bergman favorite Pernilla August as Anakin's mother; Natalie Portman (Broadway's Anne Frank) as the young Queen; and, brooding on the Jedi Council, Samuel L. Jackson. The completed film will offer definitive evidence, but for now there is reason to give Episode 1 the subtitle of the original Star Wars movie: A New Hope...
...other crew assembled "animatics": rough computer designs of the script's scenes using stick figures, artwork, bits of film. "We previsualize the movie," says animatician David Paul Dozoretz, who was in charge of the digital whiz kids. "We're Lucas' toy box. We do lots of experimentation." Thanks to these sages and sprouts, 45 min. of Episode 1 was viewable as a computerized storyboard before principal shooting began...
...leap of faith," says Neeson. "I couldn't get a script. Forget Woody Allen--this was like trying to get into Fort Knox. I finally got to read the whole script in George's office with Darth Vader standing outside the door. Seriously." Even now, Neeson won't talk about his role, though everyone knows he's the lead in Episode 1. "I can't say," he says, unsmiling but with a flick of laughter in his eyes. "I am forbidden by my Jedi code of ethics...