Star Wars behind the scenes: Creating the unique aesthetic of The Acolyte

The Star Wars franchise is creeping up on the 50-year mark for the original 1977 film that started it all, and Disney+ has successfully kept things fresh with its line of live-action Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian and Andor were both unquestionably popular and critical successes, while The Book of Boba Fett ultimately proved disappointing, focusing less on our favorite bounty hunter and more on setting up the third season of The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka fell somewhere in between, bolstered by strong performances from its leads but often criticized for sluggish pacing.

It's unclear where the latest addition to the TV franchise, The Acolyte, will ultimately fall, but the first five episodes aired thus far bode well for its place in the growing canon. The series eschews the usual Star Wars space-battle fare for a quieter, space Western detective story—who is killing the great Jedi masters of the galaxy?—with highly choreographed fight scenes that draw heavily from the martial arts. And like its predecessors, The Acolyte is recognizably Star Wars. Yet it also boasts a unique aesthetic style that is very much its own.

(Spoilers below for episodes 1 through 5 of The Acolyte.)

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. The Acolyte explores those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown.

The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace. Apparently, Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as "Frozen meets Kill Bill." She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. In this period, the Jedi aren't the underdog rebels battling the evil Galactic Empire. They are at the height of their power and represent the dominant mainstream institution—presumably benevolent, but that might depend on one's perspective. Headland particularly wanted to explore the question of how Darth Sidious managed to come to power and infiltrate the Galactic Senate without the Jedi ever suspecting it.

The Acolyte opens on the planet Ueda, where a mysterious masked woman wielding daggers attacks the Jedi Master Indara (Carrie Ann Moss) and kills her. (This was an utter waste of a gifted "name" actor, but it certainly set the stakes early.) The assassin is quickly identified as Osha Aniseya (Amandla Stenberg), a former padawan now working as a meknek, making repairs on spaceships.

Osha is arrested by her former classmate, Yord Fandar (Charlie Barnett), but claims she is innocent. She has a vision about her twin sister, Mae, who died in a fire on their home planet of Brendok when they were both quite young. She concludes that Mae is still alive and is the one who killed Indara. Osha's former Jedi master, Sol (Lee Jung-jae), believes her. This is confirmed when we see Mae meeting with her mysterious Master, who wields a red lightsaber and commands her to kill a Jedi without using a weapon.

We eventually learn that Mae's targets are not random. She is out to kill the four Jedi she blames for the fire on Brendok: Indara, Sol, Torbin (Dean-Charles Chapman), and a Jedi Wookiee named Kelnacca (Joonas Suotamo). The quartet had arrived on Brendok to demand they be allowed to test the twins as potential Jedi. The twins had been raised by a coven of "Force witches" there, led by Mother Aniseya (Jodie Turner-Smith), who believed the Jedi were misusing the Force. While Mae was keen to follow in their mother's footsteps, Osha wanted to train with the Jedi. When the fire broke out, both Mae and Osha believed the other twin had been killed along with the rest of the coven. How the fire really started, and the identity of Mae's Master, were the primary mysteries yet to be revealed. (Note: The Master's identity has now been revealed, but we are not spoiling that particular detail.)

The Acolyte is set in the High Republic Era.

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

Star Wars has always had a distinctive style and visual language. The Acolyte sports something of the sleek look of an advanced civilization characteristic of the prequel trilogy, with just enough of a lived-in look to ensure it still feels like Star Wars—before the inevitable decay in the wake of the Republic's collapse and establishment of the Empire. Production designer Kevin Jenkins and cinematographer Chris Teague played key roles in making sure The Acolyte stayed true to that ethos while also giving the series its own distinctive look.

Ars spoke with Teague and Jenkins to learn more.

Ars Technica: What did you draw on for inspiration in creating a distinctive look for The Acolyte that still feels very much part of Star Wars? 

Chris Teague: I have always been very inspired by the original three Star Wars films. They have a look that feels very lived-in. There's a real grit to the image, a real texture. The ships and the props don't feel brand new. Things feel like they've been around for a while. That's something I've always loved about the look and that I wanted to bring to our show. I wanted a look that wasn't so crystal clear and so pristine. That came down to the lenses that we chose, these beautiful anamorphic lenses where the focus falls off on the edges, and we added film grain to the image.

I was also inspired by the straightforward visual approach that George Lucas took with A New Hope: the idea that if we're going to be moving the camera, we want it to really have an impact and mean something narratively. We were going to be dynamic with the camera movement, but with a purpose behind it. So we prioritized using the dolly or the crane as much as humanly possible. That set the standard for the type of movement we were after. There were a few shots where we had our action designer, Chris Cowan, operating a gimbal. He could make his moves look like they were dolly moves. They cut really beautifully with the work that we were doing on the crane or on the dolly.

The design for the planet Ueda featured a Shinto-like gate.

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

Kevin Jenkins: Thank you for saying that it looks like Star Wars because I had everything taken away from me. I didn't have Archer units, I didn't have Stormtroopers, I didn't have the Empire, I didn't have the Rebellion, the Resistance, X-Wing fighters. I was not able to use them because we'd gone back in time. So I tapped into the design rules I'd learned as a design supervisor and a production designer on previous Star Wars shows, emulating the designers on the original Star Wars film: John Barry, Norman Reynolds, and Ralph McQuarrie. Star Wars, at its core, is 2001: A Space Odyssey with dirt.

One of the other big changes concerned the colors. If you watch Andor, say, or [the original] Star Wars, or even the sequel movies, you have a certain range of color palettes. We go to desert planets, we go to the Empire, and that is all tons of gray and white. I decided to ban gray because that wasn't the world [of The Acolyte]. I talked to a few people at Lucasfilm about what the tone of the High Republic Era was supposed to be and got the impression it's like the height of the Roman Empire. So I decided to inject color into many of the sets and locations to differentiate the different worlds. How much color can I get away with? What if the color palette was made by Norman Reynolds in 1980, and we just made it really lived-in and dirty?

Without the Jedi and their lightsabers, could it ever be truly Star Wars?

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

The Jedi and their lightsabers—that was our one placeholder. If I took out the Jedi and lightsabers, then what do you have? But in this period, they're not the underdogs. So there's two different types of dress uniform that the Jedi have. They really pop, especially on Olega. It's almost like they're in uniform—a police mentality. Same for the lightsaber design, you don't get to choose a customized fancy one. There's 500 that are all the same, you just grab one, like the default Colt for a policeman.

Ars Technica: How did that approach translate to the design of the spaceships and other vehicles? 

Kevin Jenkins: Because we're in a new time period, I felt that we had to give it all a fresh thought process, in the way that a Model T doesn't look the same as an electric Tesla. You'll notice that the interior of the prison ship is very different from the interior of the Polan. I painted a spaceship green and red, for crying out loud. When I talked about the Polan, Leslye just said, "It's a caravan for Jedi police." Because in a funny way, we're watching a police drama. So I gave it the sensibility of a traveling vehicle where everything they ever need is in there rather than a freighter. The ships are almost like old liberators, they're all aluminum outside and literally riveted. For their design vernacular, we decided to try something new just to make them all feel of an era. We made the big ships so they could fly through space, but all of the small ships are joined to docks.

Ars Technica: How does a cinematographer go about the challenging process of bringing a shooting script to the screen? 

Chris Teague: There are so many different ways to visualize things, and being able to visualize things in advance is really key. Some of it's as simple as walking around the stages—just being in the physical space and imagining what the sets are going to look like and how the light is going to bounce off of them, or fill them up or create shadows. A shape of a set might be a little bit easier to film in to get the shots that we're after because we might know a little better visually what key shots we're going to have in a certain set. Of course, we work with the art department, and they create these elaborate 3D models so that we can get a sneak peek at what they're designing and give our input into suggestions that might help give us some practical lighting to work with.

The camera moved on a single axis for the wuxia-inspired fight scenes. Here, Mae fights Sol on Olega.

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

Our stunt team had this phenomenal pre-vis process where they would record in three dimensions the motion of their stunt performers doing the action scenes. They were able to take this recording and place it into a 3D model of our sets so we could really see how the fights were going to play out in the actual space. We could experiment with camera angles and focal lengths and things like that, so when it came down to the set finally being built, we were ahead of the game in terms of knowing what we needed to capture.

Ars Technica: Did you find design inspiration primarily from the Star Wars source material, or were there other influences?

Kevin Jenkins: I'm always inspired by other references. My passion for Star Wars comes purely from a design level. I was that kid who bought The Making of Star Wars book and thought, "Oh, what does a production designer do?" So I'm really intrigued by why it looks like it does, where its influences come from, from a technical level. I did love the films and do love watching them, but my fandom comes from a more professional level.

This is the first time we've seen the High Republic Era, and I wanted to be very respectful to what everybody thinks they're going to get. But it's also my job to give a new spin on things and surprise people. My job was to try to make that cinematic. That, to me, is a slightly different sensibility about how a world is filmed on camera than pulling it straight from a book. You can't just do it wholesale. The structure of Leslye's story is very episodic, and even though there's many directions I could have gone in, this is the most Flash Gordon I think we could have gone—that kind of 30-minute, everything ends on a cliffhanger [approach]. It is very much like those black-and-white serials that I grew up with.

Ars Technica: The Acolyte is unusual in the Star Wars franchise because of its highly stylized martial arts fight scenes. How did you go about shooting those?

Chris Teague: We watched a lot of wuxia films like Come Drink With Me and Lady Snowblood and films that were inspired by those earlier films like Kill Bill and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. One of the things we discovered is that the camerawork is generally there. The camera doesn't get in the way of the fight choreography. It moves, but it only moves on one axis. It moves left to right, or it pushes in, or it pulls out to maybe heighten the moment. And then it has all these kinds of built-in pauses for dramatic tension. That also really felt very much in line with our approach to the rest of the show: this classic approach where we didn't want the camera to move so much that we were distracting the audience with it. We really wanted to highlight the incredible choreography that we were capturing.

The design of Osha and Mae's home planet of Brendok is "Black Narcissus meets Hoover Dam."

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

Ars Technica: Were there certain sequences or design elements you were particularly pleased with? 

Kevin Jenkins: I was very happy with the characters we called the witches. The original versions were almost fairytale-like. I decided to industrialize that design, so they were more nomadic and had inherited a place that someone else had built and gave that place the Star Wars simplicity and identity. The Death Star is a sphere. An X-wing is an X. I needed to make a building that would last because three or four episodes are shot in this one place, so I needed to make it confusing enough to give us enough screen time to shoot there. I ended up with this confusing mountaintop retreat, kind of Black Narcissus meets the Hoover Dam. We ended up turning previous sets into this set and vice versa to give us enough room to work with as we were filming.

Chris Teague: Episodes 4 and 5 were a cinematographer's dream because it's this sequence on this one planet where we transition from afternoon to late day. To sunset to last light, and then into night. That arc of the changing light over the course of the day also parallels the heightening tension of the episode in such a beautiful way. It was really fun to design specific looks that indicated to the audience that we're getting closer and closer to this really dangerous moment that these characters have been trying to avoid, which is getting stuck on this planet at night.

It's a tricky needle to thread—to find the right level of darkness that feels appropriately like night but that doesn't take away from the viewing experience. We have these phenomenal sets to work in. I wanted the audience to be able to see them and really to see the incredible action that we're photographing. There was a lot of testing, a lot of working with color, checking our levels and balancing it in post and comparing it to other scenes and other shows, making sure we were in what felt like the right range.

The jungle where Kelnacca lived was partly shot on the Portuguese island of Madeira and partly on an elaborately constructed set.

Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

In the spirit of the show, trying to work as practically as possible, we played with a lot of real effects. We built a setting sun in the background of one of our shots that was essentially a big circle of plywood wrapped in gold fabric that we hit with light to create this glow of a blood-red sun falling down through the trees. We had the moment when Mae finds Kelnacca in his shelter, and he's dead. That's the moment when the sun actually sets. So we put two big Tungsten Fresnel lights up on cranes and had them drop at just the right moment to perfectly amplify that exciting reveal and tension in that moment.

Ars Technica: The Portuguese island of Madeira, off the coast of Africa, is a new location for the Star Wars franchise. How much of the series was filmed there?

Kevin Jenkins: We originally went there because we needed a jungle for Kelnacca in episode 4, but it was only going to work for the exterior of the jungle. I was inspired by what they did in 1980 when they made a space forest for Yoda on Dagobah. I wanted to make our own version. The trees are like giant spider's webs or feet. I ended up taking over a soundstage and we built a massive forest that allowed five weeks' worth of shooting full of fauna and maybe 160 real trees, seven made trees, a full 360 painted backing so you couldn't shoot off the set. We misted up the ceiling, and it was full of thousands and thousands of ferns, and there was water running through it. We even had to provide a map to everybody when they first arrived on set, because it could be initially very confusing.

The secret island at the end of episode 1, where Mae walks toward the bad guy and you see that massive rock in the sea and the coast? That's all real; that's another part of Madeira. The other part shot on Madeira was at the beginning when they land on Olega. I made a 3-foot miniature in the art department of the spaceship, which is in the foreground before you see the city. Another location was about 20 minutes up the road from there, where she first lands on the planet Ueda, which has the Shinto gate. That's another piece of Madeira. There was this wonderful, amazing rocky volcanic beach. And then there were these desert-y bits and what looked like a Wild West bit as well. So we got value from Madeira. 

The snow in the dream sequence on Carlac "serves this great narrative transitional purpose."

Ars Technica: One of the more haunting scenes is Osha's dream sequence when she crash-lands on the frozen planet Carlac, particularly the snow and lighting effects.

Chris Teague: Snow is really helpful for us just in creating another layer within those scenes on Carlac. In the dream sequence, it serves this great narrative transitional purpose. We tried to design that dream sequence with as many practical transitions as possible, where we do a lateral camera move from one location to another location. We did this really fun lighting effect to transition from Osha just having a younger version of herself to waking up on the crashed ship. We put a white gauze fabric behind her that, when it has no light on it, you can see right through it. But as we slowly dimmed up the light, it wiped out the world behind her, creating this really fun practical transition where the snow is falling at the same time. So we're able to bridge all these worlds and this dream moment, and it's grounded and as handmade as possible.

Ars Technica: What do you hope audiences will take away from the experience of watching The Acolyte? 

Chris Teague: When I watch things, I like to experience it on many levels. Obviously, there's this really fun visual component where you're traveling to all these different planets. You're experiencing all these different worlds and creatures and incredible costumes and spaces. I want that to be a feast for the eyes. But the other thing that's really important is that people feel connected to the characters and they feel drawn in by the story. That's the thing that Leslye and I were really trying to stay true to. At its heart, this is a story about family, about relationships, about people reconciling themselves with decisions that they've made in the past and trying to grow and adapt and understand who they are. I feel like you can't have a great show without both the emotional component and the visual component. Hopefully, the two work together to heighten the experience.

New episodes of The Acolyte air each week through July 16, 2024, on Disney+.