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.
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?
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.
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