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.
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.
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.
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