While the clear focus of the interview is on the relentless negativity that bombarded Ahmed Best after his history-making performance as Jar Jar Binks, a barrage that brought the actor to the lowesr possible ebb, there is also the fact that his work on the Gungan general changed the face of digital cinema, a contribution that is still felt today as Ahmed explains.
“I was an enormous Star Wars fan as a kid,” says Best, speaking from LA (the Hollywood actors’ strike doesn’t apply to documentary podcasts). “I loved it so much that my mom went to the fabric store and made Star Wars pillowcases for us, Star Wars sheets, Star Wars clothes.” A couple of decades later, the actor and martial artist was performing with percussive dance troupe Stomp. After one show, he was approached by a casting director who wanted him to audition for a role. When he found out it would be at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch the next day, it blew his mind. “I didn’t know what was happening,” says Best. “I thought it was a prank.”
He turned up, walked through a faux-Victorian mansion filled with display cases containing original lightsabers, and was asked to try out for a role in new Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace – which involved acting like a salamander. He got the part as Jar Jar Binks’s body – the basis for the CGI animations that formed the character – only to talk the production into giving him a spoken role, using a voice he’d previously invented to entertain his young cousins. Soon, he was on set with Hollywood megastars, driving around with George Lucas – who became almost a mentor to him – and filming a role that effectively invented motion capture.
“We were doing something that was going to change cinema history,” says Best, of a collaboration with visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic that meant they had to create new programmes to capture what he was doing. This was the first time CGI had been used to generate a major movie character that spoke and interacted as though it were human.
“Even the software was written on my body,” says Best. “There’s still that legacy code in CGI packages today. My physical DNA is in every single CGI character since.”
Read the full interview, where Ahmed details his very public worst times, but also be very aware that the work Best did was groundbreaking, innovative, important and paved the path for his triumphant return as Kelleran Beq in The Mandalorian season 3.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Soule, Charles (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 31 Pages - 08/02/2023 (Publication Date) - Marvel (Publisher)
