With season three of The Mandalorian now out in the world and forging already towards mid-season, Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau sat down to chat with StarWars.com to discuss the past, the present, Grogu and much more besides surrounding the global phenomenon.
Favreau and Filoni are surprisingly insulated from the effects of helming a global phenomenon, a skill that Filoni has honed over 15 years of working in the Star Wars galaxy. “You know, George [Lucas] taught me, you’re telling the story you’re telling,” Filoni says when asked if the series’ success impacts his creative process now. “And I think we’re incredibly lucky that people have responded the way they do. I learned a long time ago, people just don’t like this because you stick the name Star Wars on it. That’s not good enough. You have to care. You have to put a lot of work into it.”
That starts with Favreau and Filoni, and their creative toy box and whiteboards, and ripples out to the rest of the cast and crew. “They love it. They research things. They find the right items to make the props. They put the extra time in to make the costumes. You know, Kathy Kennedy, she was adamant about the level of visual effects that this thing needed to have there. It has to be equal to a movie. Everybody invests in this. And so, you know, we are delivering something that we can be proud of and that we like as fans. At the end of the day, you can only make something that you really enjoy and hope that other people like it. But the response to Grogu, when people saw him and that was on a level that even though I’d been with Star Wars a while, I had never experienced anything like it. I think that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. You’re lucky if you’re ever a part of something like that. If anything, it puts more pressure on you because you know how many eyes are watching this. The expectation has grown. But it’s a privilege to have that.”
