One of the many treats of following the adventures of The Mandalorian was the recreation of the original trilogy ‘look’ and feel, bringing back that OT aesthetic in such an authentic way it – along with Solo and Rogue One – sit in the same bracket as those classic three films. Production Designer Andrew L. Jones spoke about the design of the show and the challenges of creating that OT feel on a TV budget.
Despite having access to the latest digital technology, Jones wanted to ensure that the aesthetic of “The Mandalorian” wasn’t too perfect or too manufactured. It needed to match the look of the first “Star Wars” trilogy, especially “A New Hope,” and Favreau was clear that the visual effects shouldn’t overtake the storytelling.
“When you’ve got ILM on board, we can do anything,” Jones says. “You can have the most spectacular skies and spaceships and visual effects. But then it would start not to be the world of ‘Star Wars’ and the language of ‘Star Wars.’ Those original films were really ground-breaking stuff, but it had a simplicity to it. We are definitely trying to respect the original aesthetic.”
There are visual nods to the original trilogy throughout “The Mandalorian,” and re-creating the cantina was a particular challenge. Originally, the team wasn’t sure such a small set would work on the Volume, but in the end they were able to make an aged replica of the space that was half virtual and half built set.
“We wanted to be absolutely faithful to that set,” Jones says. “That was a bit of archaeology, finding what was there and how it was positioned and what would have happened in the intervening years that would have changed it. It’s not the exact same thing — it’s the same place but it’s later on. There’s going to be some storytelling in how things have changed since the fall of the Empire. Things have gone to seed a little bit.”
