The first running of FanXLIVE took place over the weekend of 5th – 6th October at the Farnborough International Exhibition Centre, and across the weekend I was fortunate enough to host two panels. On the Saturday I sat down with Hugh Quarshie, Marc Silk and Andy Secombe to talk all things The Phantom Menace and on the Sunday I was joined by John Fensom, Jack Parker, Jake Lunt Davies, Dickie Beer, Hassan Taj, Lee Towersey, Lynn Robertson Bruce and Brian Herring for the Droids Panel.
MARK NEWBOLD: Hello everybody, welcome to the Star Wars Droids panel. We’ve got eight people on stage and half an hour to get through it, so I’m going to pass the mic down and let everybody introduce themselves to give you a flavour of what they did on their respective shows. I shall start with you, Brian.
BRIAN HERRING: Hello, I’m Brian Herring I was the principal performer on BB-8 on episodes 7, 8 and 9 and I and did various other puppets and droids throughout the new Disney movies.
LYNN ROBERTSON BRUCE: Hi, my name is Lynn Robertson Bruce, I’m a puppeteer and I ‘m best known for D-0 on The Rise of Skywalker.
LEE TOWERSEY: Hi, I’m Lee Towersey, I built R2-D2 for The Force Awakens and for the last twelve years have been building and operating droids.
HASSAN TAJ: Hi, I’m Hassan Taj, I also played Artoo in The Rise of Skywalker, I did Bazil in The Acolyte as well as being droids in other projects.
DICKIE BEER: I’m Dickie Beer, I’m not a droid (LAUGHTER) but I was five different characters in Return of the Jedi.
JAKE LUNT DAVIES: I’m Jake Lunt Davies, I’ve worked on all the films with Neal Scanlan designing droids and creatures, I designed BB-8, D-0, B2 and thousands of aliens for the sequels.
JACK PARKER: Hi, I’m Jack Parker and I played PIP in The Acolyte.
JOHN FENSOM: My name is John Fensom, I played the protocol droid TC-14 and a couple of other protocol droids in The Phantom Menace.
MARK NEWBOLD: So, because we want to give people a flavour of what your experiences were like on the films, if you had to go back and pick a moment from your time on the films, what do you think that moment might be?
BRIAN HERRING: I was a huge fan going in, so to be involved in it even slightly was a big deal, but to actually get something that was so universally liked as BB-8 was a fairly big deal. One of the really odd, surreal moments was when Dave Chapman (who was the other puppeteer for BB-8) and I were in the desert and we’d just done a very long run. We did it practically, so I pushed this thing in very, very, very hot weather in a green nylon suit, and we finished and went for a bit of a rest when I heard a very odd noise. I said to Dave ‘did you hear that?’ We looked out and across the Salt flat like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia was a British ice cream van, in Abu Dhabi, coming through the haze. J.J. Abrams had bought an ice cream van for everybody, and it pulled up and started giving out free ice creams. It was just part of the very surreal life of doing a Star Wars film.
LYNN ROBERTSON BRUCE: I’m not sure, but I think I will say that my most memorable deal was the very first day I shot on D-0, which was on location shoot up. Until that thing I hadn’t really been involved in the droids. I’d done a lot of puppet and creature work on Star Wars and it was a thrill to actually start shooting outside where they had an air embargo because they didn’t want anyone to take any photos or anything.
LEE TOWERSEY: Many happy memories, but my most memorable one was again on location. It was at Greenham Common, and I was remote controlling R2-D2. This was for The Force Awakens. You didn’t see the scene unfortunately, but I had to drive R2-D2 up the Millennium Falcon ramp. There was a stunt man at the top ready to catch him because I couldn’t see where he was going. We shot it a few times successfully and Anthony was on set, and he was looking for me apparently. I was hiding behind crates, and luckily my boss was with me, Neal Scanlan. Anthony had sought me out to compliment me on the driving because of the remote-control work and the quality of the build, I hit the mark every time, so Anthony came to find me, which is quite nice because he’s worked with quite a few difficult R2-D2’s.
HASSAN TAJ: Loads of happy memories from the first time I went into Artoo. It was at the back of Black Park, the whole of the CFX (Creature Effects) team were there, they all kindly cheered. That was my favourite memory.
JAKE LUNT DAVIES: I work behind the scenes a lot, so I’m sitting in an office creating things and one of the best things that I think happened was that my daughter, who was seven at the time of the earlier sequels, she tried to draw and create the aliens herself. Every so often I’d take her little drawings and make them into sort of professional looking designs and eventually one got picked and made and I think it appeared in Solo and then went on to pop up and we keep seeing in The Mandalorian. And I love the fact that I managed to get one of her designs into Star Wars.
JACK PARKER: I’m quite new to Star Wars but I’ve been a Star Wars fan since I can remember and sort of spend my whole childhood pretending to fly ships and wave lightsabers and shoot blasters and that sort of thing. There was a day where myself and Josh Lee found ourselves preparing to shoot a scene in this little single cockpit and we had to find a way to put PIP in the cockpit on our own, and I said to Josh, can you just give me 10 minutes, and I and I sat in that cockpit and pretended to fly around like I was 6 years old again.
JOHN FENSOM: I guess the best memory was being directed by George Lucas. He came in and I remember he grabbed my clothes and was pulling me around…. I mean, not in an aggressive way, and he said right, I want you to go here, there and everywhere, I was a bit nervous. I want you to hit your marks here. I could hardly see anything in the costume. We did the first take, and he said, ‘Oh well done, John, that was great’ and he said I’m done. That’s pretty cool, thank you very much.
MARK NEWBOLD: What you guys do is technically intense and there’s a lot involved, a lot of repetition to make sure things work. Is there a moment when you really felt like you’d hit the wall and then you clicked and worked it out. I can think of one for you Brian, the steps in Force Awakens.
BRIAN HERRING: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dave Chapman and I had about two weeks to come up with BB-8’s movement vocabulary, and we tried all sorts of things, and we tried stairs. BB-8 is too wide to work on normal stairs, so we were promised categorically he would never have to do stairs, ever. So we got onto the set of Maz’s castle and we did the set walk through on the Monday. There’s this big spiral staircase, and we said to the second we don’t have to do the stairs, and he said no, no, the boss doesn’t want you to do stairs.
We turn up on the Wednesday and he said, yeah, J.J wants to start at the top of stairs. Well, you told us no stairs, so we had to come up with a very, very fast way of BB-8 doing stairs. Luckily, it was a spiral staircase, so they were quite wide, and then I made a very quick decision that BB-8 doesn’t like stars as a character. Stairs are his nemesis, so if you look at that shot when Rey was coming down when the lightsaber was calling to her she’s just walking down, but BB-8 is checking every single step and he’s going down it like he’s on his backside like a toddler. He checks and he looks and he goes BONK, and then he checks and looks and goes BONK again. We did it a few times. We started off, just do two or three (stairs), then we’d go back a bit further, and we’ve got 20 steps. We must have taken this thing up and down those stairs a good 5, 6, 7, 10 times in green nylon lumping him up and down until we got it right, so yeah, that was a tricky one.
LEE TOWERSEY: The Last Jedi, the first time we see R2-D2 on the Millennium Falcon. It was my first day on set on that film with Rian Johnson. The first thing you see is Artoo. He turns his head, drives towards Luke and projects the Leia message, and we were working the shot out, ready to shoot, off we go, cameras rolling, action, the cameras kept rolling, Artoo didn’t move, nothing happened. Mark Hamill is patiently waiting, still nothing happened. Cut, cut – what’s happened Lee? I forgot to turn the remote control on, and then the first AD (Assistant Director) Jamie Christopher, God bless him, he’s no longer with us, he looked at me and said ‘you’re allowed one mistake. Poor form, you used it up very quickly.’ That was a memorable day.
DICKIE BEER: I do have a funny story. On Return of the Jedi, you remember the scene where Mark Hamill gets on the (Sail) barge deck and starts knocking people out of the way. One of them was a Gamorrean Guard, he knocks him down and finally gets to Princess Leia, picks her up and they swing away from the barge and there’s a big explosion. Well, when we were doing that scene I was that Gamorrean Guard and Mark Hamill comes in, knocks me out and I’m on the floor and then it’s a cut and I couldn’t get up because the suit, it’s a huge head and I’ve got extended arms so I could not get up myself, so three guys had to come in and pick me up, put me back on my feet and then go for take 2.
So, take 2, Mark Hamill comes in, knocks me out and on the floor and cut, the three guys come in and they pick me up again and they say let’s go for take 3. So OK, here we go again and action, take 3, Mark Hamill comes in, he knocks me out, I’m on the floor, they call cut, and then they call lunch.
Lunch on a film set is crazy because everybody runs for the kitchen because they want to be there first. They don’t want to stand in line for half an hour to only have 15 minutes to eat your food, so everybody took off…including the two guys that were supposed to pick me up. So here I am on the floor, screaming my head off and nobody can hear me because it’s this huge face, and I’m breathing my own air and it’s 120 degrees, no shade and I passed out. I’m done.
Next thing I know, I wake up. The head is off and I’m looking at Princess Leia, and she’s slapping me in the face. This is Princess Leia as she was in the scene in her slave outfit. So, what happened was I was supposed to meet her in her trailer because we had to go through a scene that we were going to do the next day and she was in the same scene where I got knocked out, so when I didn’t turn up in the trailer, she realised that I was still up there on the deck. She came back to the set with two guys and woke me up. She literally saved my life because I probably would not have made it one hour passed out in that in that heat, rebreathing my own air. So, there’s a funny story, but at the same time, she saved my life. (APPLAUSE FROM THE CROWD)
MARK NEWBOLD: Many of you are either involved with numerous characters, have a single lead character or have inherited characters. Tell us a bit about the reactions to your characters.
BRIAN HERRING: Mine is BB-8, because this was just the most fun I ever had. It was our little secret for about two years, because I started on The Force Awakens in 2013 and it didn’t come out until Christmas of 2015. We all knew about it, but we couldn’t tell anybody, and then the trailer dropped, and this thing rolled through, and everyone was like, that’s not real. And I knew that this thing was real I was in there pushing this through the desert. Well, the initial reaction was Disney have made a toy commercial and it’s all CGI and we knew that they hadn’t and it wasn’t, so for about 20 minutes the Internet were quite mardy about it, and then it swung around when the second trailer came out and Mark Hamill started Tweeting about it.
I didn’t know quite how big it was until I was doing a different film out in Mumbai and I’d walked down for the sake of this conversation what I’ll call Mumbai High Street, and BB-8 was in shop windows in India. This is crazy big, just massive. It was the biggest selling toy that Christmas. It was mad, absolutely bonkers.
LYNN ROBERTSON BRUCE: So mine comes from today. One of my smaller characters was Albrekh, the Sith alchemist that puts the helmet together, and a chap came up today and told me how he loved that character. That character was probably only onscreen for 20 seconds, 30 seconds maybe, it’s like a tiny moment, and it meant so much to him. That actually, really moved me, that my work can do that to someone.
LEE TOWERSEY: Mine’s R2-D2. I’m only a custodian of Artoo so I’ve got nothing to say about that, but it was fascinating as a fan coming into the industry (TURNS TO ADDRESS BRIAN) to watch BB-8 grow and the way we knew what was going on, but then to see it explode, that was a fascinating journey for me to observe, for sure.
HASSAN TAJ: With mine it was with Bazil in The Acolyte. I had someone come over today and he said that he thought that Bazil was carrying the show, so it’s just really nice to hear something like that and it’s positive hearing feedback from people. And I just really enjoyed it.
JAKE LUNT DAVIES: I’ve designed a lot of creatures and a lot of droids and I come to places like this, or I see things on the Internet and it still blows me away to see a little kid wearing a BB-8 T-shirt. I look at that and I think well OK, it’s a product of various peoples creativity, but there are elements in that that which came out my hands and my head and it’s there on that T-shirt or it’s in a cosplay. The top thing is if I see somebody has drawn a creature or a droid that I designed, or gone to the effort themselves to dress up or to draw and create something out of it just blows me away. That was the pinnacle, more than seeing it on screen. That’s kind of expected and even though it was pretty amazing you kind of know that’s part and parcel, but when are you extending to cultural awareness it’s so exciting. I love it.
JOHN FENSOM: I had a slightly challenging relationship with my role, certainly when it first came out because The Phantom Menace was widely anticipated but it wasn’t what everybody thought it would be, and wasn’t until a couple of years ago I said to somebody that I said I had a challenging relationship with it and then they said you were the first character to ground us in the Star Wars universe in Phantom Menace, you were the first character that I could relate to the original ones. For me that was a lightbulb moment, so that’s a lovely thing to hear and a privilege to have been part of it, so I have a much better relationship with it and less imposter syndrome as well.
MARK NEWBOLD: Dickie, you came into the original trilogy, so maybe the legend of Star Wars wasn’t quite what it became years later. John, you came into the prequel trilogy and everybody else got involved in the sequel trilogy and beyond. What does it mean to you guys now to be a part of something that’s so ingrained into the cultural zeitgeist? It’s not just a film, it’s not just a TV show, it’s Star Wars, so what does that mean to you guys?
JOHN FENSOM: For me it moves with each generation. The first generation grew up with the originals and that generation introduced their kids to the prequels and so on, and I think that’s what’s so amazing about it is the universal love and the connection and the relationships, the friends you make, but also that parents can connect with their children over the same love. Coming to conventions is a beautiful thing because you see this as a safe space, express yourself and you see generations coming together and sharing the love of one thing. There’s a lot of horrible stuff going on out there and if you can celebrate a combined love of something, then who doesn’t want to be a part of that?
JACK PARKER: Star Wars has been such a big part of my life since I was little, and on a personal level to have worked on something that lives in that universe and to have been on those sets and kind of helped create new work in that world is one of the greatest privileges I’ve ever had. And I will remember it for the rest of my life.
JAKE LUNT DAVIES: Not sure I can top that but similar sentiments. As a child, I grew up with this, and as a child it would have been a dream job, a job that I never expected to find myself doing. And here I am (LAUGHS) Still insane, it’s just crazy.
DICKIE BEER: You’ll not believe this, but about 18 years ago, my daughter came home from school, and she was about 10 or 11 somewhere around there, and she tells me ‘Daddy, you’re famous’. I go ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘There’s a kid in school and he has a book about Star Wars, and you’re in it as one of the people who played Boba Fett.’ And I said, ‘Who’s Boba Fett?’ She showed me the picture and I said oh yeah, I remember putting on that costume. It was so long ago, and in that movie I played four more characters. She said ‘No, no, no, Boba Fett is the one that makes you famous.’ I said ‘OK. Fine. Thank you, bye’ and that was it.
I have never saw any of the Star Wars movies because I worked on them and for me, when you watch a movie, there’s a story being told. I watch a movie being made, and that’s not as much fun. I know what doesn’t end up on the screen, and I’m always disappointed. So until 18 years ago I totally forgot about the movie that I worked on, which was Return of the Jedi.
HASAAN TAJ: With me it’s more of a generational thing. I think the Star Wars universe is always accepting of everyone, and that that’s why I like it, so that’s a really good thing. I just felt like it was very welcoming and it’s just really cool, how accepting everyone is of appearance or how they choose to live their life.
LEE TOWERSEY: Star Wars was the first film I ever saw in 1977. Again, little did I know I’d be working on it. I didn’t start working on Star Wars until I was 40. The thing I got from it most is the people. Not just the great stuff that was made, but the people I work with. Some of my best friends are in the industry, just the whole camaraderie and everything about the job itself, and what goes on behind of scenes, it’s just amazing to be part of.
LYNN ROBERTSON BRUCE: So, my introduction to Star Wars was with Brian (HERRING) on a job we were doing. He said to me ‘You know Star Wars?’ and I said yeah, and he said, ‘You know that bit…’ and I said I know of Star Wars, but I have not seen them. So, he took it upon himself every lunchtime and we had movie hour, and I was introduced to Star Wars which was some time before I got involved. He was the person who got me involved in Star Wars, and to be honest I don’t think I realised quite what I was getting into. Our job is absolutely amazing, every single one of us just enjoys what we’re doing and the fact that we’re part of a larger team of people who enjoy talking about it, it’s just the best thing ever.
BRIAN HERRING: What she’s missed out of this story (LYNN LAUGHS) is that we were watching lots of different films, because Lynn didn’t go to the movies in the 80’s I said you seen Star Wars, and she said no. We saw the first one and she said, ‘there’s more of these?’ and I said yeah, so we did The Empire Strikes Back the next day and we go to that bit at the end where that guy in the helmet says that thing…I don’t want to spoil this for anybody, and Lynn said ‘it’s not true is it?’ It was about 2008 and it was brilliant because I got to see stuff like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark with someone who had never seen them before and it was like watching for the first time. It was a lovely, lovely job.
I am wearing a shirt that was the same as the curtains I had when I was a kid, and that kind of sums this up for me. I had a school report when I was 10 that said Brian’s obsession with Star Wars will lead him nowhere and he should concentrate on his academic studies. Well, I didn’t and it did. That was sound advice obviously, so stay in school kids. I almost worked on The Phantom Menace with Phil Eason who did Yaddle, but that didn’t work out in the end, and then I got to come and do Star Wars with Han Solo and Chewbacca and Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and we got to mess about on the Millennium Falcon. I got to beep at Daisy Ridley, and it meant absolutely everything to me. It will remain the high point of my career, no matter what I end up doing after this cause once you’ve done that, what else to do, you know. It’s just been amazing.
MARK NEWBOLD: Well, this has a treat for me, big round of applause for these fine people.
You can hear the first of our interviews from FanX LIVE on the 205th episode of Making Tracks as we chat with The Last Jedi Caretaker performer Cecily Fay. Stay tuned for much more from FanX LIVE throughout October and November on Making Tracks.
