As part of their ‘Phantom at 25’ series, the official Star Wars site has spoken with Skywalker Sound’s Matthew Wood, who has expressed his love for The Phantom Menace, and recalls it as his favourite film to work on.
The first person to watch the initial assembly of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace(1999) wasn’t director George Lucas. It was then-25-year-old Matthew Wood of Skywalker Sound. As he tells StarWars.com, picture editors Ben Burtt and Paul Martin Smith had spent weeks with Lucas at Skywalker Ranch compiling the first rough version of Episode I. Hours long and far from the refined cut that audiences would see, it was up to Wood to review it and make notes about voices that needed recording.
“Paul and Ben ran out their sequences on video tapes for me,” Wood recalls, “and as I walked into their office, they were all stacked up really high on the table. George Lucas said, ‘Well, here you go, Matt. You’re the first person that’s going to watch the whole movie from beginning to end.’” George was obviously watching everything between the two editing rooms, but they hadn’t screened the movie in its entirety yet. This was the first output of the movie, and I had it in my hands. The Ranch has these bikes so we can ride between the buildings, and I put all the tapes in the front basket and rode back to the Tech Building.
“I got paranoid about security, not that anything could actually happen,” Wood continues, “but I sort of put something to block the door. This was the first time that someone had watched a new Star Wars movie since 1983, and I actually did call my mother and tell her what I was doing! It was several hours long with a lot of temp material. Even though I’d seen the designs and read the script, just seeing it was different. Everything was so new in this film. There was a lot to take in. There was no John Williams music and bluescreen everywhere. The movie was this new way of doing Star Wars, for sound and everything. I understood how big the project was and it lit a fire under me.”
To read the rest of a fascinating insight into the making of the film, head on over to the official site.
