The recent Fan Expo Boston saw Ewan McGregor asked onstage which was his favourite lightsaber fight, and the one-on-one fight in The Phantom Menace between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul came out topps, a sequence that ultimately saw director George Lucas abandon his mantra of ‘faster, more intense,’ and instead requested that the action be slower, as the speed of the action was too fast to be believable as McGregor explains.
“When Qui-Gon’s been cut down, that… it goes up a notch there. All of that fight was amazing to do, getting stuck behind the laser doors and all that stuff. But that part, it’s just next level.”
“When me and Ray did that fight… George — I’ve got to get this right — over-cranked. We used to shoot on film, and you can adjust the speed that the film’s going through the camera. If you want it to be slow motion, you make the camera run really fast so when you play it back, it’s in slow motion.”
“I remember hearing him saying, ‘They’re going too fast. Slightly over-crank the camera.’ So they over-cranked the camera to make it slightly slower because me and Ray were so fast doing this fight. He was worried that people wouldn’t believe it.”
“With me and Hayden in the prequels, or me and Ray Park in this case, we were fighting with lightsaber handles with no guard… and they were made of metal. There was a guy, I wish I could remember his name, but there was a guy who had this mobile cart that went from stage to stage. His only job was to replace the blades on the lightsabers after we’d fought a take. By the time me and Hayden fought a take, both of our lightsaber blades were totally bent.”
“They were made of metal: metal tubing, some kind of alloy, I guess. But we went at it so hard that… George would go, ‘Cut,’ and you’d look down, and your lightsaber would be a big bent shape. So this guy would replace the blade on it every take. You can imagine how hard we were going at it.”
