Next month sees the long-awaited arrival of The Art of The Mandalorian (Season 2) and author Phil Szostak discusses his favourite designs and his journey writing the book with StarWars.com.
StarWars.com: How did working on the Season 2 book compare to doing it for Season 1?
Phil Szostak: It’s not totally different. The art department rolled from one season to the other. I think one of the biggest struggles with writing one of these books is just going back in time, and remembering the sequence of events, especially in the midst of the pandemic lockdown.
I started this book last September. This is the first book I’ve ever written on my work laptop at home, talking to everyone on Zoom calls or on the phone. So, that was a new experience and definitely a challenge.
StarWars.com: So, I’m going to ask you to go back in time again! [Laughs] I think one of the things I really loved about the second season was I felt like it was this really wonderful mix of familiar places and experiences with completely new ones. Thinking about like a place like Tatooine, which is a well-trod planet, I suppose, for Star Wars fans, and yet we had a completely new experience there. From an art perspective, how did everyone go about really building out this Western outpost in Mos Pelgo?
Phil Szostak: That was a particular challenge. [Lucasfilm VP and executive creative director] Doug [Chiang] expresses it in the book. It would have been so easy for them to just lean on the history of the design of that place, which was influenced by Tunisian architecture — which has now become fully integrated into the architectural aesthetic of Star Wars in general — and focus mostly on where the filming locations were near the island of Djerba. Those very specific buildings there that have those like, soft corners and buttresses on the outside and all that stuff. It’s just become such an integral part of Star Wars. And that was just a function of where they found themselves shooting the first film.
I think looking for something different and letting the story kind of lead the way in a sense [was the method]. You know, this krayt dragon plowing its way under the town and down the main street lends itself to the idea of raised boardwalks. Just bringing that boardwalk aesthetic alone is reflective of a lot of Western films. And the Western aesthetic is a huge part of Tatooine in general. Putting those pieces together and creating this fairly unique-looking, one-bantha town that was also a pretty typical Western frontier town. There’s one street down the middle of it. And we have really a handful of buildings, and then it peters out. And giving that sense that these are people that are having to personally deal with this crisis because they’re so remote and far away from the more populous cities.
It’s a feedback loop that we’re always nurturing, between the writing and art. So that was kind of a nice evolution, and, you know, a way to both honor the aesthetic of Tatooine and make sure that fans felt grounded in something that they already knew, but also bring something new to it.
