The veteran sound artist was among the first crew members to work on the Star Wars prequel entry.
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….
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