Phantom at 25 | Iain McCaig Talks Darth Maul

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Concept and storyboard artist Iain McCaig was among the first to join Episode I’s art department and played a central role in designing many iconic characters.

By Lucas Seastrom

In 1995, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999) was still two years from starting principal photography and four years from release, but Lucasfilm’s art department at Skywalker Ranch was well underway creating designs and concepts for the innumerable characters, locations, and vehicles in the film. This included a new villain: Darth Maul.

“George [Lucas] just came up and said, ‘Darth Maul, he’s our new Sith Lord,’ and he walked away,” recalls artist Iain McCaig, who by that point had been working primarily on hero characters. “I didn’t know if Maul was male or female, an alien, anything. It freaked me out at the beginning that I didn’t get much direction. Then I realized that maybe he picked me because he liked my work and wanted me to show him what I thought a Darth Maul might look like. George clearly enjoys reacting to visuals. One of his many skills is that he can look at fifty things, make choices, move things around, take a head from this character and put it on the body of that one over there, and suddenly, it’s Star Wars. We learned to trust him and also to trust ourselves.”…

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