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Hitting the Club Scene

July 19, 2001

If the Mos Eisley Cantina can be likened to a western saloon, then Episode II’s upcoming Coruscant nightclub is an entirely different class of watering hole altogether. Although thematically, the two have much in common — a gathering place for a variety of aliens from throughout the Star Wars galaxy — stylistically, it fell to Production Designer Gavin Bocquet and his crew to give the place a character all its own.

“With the nightclub we’re actually seeing environments that showcase the social life of Star Wars,” says Bocquet. “It’s quite nice to move into those sort of worlds and see how people enjoy themselves in our mad universe out there.”
Often, Bocquet and his crew build designs originating from concept sketches and models crafted by the Art Department. For the nightclub, the Art Department did indeed contribute detail and atmosphere sketches, but the shape of the place came from Bocquet’s crew. “That’s the set that really came from our end” says Bocquet. “There was concept work of environments and what may be in them — things like travel tubes and gaming tables — but there was nothing architecturally, so we sort of started from scratch.”

In addition to sketches, Bocquet’s unit crafted a number of architectural models detailing the working space of a nightclub movie set. “We produced four conceptual models for that set,” Bocquet says. These models, delivered early in preproduction while the script for Episode II was still being written, influenced the outcome of the scenes set in the nightclub. “George Lucas often uses the models when scripting,” explains Bocquet. “He uses them and the concept art to actually work out the scene in his head. He’ll pull parts of our models together and grab a bit from this one and put it on that one, and block out scenes and ideas.”

These models help Lucas work out logistically how the action will progress through a set, and how a camera crew will capture it. “You’re trying to get out of him what he feels he needs initially, as far as volume, and how he can use the space,” notes Bocquet. “It’s not necessarily about style at that point, but just how physically that space works in the filmmaking process. After that, we can start talking about how we detail the set. We came away from that first meeting and produced two or three greater models, which go up another scale.”

While adding details and décor, questions of style and ambience need to be answered. “Is it a very small bar? A jazz nightclub? Is it a rather grand, glitzy place? Is it a sort of a warehouse type environment in the back streets?” asked Bocquet. “George felt it used to be a very glitzy place, but it’s lost a bit of its former glory. So it’s definitely going to become a much more rundown environment.”

Once the set was constructed at Fox Studios Australia, colorfully costumed extras filled in the scene. Given the Coruscant setting, the crowd is appropriately more cosmopolitan than the Mos Eisley barflies. The nightclub also had many more female patrons, several of which can be seen in introductions to the on location video pieces found here.

The Episode II story also called for a section of nightclub exterior and a nearby alleyway, also realized by Bocquet and his crew. “It’s a big composite set for quite an exciting chase sequence that starts up in the skies of Coruscant and lands down in the bowels of the metropolis,” he describes. “There was a lot of discussion early on about how much of the exterior street we would have to build. Initially, we had quite a big Y-section of street where we had the full front of the nightclub plus a street off that where speeders land, and then another street that connected them all together at the back alley where the characters come out of the nightclub at the end.”

Once the sequence was storyboarded and blocked, the amount of required construction was reduced. The action focused on the front and rear entrances of the club, with the rest of the street scenes taken care of with stretches of flooring (nicknamed “techy” floors for their high-tech look) and bluescreen.

However, when production began, Lucas saw another alternative with sections of alley walls that Bocquet’s crew constructed. “He decided that it might be useful to have those as the wider street,” says Bocquet. “We actually picked up one side of the street and just moved it across about 20 or 30 feet, increasing the width of the floor. We then ended up with a much wider section of the street, where he did most of the chase sequences in there. I think everybody agreed — even John Knoll and ILM — that it’s much more useful at a given moment to have as much set as you can to cover most of the shots.”