10 Things We Gleaned From Rick Heinreichs On Creating The Look Of Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Bringing The World Of The Last Jedi To Life

♦ Star Wars: The Last Jedi is still doing great business at the box office and here’s 10 things we learnt from its production designer Rick Heinrichs about how he created its look…

1. It was important for Heinrichs to stick to the visual feel of Star Wars but update it for forty years later:”Star Wars: The Last Jedi features a visual aesthetic rooted in Star Wars traditions, but modernized. There’s the graphic red and white of Crait, a decidedly different take on a Star Wars planet. The sleek and elegant ships and interiors of the First Order, which recall the Empire but are darker and bolder.”
2. Unusually for films, Star Wars: The Last Jedi isn’t that radically different from what director Johnson wrote a few years ago when he was first brought on board, Heinrichs recalls:”What was interesting was, Rian, when we met initially, he gave me like a good 30-minute pitch about the movie. And the amazing thing is we’re here three years later and, basically, the movie is, by and large the same movie he pitched me three years ago, which is so unusual. I think that I chalk that up to a combination of a writer-director, which is also pretty unusual in our industry.”
3. The filmmakers intention was to create as much as they could for the film in front of the camera and this was there from the start:”We were all trying to get as much in-camera as possible, so that nothing ever took the audience out of that moment, and that there was always almost that documentary-style immediacy to the proceedings. Lucas started that. It’s all very much his ethos of making the audience feel like they’re entering into a very specific moment and being introduced at lightning speed to characters who have to figure out where they’re going from there.”
4. The production designer sees a particular approach which marks something out as a Star Wars film:”I could probably describe it, but I think the most important thing about it is the fact that we all respond to it as, “That’s Star Wars!” And there’s just absolutely no mistaking that for Star Trek or something else. It’s an almost simplistic and a metaphorical approach to graphic shapes, space ships, the sharp angles and dagger-like quality of the Empire/First Order shapes, and the more curvilinear and somewhat friendlier shapes that you want to associate with the rebels and the Resistance.”
5. He does stick to a specific way of working on things like a Star Wars film: “My approach is, usually, to find the toughest things that we’re going to have to approach and just sort of hit them all at the same time, even if we’re just picking away at them, trying to figure out exactly how to approach them, even if they’re not necessarily revealing themselves right away.”
6. It was important for Kylo Ren to have his own ship which felt distinctly his, Heinrichs reveals:”he TIE fighters are an iconic part [of Star Wars] and they were very intentionally updated for number VII, for J.J. [Abrams]’s film, and they looked really cool and it was used in a really great way for that film. But we felt it was very important for Kylo to have kind of a signature look in the same way, really, that Darth Vader did in A New Hope when he suddenly appears [in the space battle climax]. We wanted that to have a bit of the same impact that that vehicle did at that time.”
7. It was also essential that the new-look TIE fighters could sit comfortably with the classic ones while still feeling more contemporary, so if they connect in the long run the same way the old ones did, he would be very pleased:”One of the things that happens with our popular culture is very strong, popular culture elements like the TIE fighters and all the Star Wars stuff, really almost become a part of the signature zeitgeist, graphic base of a period. And I think that’s certainly true of that time, and if that’s the case for the stuff that we were developing for number VIII as well, that would be fantastic.“
8. Elements like the bridge on the Resistance ship were things that they gave a lot of thought to here:”It is clean and it’s something we thought a lot about. There were a lot of different influences, and certainly one of them is Admiral Ackbar’s vehicle [from Return of the Jedi], but within the context of our film, the cleanliness is going to make sense. I can’t really tell you any more about it for that reason. But it ends up getting contrasted in a very believable way.”
9. He had a very specific vision in mind when it came to Snoke’s ship too: “We always called it the Mega Destroyer. We put a check on ourselves in terms of just having inflation happening to the design. We weren’t just trying to make things bigger and just trying to best everything by making it a bit bigger than before. I think it’s very important when you’re trying to impress the audience with the character of the Empire and the First Order, that they’re associated with something mammoth.”
10. He finds it hard to pick out just one design he is most proud of on The Last Jedi: “Several! I think the look of this film is extraordinary and I can take a certain amount of credit as a production designer, but one of the great advantages of working on a Star Wars film like this is that there is a legacy of people for who Star Wars just went down deep in their psyche. They just know it, and they know what it feels like and what’s right about it, and it inspired them to draw at an early age, and it made them into amazing artists.”

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