Star Wars takes The Goonies to the edge of a galaxy far, far away

Stepping into the Star Wars universe is more than just walking onto a set. It involves picking up props, such as lightsabers, and meeting Jawas, and surrounding yourself with a “long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away” style of architecture which is, in wider popular culture, very familiar.

For actor Jude Law, who stars in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, walking onto the set was an emotionally rich moment, triggering childhood memories of his love of Star Wars, which had to find balance with his professional duty as an actor to keep things straight and serious on the set.

Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.Credit: Lucasfilm

“The little boy is very securely inside me, and I realise the older I get, this extraordinary and wonderful job I do keeps him very alive and needs him, you know,” Law says. “Because I think there’s a sense of play in acting that is rooted in the play that we had as children.

“Oddly, that’s my link also to Star Wars, that one of the things I remember playing the most was at the age of six, having seen this film, Star Wars, who am I? Am I Han? Am I Chewbacca? Am I Vader? Am I Luke? Running around, you know, pew-pewing each other.

“What surprised me was, not stepping in and going how do I believe in this, but the fact that I immediately believed in it because it was so familiar,” Law says. “Suddenly, you go, now I’m in Star Wars. Recognising that and understanding the rules, the rule book, but also the passion of the individuals who are the gatekeepers of that was wonderfully insightful and exciting.”

And the little boy? “Of course he poked his head up now and again,” Law says, laughing. “There were moments where I couldn’t help but get excited, being on a set where Jawas were walking around, I remember seeing those as a kid and being intrigued, the old language and the lit eyes, wondering were they bad guys?”

Heading into deep space in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.Credit: Lucasfilm

Created by Christopher Ford and Jon Watts, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is a coming-of-age story about four children who are lost in space and must embark on a great adventure to get home. It has vibes of The Goonies, but it is very much a Star Wars story, tapping into the wider mythology of the George Lucas-created, Disney-owned Star Wars story.

Though we bestow on Star Wars a kind of intellectual greatness, in fact, it uses an elementary story-telling rule book. And in many respects, particularly in its infancy, it almost colour-coded its ethical and moral signals. Princess Leia wore white, and Darth Vader wore black, and lightsabers were blue for Jedi and red for the evil Sith.

Unusually, in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, Law’s character Jod Na Nawood is presented somewhat ambiguously. He has been described as “a quick thinker who uses his charm to get out of different scenarios”, but that could as easily make him a rough analogue for Han Solo as it could for something more sinister. And the series’ trailer seems to suggest it could go either way.

“His ambiguity is key to his role in the piece as a whole and his relationship with the children,” Law says. “But I would go even further than that and say it’s almost his relationship with himself. There is, I would say, without hanging his hat on this, a little of Luke Skywalker, and a little of Han Solo.

Do the bad guys always wear black? Star Wars villain Lord Darth Vader.Credit: Lucasfilm

“He’s surviving and hasn’t had the clear sort of connection that, say, Luke Skywalker had, but surviving like Han Solo in a messy world,” Law says. “The journey with the kids, my backstory was that he didn’t really have a childhood, so he doesn’t treat the children like children, they’re just small adults, but he himself is actually a big child, and so they kind of fit in a funny way.

“Not to say that you don’t like him or you’re not meant to like him, but I want [the audience] to understand why he is making the decisions he makes,” Law adds. “Some of them are questionable and some of them aren’t questionable. But what I loved about the opportunity with the role is that he’s contradictory, he contradicts, and he’s full of contradictions himself.”

In a sense, Jod Na Nawood’s approach to the children – that he doesn’t treat them as children, but as small adults – inadvertently taps into one of the reasons that the Star Wars franchise became a global juggernaut in the first place. Back in 1977, creator George Lucas’ approach to storytelling was very much the same.

“It is cracking a code and having [George Lucas’ apprentice] Dave Filoni be one of your producers, is having George there in a way because it works so closely,” Watts says. “It’s a tonal thing to get, especially when you’re figuring out what the story is.” At the same time, Ford says, “you don’t want to try to copy Star Wars, but you want to try to copy the process.”

Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) with (from left) Wim (Ravi Cabot-Conyers), KB (Kyriana Kratter), Neel (Robert Timothy Smith) and Fern (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.Credit: Lucasfilm

The entry point to Star Wars, creatively, was also to tap into the various cultural touchpoints that influenced Lucas in the first place. Elsewhere, critics have pointed to Dune, and to Hidden Fortress. For Watts and Ford “we watched old pirate serials”, Watts says. “That was a way to sort of capture the pirate spirit in a way that felt Star Warsy.

“And that helps you crack a storytelling problem or figure out a tonal imbalance,” Watts says. “For us, it was figuring out what were the things that we loved, what were the genres that we were drawn to, and using those as an entry point to tell our own story within the story.”

One of the most earthly aspects of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew is that, like the new generation of Star Wars series such as The Mandalorian, the series uses a blend of real sets and digital sets shot in the 360-degree filming environment known as the Volume. What you see less and less are green screens, which more or less peaked with the CGI-heavy Star Wars prequels, released in 1999, 2002 and 2005.

Law’s perspective on the trend is almost unique; in addition to Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, he also starred in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was one of the first films to be shot almost entirely in a CGI environment. That is, a digital blue screen and overlaid digital backgrounds.

Vane (Marti Matulis) in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew.Credit: Lucasfilm

“I had no problem working on blue screen, and it feels sometimes like I’m talking a lot about play as a child, but on Sky Captain, I was excited about the idea of having to visually imagine everything,” Law says. “It was all in my head, and we were going off pictures, but it really was floating tennis balls and my car was a chair with a steering wheel in my hands.

“I think the rules now are very much try and lean towards the technology of those first three [Star Wars movies, from 1977-1984],” Law adds. “Certainly, in what the camera can do and in the interaction with props and ground and sets, it’s just so much more fulfilling for an actor to work on that.”

The Volume is something else again: a circular space which can create 360-degree wraparound digital sets. “I had a great experience on it, its flexibility is extraordinary,” says Law. “Walking on the surface of a small moon or landing on a docking bay of a vast port with hundreds of ships around you, if you can look around and see all of those things, it can’t help but feed you and feed your sense of belief.”

And the most magic part of it all? That much of the original Star Wars universe was production designed “on a budget, on a tight deadline, made out of junk, [just] made out of pieces,” says Ford. “So it has this amazing artistry and craft and genius to turning something from just some stuff into a spaceship wall.”

Much of the architectural code in Star Wars is subtly signposted, Watts adds. “It’s like rounding edges in certain shapes and the strength of certain shapes and putting them next to each other. As just a pure visual language, Star Wars is fascinating and so much of it was the process that it took to get there. It’s why there’s a werewolf in the cantina. They ran out of costumes.”

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew screens on Disney+ from Tuesday (December 3).

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