If the name John Knoll is unfamiliar to you, you need to pay a bit more attention to the credits of some of your favorite films. For the purposes of this particular story, Knoll is the executive producer and visual effect supervisor of ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. But most importantly, he also has a story credit, which is a shorthand way of saying that, not long after Disney got ownership of Lucasfilm, Knoll walked into Kathleen Kennedy’s office with the outline of a story he’d been long gestating on for a movie that took place between the primary episodic STAR WARS timeline. And before long, he heard back that they were interested in developing it.
Knoll has been a staple at Industrial Light & Magic for 30 years, beginning as a technical assistant and soon moved over to a motion control camera operator position for CAPTAIN EO. He also had a major hand in the effects for James Cameron’s THE ABYSS and won an Oscar for being visual effect supervisor on PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN’S CHEST (he has been nominated five additional times since then).
Knoll has also worked in a supervisory capacity on the STAR WARS prequels, MISSION TO MARS, STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE–GHOST PROTOCOL, and PACIFIC RIM, among many others. Oh, and he and his brother Thomas also created Photoshop in 1987, so there’s that. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Knoll briefly in the the ILM offices to talk about his initial ideas (and title) for ROGUE ONE, as well as the ever-changing and anticipatory role of an effects team in the movie-making business. It was a real honor to be in the room with this true legend. Please enjoy my chat with John Knoll…
Capone: Hi, John. Great to meet you.
John Knoll: Nice to meet you.
Capone: So you’re the reason we’re all here today. Somebody clued me into the fact that you had a different title for this that is not the title we know.
JK: The original treatment I wrote, the title I put on it was DESTROYER OF WORLDS, and that draft, there were some political themes that were in the story about the rebellion, there’s a little bit of political paralysis inside the rebellion, because there are two major factions that disagree about what the whole purpose of the rebellion is and how you act on that purpose. There’s one faction that feels like the whole purpose of the rebellion is to apply political and military pressure on the Empire to force them to reform, and “We’re making it expensive for them to continue with these abuses, and eventually they’re going to have to negotiate and come back, and we’re going to make things better by negotiation. That means we can’t do anything that will be unforgivable. You can’t do something that’s a war crime, because we’re going to have to reconcile with these people eventually.”
And there’s another faction that knows the true nature of the Empire, and knows that any overtures they’re making to negotiate is them just stalling for time, because they are never going to agree on a political solution. The only way forward is total military defeat, so we have to do what’s necessary to stop this evil. Because they can’t agree on tactics, it’s a bit like Congress, where it’s a gridlock. It was not until the rebellion discovers evidence that the Death Star is real, it’s really been built—a weapon that’s only purpose is genocide and they intend to use it—does that settle a lot of those questions and bring everybody together in a united goal, and the rebellion becomes the alliance that we see in the later films. That’s where that came from; it’s our commentary on the morality of weapons of destruction.
Capone: There’s a scene here in the film where that discussion is happening, and there are still hold outs who think going after the Empire is the wrong move without more definitive proof.
JK: Oh yeah, that theme survived. It was still important to us that there are still factions inside the rebellion that can’t really come to agreement, so that threat is still there.
Capone: Of the seven pages that you came to Kathleen Kennedy with all those years ago, how much of that is there in ROGUE ONE?
JK: Oh, 50 percent or so.
Capone: That’s not bad actually. Was it still a war film? Were you still pulling from NAVARONE and SEVEN SAMURAI. Was that still all part of the DNA?
JK: Yeah, those were some of the references I used when I was pitching it. There was a little bit more of an espionage thriller, and maybe even a caper film. There were elements of OCEAN’S ELEVEN and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE in what I pitched originally. It evolved into more of a straight-out war film. Some of those changes I think were pretty good.
Capone: Was there always a female lead?
JK: Oh, yeah. Jyn Erso was in my first draft.
Capone: That’s great. Why was that important to you?
JK: Well, I’ve got three daughters, and they were all young when I was working on the prequels. They all really liked STAR WARS, but there were certainly limited options for strong female characters to identify with, and I felt like it couldn’t hurt to have another female lead. And I had written this while script development was going on for Episode 7, so I didn’t know there was going to be a female protagonist in Episode 7 when I pitched this idea.
Capone: Just from the demos we got today, I realized that visual effects aren’t something that are just done in post-production any more. They’re done pre-, they’re done during, and then you’re just polishing it off after it’s all pieced together. It’s amazing how much work is not only done before but also in anticipation of a particular director’s style. There’s a learning curve with each new director. Can you talk a little bit about Gareth’s approach, and what you designed to factor in his style?
JK: Maybe the best example of that comes from—I’d seen MONSTERS, I’d seen GODZILLA, and he’s got a bit of a documentarian flavor to the way he covers things. We did a pre-shoot where he was trying to pitch to all the rest of the crew how he wanted to shoot, which is a little unconventional. I think that a lot of the crew is used to walking on set and being told, “Alright, first set up is going to be this direction. We’re going to shoot this, and then we’re going to shoot the close-ups.” And Gareth wanted to be a little more vague about that stuff. We’d come on to set, and there would only be very general blocking that the actors had, and we wanted to let them have some freedom to find what felt natural to them.
And then since he’s his own camera operator, he’s going to go in and start fishing around for “What are the right angles? What feels like a good composition?” So he doesn’t really storyboard that kind of stuff in advance. Part of his brilliance is being able to look through that viewfinder and find what feels like the true, best angles for this stuff. Watching that, the first take or two are just total chaos, because he’s just like “That looks weird.” A lot of the actors are performing and he’s like, “Wait, wait, can you start over again?” And they’d start over again. What happens is, the first few takes look like total chaos, and then he starts figuring out what he likes and what works, and then they start getting smoother as they go on, and then we eventually evolve into more conventional coverage to get “I need a close here, and a close there, and a two shot here.” It’s an unusual way of working, but that unplanned, vérité style, I thought that could be really cool in the STAR WARS universe. It’s almost like you’re witness a documentary that’s in that environment.
So I got thinking about, for example, the space battle. That’s a scene where we’re not going to be using a lot of live plates. There’s going to be a lot of action that’s entirely synthetic, and how do we get that kind of tone, that vibe, that energy that Gareth has in those scenes as well? So I pitched it to Gareth the idea of why don’t we do these with virtual cameras on our motion capture stage? We’ll animate these scenes independent of camera, we’ll block them out, and we’ll have that scene playing live on the stage. We’ll give you a virtual camera, then you can do the same thing. You can go around, fish around, find those angles, and we can record camera moves, and you can walk out of those sessions with dailies that you can then take into post. So we tried to design a workflow that played to Gareth’s comfort zone and his strength to make sure that the style of the movie was consistent from the live action into the scenes that were largely virtual.
Capone: When you’re first coming up with this, you’re doing so because you love this universe. I love that there are no Jedis in this movie, but they’re obviously still an important part of this world. What did you want to pull from and use and manipulate in ways that maybe we hadn’t seen in this universe, with very few of the touchstones that we are used to seeing in a STAR WARS movie?
JK: Well, specifically about there not being Jedi, for me, I felt pretty strongly that the story that takes place in Episode III and the purge of the Jedi, but before Episode IV when Obi-Wan comes out of hiding and starts training Luke, that this is a time when ordinary people have fought and died for the cause without any magic superpowers. And that heroism and dedication, I want to tell that story. All those pilots on that attack of the Death Star, they had nothing protecting them, they fought and died for the cause.
Capone: Absolutely. It was great to meet you. Thank you so much.
