George Lucas and the Cult of Darth

Vader
As the Star Wars saga reaches its conclusion with Revenge of the Sith, the men behind
the masks look back on the greatest villain in movie history

By Gavin Edwards

Published on June 2, 2005 2:55 PM ET

I accomplished what I set out to accomplish,” says George Lucas. After thirty years of immersion in a
world of Wookies, droids, Jar Jars – and one of the greatest movie villains of all time, Darth Vader – he’s
finally completed the six-part Star Wars saga with Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. “I’m very happy that
I reached the finish line,” he says. Content with his movie and refreshed from a Hawaiian vacation, Lucas
sits on a couch in his office at the main building of the Skywalker Ranch complex in Marin Country,
California, a room large and plush enough for Jabba the Hutt. Lucas turns sixty-one the week of his
movie’s release but still sports his low-key geek uniform: jeans, a plaid shirt and sneakers. He’s suffering
from a bad cough, but it seems like a badge of honor after the marathon rush to complete Sith. (Lucas’
own cough was used as the sound effect for Sith’s evil wheezing droid, General Grievous.) Between
bronchial hacking and sips of Diet Coke, he reflects on the creation of Darth Vader.

Has Vader ever appeared in your dreams?

No, I don’t dream about Star Wars, to be honest. I’ve had a lot of waking nightmares on the set, though,
imagining the mask won’t fit on, or the guy inside can’t breathe and faints, or he can’t sit down in the
suit.

What was the greatest challenge with him?

I had to make Darth Vader scary without the audience ever seeing his face. Basically, it’s just a black
mask. I said, “How do I make that evil and scary?” I mean, he’s big and black and he’s got a cape and a
samurai helmet, but that doesn’t necessarily make people afraid of him. His character’s got to go
beyond that – that’s how we get his impersonal way of dealing with things. He’s done a lot of horrible
things in his life that he isn’t particularly proud of. Ultimately, he’s just a pathetic guy who’s had a very
sad life.

The first film, people didn’t even know whether there was a person there. They though he was a person
there. They thought he was a monster or some kind of a robot. In the second film, it’s revealed that he’s
a human being, and in the third film you find out that, yes, he’s a father and a regular person like the
rest of us – he’s just got a bit of a complexion problem.

Even as you were building up this iconic villain, you knew the
tragedy behind it.
He’s so overwhelming in that first film, but you get to the point where you say, “Wait a minute, if he’s so
powerful, why doesn’t he run the universe?” He even gets pushed around by the governors! They know
the Emperor is the final word, so what happens is the same thing that happens in any corporation:
Everybody worries about the top man, they don’t worry about his goon. And by the time the Death Star
is finished, it gives them the sense that they have a bigger, better suit than Darth Vader. In a standoff
between the Death Star and Darth Vader, they have no question about who would win, and it’s not this
mumbo-jumbo Sith guy. So it’s even more tragic, because he’s not even an all-powerful bad guy, he’s
kind of a flunky.

He’s not Satan, he just goes down to the corner and gets Satan’s
cigarettes.
You got it. And when he finds out Luke is his son, his first impulse is to figure out a way of getting him to
join him to kill the Emperor. That’s what Siths do! He tries it with anybody he thinks might be more
powerful, which is what the Emperor was looking for in the first place: somebody who would be more
powerful than he was and could help him rule the universe. But Obi-Wan screwed that up by cutting off
his arms and legs and burning him up. From then on, he wasn’t as strong as the Emperor – he was like
Darth Maul or Count Dooku. He wasn’t what he was supposed to become. But the son could become
that.

When you were growing up, what villains made an impression on

you?
I was more impressed by the good guys. But I remember the bad guy in Ben-Hur who got dragged
behind the chariot. John Wayne films had a lot of bad guys, but I can’t remember any of them. Most of
the movies I liked didn’t really have strong bad guys. In films like Bridge on the River Kwai and Citizen
Kane, the bad guy’s the good guy.

How did you get the name Darth Vader?

“Darth” is a variation of dark. And “Vader” is a variation of father. So it’s basically Dark Father. All the
names have history, but sometimes I make mistakes – Luke was originally going to be called Luke
Starkiller, but then I realized that wan’t appropriate for the character. It was appropriate for Anakin, but
not his son. I said, “Wait, we can’t weigh this down too much – he’s the one that redeems him.”

Rewatching the Star Wars films recently, I found it interesting how

the new films reframed the old ones: They now seem primarily
concerned with the tragedy of Darth Vader, rather than the triumph
of the Rebels.
Yeah, I made a series of movies that was about one thing: Darth Vader. Originally, people thought it was
all about Luke. The early films are about Luke redeeming his father, so Luke’s the focus. But it’s also
about Princess Leia and her struggle to reestablish the Republic, which is what her mother was doing. So
it’s really about mothers and daughters and fathers and sons.

So now, instead of all these surprises that aren’t actually surprises, when you get back to Episode IV, as
soon as Darth Vader walks through that door, and you see Princess Leia with R2, you’re going to say,
“Oh, my God, that’s his daughter. Are they gonna find out?” And you get through the whole first movie
and nobody figures anything out. The figuring-out part is mostly done off-screen. The first three
episodes are a tragedy, and the second three go slightly goofy, but they’re inspirational: Even the worst,
most evil people find compassion. Darth Vader has compassion for his children, and that’s ultimately
what children are for.

Often, in classical tragedies, there’s a final moment when the scales

fall from the hero’s eyes.
Well, in real Greek tragedies, the kids are usually the problem. They’re the ones that are killing the
parents, but this is more uplifting: It’s up to one generation to fix the sins of the last generation.

What was the visual evolution of Vader? Originally there was a

Bedouin concept—
No, that was more the Tusken Raiders. Darth Vader has pretty much always been Darth Vader. When
he’s first mentioned in the script, he’s a guy in a helmet with a breathing mask who can’t breathe
because of this fight with Obi-Wan. And I took that description to [designer] Ralph McQuarrie. He did
different drawings, but they’re almost all the same: a guy with a cape, a portable iron lung, a mask, a
samurai helmet and a chest piece that had electronics on it.

Where did the samurai helmet come from?

I was introduced to samurai movies in film school. And I became infatuated with Japanese culture; I was
going to do my first film, THX 1138, in Japan. Then reality set in.

Just how restrictive was that costume?

He couldn’t move at all, really. We had to keep modifying the suit so people could move in it. By the
time we got to the first light-saber battle, we realized we weren’t going to be able to do much. And so I
accepted it was an old man vs. a half-man, half-machine. But Jedi were supposed to be quite active. So
for the next one, we got a really good stunt guy in, one of the best sword fighters in England. And Mark
Hamill is a good sword fighter. For the final film, Hayden [Christensen] and Obi-Wan – I mean Ewan –
took it very seriously; they trained for months. Those swords are carbon fiber: We went through lots of
them, because they were hitting so hard, they would get bent. It’s like learning to dance, only if you
make a mistake, you really get hurt.

Did you ever know anybody who was in an iron lung? Vader’s
breathing sound is so scary.
No. Soundwise, the idea was that he had been almost killed, so his breath was much louder than
anybody else’s, like a monster breathing. I hired Ben Burtt to do the sound effects before I even finished
writing the screenplay. I had given him a huge list of tasks before I went off and shot the movie:
“R2 needs a voice, and we need lasers that are different from what anybody else has ever done, and I
don’t want the engines for the spaceships to sound like rockets or jets. And this guy is in an iron lung, so
figure that one out.” When I came back, he had this whole library of sounds. And he came up with this
iron lung that was a combination of other sounds, and it was eerie and deeply disturbing, and I said,
“That’s it.”
How did James Earl Jones get involved?
I said right from the beginning that I was looking for a voice for Darth Vader. I went through a lot of
different tapes of people, including Orson Welles. But then I landed on James Earl Jones, because he’s a
superb actor. And I was so worried at that point, because it’s minimalist acting in a mask: He doesn’t get
a huge range of stuff to deal with. I was looking for him to pull a realistic performance out of this
constrained reality I had created and really grab the audience. It’s one of these horrible acting
exercises – sometimes directors put themselves in a corner, and it’s thankless for the actor.

The same thing happened with Padmé in Episode I, when she had this very stilted dialogue as the
Queen. And also with Hayden in Episode II. He said, “I don’t want to be this whiny kid.” I said, “Well, you
are. You gotta be a whiny teenager.”

Like father, like son.

He said, “I want to be Darth Vader.” I said, “You gotta be a petulant young Jedi. You’re not going to be
the guy you thought you’d be when you signed your contract.” Hayden was grateful for this last movie,
where he actually got to be Darth Vader.

Why do you think people have focused so much on Vader?

People like villains because they’re powerful and they don’t worry about the rules. And as you go
through puberty, you have to break off your social bondage and become your own person. So when you
have a film aimed at adolescents, the movie is there to say, “Well, all well and good, but this is what
happens to you when you do that. This is why you’re compassionate, and why you join together as a
group to help each other.” These are the same basic stories that have always been told.

It was interesting how many people wanted to see Darth Vader

massacre the Jedis.
Well, when I said I was going to do the prequels, everybody said, “That’s great, we get to see Darth
Vader kill everybody.” And I said, “That’s not the story.” When I announced that the first story was going
to be about a nine-year-old boy, everybody here said, “That’s insane, you’re going to destroy the whole
franchise, it’s More American Graffiti all over again.” And I said, “Yeah, but this is the story.”

I don’t have energy to just make hit movies. I’m not going to make James Bond Pt. 21 – I’m just not
interested. Everybody said to drop the stuff about the midichlorians, it makes it too confusing. But it’s a
metaphor for a symbiotic relationship that allows life to exist. Everybody said it was going to be a giant
turkey: “This isn’t going to help LucasFilm at all.” I said, “This is about the movie and the company is just
going to have to deal with whatever happens.” That’s one of the reasons why there was so much hype
on the first prequel: Everybody was terrified.

Having thought of Darth Vader as this ultimate evil, it was alarming

to see him as a cute kid in “The Phantom Menace,” as if we were
watching home movies of Hitler.
Well, a lot of people got very upset, saying he should’ve been this little demon kid. But the story is not
about a guy who was born a monster – it’s about a good boy who was loving and had exceptional
powers, but how that eventually corrupted him and how he confused possessive love with
compassionate love. That happens in Episode II: Regardless of how his mother died, Jedis are not
supposed to take vengeance. And that’s why they say he was too old to be a Jedi, because he made his
emotional connections. His undoing is that he loveth too much.

Anakin has no father. Do Christ overtones—

Oh, it’s not just Christ. Christ is one of a long, long, long line of heroes who don’t have fathers. There’s a
long tradition of mythological heroes.

Can you name a few others?

There are a lot of Greek gods who came down [and impregnated mortal women], and so the heroes
didn’t have fathers. Whether it’s Hindu, Chinese or Middle Eastern, all the mythological heroes didn’t
have fathers. The fathers were the gods.

Now in this particular case, the gods happen to be a life-form that allows a cell to divide. So it’s a
metaphor: that which brings life. I don’t want to get too controversial about this – some people believe
it happened in other ways, over seven days, but if you listen to biology, there’s another theory, which
begins with an e. If you study microbiology, you will come to the realization that this alien life-form,
which has a completely different DNA, helped create life on earth and within the galaxy. But every cell
has one of these life-forms in it. It’s a simplified version of relationships – that symbiotic being goes
through everything. That’s why Han Solo joins the Rebellion, that’s why Luke saves his father. In Star
Wars land, all these relationships are necessary to bring forth a greater good – and evil.

Now, there’s a hint in the movie that there was a Sith lord who had the power to create life. But it’s left
unsaid: Is Anakin a product of a super-Sith who influenced the midichlorians to create him, or is he
simply created by the midichlorians to bring forth a prophecy, or was he created by the Force through
the midichlorians? It’s left up to the audience to decide. How he was born ultimately has no relationship
to how he dies, because in the end, the prophecy is true: Balance comes back to the Force.

Vader is largely machine. Is that a reflection of Anakin having lost

his humanity?
It’s a metaphor: As your humanness is cut away, your become more like a programmed droid. Even
though some of the droids, like C-3PO, are very human in nature, caring and worried that they’re going
to do the wrong thing. But they’re programs – there’s a difference. Even with R2, who is clever and
ultimately the hero of the whole piece. He’s the Lassie of the movies: Whenever there’s a pivotal
moment of real danger, he’s the one that gets everybody out of it.

One of Vader’s favorite ways of dispatching people is by

strangulation. Is that because of his inability to breathe without the
iron lung?
Well, it’s a bigger metaphor than that. Strangulation is always a theme. Life is breath. It’s a powerful
idea in Buddhism: Cutting off life is cutting off breath. The road to the Force is through the breath.
Impotency is cutting off hands and legs and arms. That’s a theme too.
Since Vader is the ultimate bad father, I wondered what your own
dad thought of him.
I don’t think it even occurred to my father that there was any connection. There wasn’t, other than his
being a father. All fathers are oppressive at times, especially with teenage boys. Even though he loved
me and I loved him a great deal, he was strict. But my father gave me a sense of fairness. He never said
no: He said, “This is the consequence of what you’re doing and why I’m not going to allow it. When you
get to be eighteen, you can do what you want, and you’ll probably go to jail.” Now I’ve got teenage girls.
If they don’t listen, I say, “Well, I’m the father and you’re the child, and you do what I tell you to do.
Because I’m the emperor of the universe and you’re not.”