Page 45 - Star Wars Insider - The Last Jedi 2018

CANTO BIGHT

THE ODDS ARE STACKED
CREATING THE

CASINO

Creating an environment that encompasses exotic fun with a barely
concealed layer of greed and cruelty was a challenge met by the
design team of The Last Jedi.

n a 1977 review of Star Wars, author J.
G. Ballard wrote enthusiastically of its
“ingenious and entertaining” visual ideas,
Iand especially how the fi lm depicts “an
advanced technology in decline.” It’s an aesthetic
that informs all three films in the original trilogy,

but for the casino in Canto Bight in The Last Jedi,
writer/director Rian Johnson was faced with a
different challenge: how to depict luxury in the Star
Wars universe.
For the location of Finn and Rose Tico’s big
adventure, Johnson’s aim was to create “a Monte
Carlo–like city that had to dazzle and seduce us.”
The task of developing the visuals of Canto Bight
fell to production designer Rick Heinrichs, and
“was by far the most involved design process in
the movie” according to Johnson, who explains
that “Heinrichs and his team worked to fuse visual
cues from Star Wars into an entirely new feeling of
wealth and opulence.”
Heinrichs himself confirms that the aim was

to create “an extremely extravagant, over-the-
top version of Monte Carlo. We used a lot of
architectural references to earlier Star Wars fi lms,
like columns and arches, but with more ovular,
circular, softer shapes than what we’ve seen in the
other films. I had read that Ralph McQuarrie, when

he was working on Jabba’s Palace, realized that if
he kept with rectilinear forms it would look like a
black castle from some 1930s swashbuckling movie,
but if he kept to soft deco shapes, there’s a real
opportunity to come up with something fresh, an
opulent quality, which would convey the idea of fun
and beauty. That’s what we were aiming for.” a

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