Page 27 - Star Wars Insider #187

INTERVIEW: NICK GILLARD
orty years after
F working on his fi rst
feature fi lm, Nick
Gillard is still one of
the most sought after
stunt coordinators
in the business. Boasting a résumé
featuring some of the world’s biggest
films and TV shows, his skills as a
stunt performer have enlivened the
heroic exploits of Superman, James
Bond, and Robin Hood, to name but
a few. But it was in the mid-1990s that
Gillard’s long-term association with
Lucasfilm—thanks to his work on
Willow (1988), Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade (1989), and The Young
Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992)—led
to him being approached by George
Lucas and producer Rick McCallum
to bring his expertise to the Star Wars
prequel trilogy.
Gillard and his team were tasked
with creating the huge array of stunts
and lightsaber duels required for Star
Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999),
Attack of the Clones (2002), and fi nally
Revenge of the Sith (2005), and he was
credited as both stunt coordinator and
sword master to highlight his work in
these key areas. “Sword master sounds a
little bit grand to me. I’m barely a walk
master now!” laughs Gillard, whose
career began when he literally
01 Qui-Gon Jinn
ran away to join the circus and
(Liam Neeson)
gained his first experience of and Darth
stunt work. “Back when I was Maul (Ray
Park) duel in
in the circus, we did medieval
The Phantom
jousting tournaments,” he Menace.
01
explains. “As a stunt person, you use
all these little bits that you’ve learned.
I’m certainly no master, but I know an
see myself first and foremost as a stunt
awful lot about all kinds of fi ghting. I
coordinator, and I was involved in every
stunt on those movies.”
And there are a lot of stunts in a Star
Wars movie, which one would assume
places a huge weight of responsibility
upon a stunt coordinator’s shoulders. “It
does and it doesn’t,” Gillard says, with a
calm born of experience. “It’s about how
to keep everybody safe, so that you can
shoot and keep the insurance company
happy, and everybody goes home at the
end of the day.
“Anything in stunts is achievable,”
he continues. “Anything at all. It’s just
down to time and money, but safety is
the overriding concern. You’re dealing
with danger. I’ve just been risk-assessing
a job I’m doing soon where we’ll be
shooting on a terrifying, 500-foot cliff
with a full crew; we have a crane, the
rain will be going sideways, and it will
be blowing a gale. When you risk-assess
something like that, it’s something you
really understand if you’ve been doing it
your whole life.”
The Biggest Show In Town
Rarely a day goes by on a Star Wars
sound stage without some form
of stunt work being required.
Did that make for a very intense
environment when fi lming the
prequels? “It didn’t actually.
It was a lovely place,” says
“I’m certainly no
master, but I know an
awful lot about all
kinds of fighting.”
Gillard. “Star Wars is very unique in
the business. It takes over an entire
studio. If you go to Pinewood Studios,
for example, there are often three other
movies shooting, but when we did Star
Wars at Leavesden Studios, we were the
only movie there. You looked around,
and everybody that you were working
with had three or four Oscars. But [the
first six films] were also independent
movies. The guy that was paying for it
all, George Lucas, was standing on set
with you.
“You were part of a hand-picked
crew, not necessarily because you were
the best in the world, but because you
were very good and you were going
to get on with everybody so that
it all worked,” adds Gillard. “What
that gave you was a lovely set. Yes,
you understood you were making
the biggest movie in the world, but
everybody helped everybody else.”
While Gillard’s Star Wars work
encompassed all the stunts on the
prequels, perhaps his most prominent
and visual contribution—one that
still attracts attention today—was in
bringing a new, dynamic style to the
discipline of the lightsaber. The Star
Wars prequel trilogy depicted the Jedi
order in its prime, and sometimes in
great numbers, requiring a specifi c
approach from the sword master.
“When I do fights, not just in Star
Wars but in anything, it’s about tone,
it’s about knowing the characters,”
Gillard explains. “You have to read
the script thoroughly and understand
exactly what those characters are
thinking in the moment, and why
they’re going to fight. You know who’s
going to win because you’ve read it in
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