Frank, how was it going from Yoda the puppet to a CGI Yoda. Did that affect you and how you played him?
Frank Oz: “Well, the main thing is that I really didn’t have to do the work. When I did the others it was a lot of sweat and a lot of stuff like that, but now I tell everyone this too: I do a half day and these guys work for a year, and it’s bizarre because I get the credit. And it’s really these guys who do it. So for me it’s a delight, because I see the progression of Yoda in the movies and it’s wonderful. It’s also great because he could not do the things that he’s doing on the screen now, or in the last two episodes, if he was a puppet. There’s no way. So it’s wonderful to see that growth.”
Rob, is it true that your effects team is going to digitally animate Yoda in Episode I to have him better match the Yodas in the Episodes II and III?
Rob Coleman: “We’ve actually gone ahead and done that. We did that between Episode II and Episode III. It was really an exercise to get the team back into the character. On Episode II and III, I was totally stressing to match what my friend Frank here had created, and so a lot of our focus was on that final battle sequence between Yoda and Count Duku. We’d never seen Yoda do that before, but in the process we were learning about acting as animators. So it was really exciting for me to have the team back again between II and III. We used Episode I as the test bed, because we didn’t know what was going to be in Episode III and we got the team back up to speed and really honed in on our acting. And then using that as a springboard we then went right into Episode III.”
Frank, you said you thought something was gained by having Yoda go CG in having him perform moves that he couldn’t do as a puppet. What do you think was lost by going to CG?
Oz: “What’s lost is, obviously, just the physicality of the character, but at the same time the gain is so much, because there’s no way on God’s green earth that I could’ve done anything near that terrific fight. So it’s a minimal loss compared to what you’ve gained, and I must say that I think one thing you might not be aware of is that when I talked to Rob and George [Lucas] and Rick [McCallum] about the first time we made Yoda into a CG character, they really had a problem. They had a hard job, and that was to not to live up to their capabilities. The job was to not live up to the potential because the first time that they did Yoda that way, if they did all the things that they could’ve done, the transition would’ve been too jarring. So what they really did very artfully is to mimic me to such a degree that it held down their talent. Seriously, that’s what they had to do, and then the next one they could bump up a little higher. So there was a real transition there and they had to really be aware to match it and yet give it a little bit more life.”
Coleman: “Let me just add onto that: The real example is that we did do a test and it looked like a creepy little green man. It didn’t look like Yoda. And the potential that Frank is talking about is that we could all kinds of extra things with the face that the puppet couldn’t do. And in learning about the character and trying to get to the essence of the spirit of that character I went back and studied what he’d done on Empire Strikes Back frame-by-frame, and we literally got down to the amount of wiggle in the ears. It was something that–whether he was thinking about it or not–became part of the character. Whether it was holding a 60 lb. puppet above your head all day long and your hand starts to shake and that translates over the little rubber ears, or whether it was something that he was putting in consciously, it was still part of the character. When we started doing the computer animation, computers are really good at doing smooth, sleek things and we had to add in what I call ‘dirt’–performance dirt. Shake. Wiggle. Little jars in the performance that he did naturally as an extremely talented puppeteer. He was bringing all of that. My group and I had to learn all of that. So when we first showed it to Frank, I remember the first meetings, we were showing him a pretty creepy-looking green man because it looked too slick and it looked too smooth. It didn’t look like the beloved character that we’d all come to love.”
Replacing the Yoda from Episode I sounds great on one hand, but on the other hand do you lose fifty percent of Frank’s performance in that film?
Coleman: “I would actually disagree. We don’t actually lose fifty percent of his performance because not only do we have his voice, which stays across, of course, but we also have what he did in that movie and that was our touchstone. And we used it absolutely, exactly. All you’re really going to see, if it ever comes to light, is our computer-animated character doing exactly what [Frank] did on the day. It was not my desire to redo what he did. It was really to focus the animators in on looking at exactly what he did do, and just bring that over to the CG world. It was a fantastic exercise for us to get into, a little bit into his head, but very specifically into how Yoda moves and interacts with the actors.”
Oz: “I haven’t seen it at all. I have my lawyers waiting, though [Laughs]. No. You know, when I did Empire Strikes Back, that was like, what, 20, 25 years ago, and really I think that it’d be odd to do him again like that, because the world was not digital then. Now it is, and now the expectations from the audiences are different. And to a degree I think that if you don’t [digitally animate Yoda], it’ll stand out too much compared to everything else in George’s movie, which is extraordinary. I think that he has to fit that life, and before he fit that life because that life wasn’t as digital.That’s my opinion.”
[PAGEBREAK]Coleman: “We were not ready to do Yoda on Episode I. Absolutely–I mean, we were freaked out enough just doing the other characters. I was very happy to do characters like Watto, because it was a character that had a great cameo performance, but he had finite screen time. And because there was no reference back to him in any other previous movie, we were kind of safe to create something new. But the enormous leap that it would’ve been to create a Yoda as we were coming out of the gate–that was too much for us to handle.”
What do you think you’ve learned from doing Yoda?
Oz: “As an adult and as a human being, you learn every day, but it was more a process of me learning who Yoda was than learning from Yoda. And when I first did it in Empire Strikes Back, I had a three- or four-page biography about what he used to eat, and how he used to live, and what he wore and all of that stuff, and then I would go through that just to inform me. So I didn’t learn from him, but I had to learn about him, and whenever I was doing something I had to know what other characters were doing, what was going on in the movie, because if I came on and just did my scene not knowing, then he was not that knowing. He had to have some innate wisdom. So all I can say is that I think that I had to learn about him and not necessarily to learn from him. Although, if one were to learn from him, one would learn as they do from a sensei master…but that’s getting pretty deep.”
Q: Rob, how did Yoda change from Episode II to III? Because other characters got more complex, did that effect Yoda?
Coleman: “Well, I survived Episode II, and so it did get easier. I really was terrified before the movie came out, Episode II, about the fight. We’d convinced ourselves that we had something pretty special, but I knew that we were stepping into new ground with Yoda. And in working with Rick and George and Frank and my team. we’d gotten to a place where were pretty excited about that fight, but there was a lot of stress involved. Once we got through that, looking back at the work in Episode II, between II and III I felt that we could really up the ante in terms of the performance and the interaction between the character and the live actor that he was sharing the screen with. So I put more pressure on myself and the crew to really challenge ourselves, and in the process we were rewarded with some very nice close-ups and some important scenes. There’s a great one between Anakin and Yoda in Yoda’s sanctuary. I don’t think that would’ve been Episode II had it been written at the time. I don’t think that George would’ve been comfortable enough to give us those sustained close-ups and give us the thinking time, which is really the acting time. Any time that you look at real people on screen, you learn as much if not more about them as a character when they’re not talking then when they were are: their reactions, the facial expressions, the thinking, the doubting. They’re not listening to the person. They’re worried about something else. It’s a joy as an animator to be given those shots now with a character like Yoda as we were in Episode III. So we’re always putting pressure on ourselves to be better than we are and I know that we got better because we gave ourselves that high bar to go over.”
Since Yoda was replaced digitally in the first one, has there been any talk about him being replaced in the originals?
Oz: “Never.”
Coleman: “No chance. It’ll never happen. Never. Never. Never. Everyone write down this: Never.”
Are you surprised that none of the “creature” characters from the prequels have been beloved in the way that Yoda was in the originals?
Oz: “I remember flying over to London and reading the script, and I said to George, ‘Oh, I love Jar Jar. He’s going to be a breakout character. I know he is.’ I have never understood it to this day. I love Jar Jar. And this whole thing–I don’t understand the nonsense. He was terrific. I mean, as an adult I loved this guy and thought that it was hysterical. It cracked me up. I just wanted to throw that out there.”
Do you ever do the Yoda voice for fans who ask you?
Oz: “No. [Laughs] I’ll tell you, I’ve been asked so many times, and I don’t do it because for one thing it’s like a girl on a first date: I’m not that easy. But also because it’s not like a little character that you just start talking as. There’s a lot of soul and depth to him, and I don’t want to treat him like it’s something that you just kind of throw away.”
