By Carl Macek - May - 1978

RALPH MCQUARRIE
Production Illustration and Planet and Satellite Art

"My inspiration comes to me like bubbles rising in a champagne bottle. I lay down and rest. The ideas come from somewhere inside me and rise slowly to the conscious level. Then I awake and paint my pictures."

Nestled in a neat studio in the heart of Los Angeles, Ralph McQuarrie works creating wildly beautiful paintings and sketches which depict alien creatures and wholly original landscapes and civilizations. His work on George Lucas' STAR WARS was seen in many of the matte paintings and also felt in much of the set design. McQuarrie worked closely with George Lucas to visualize the script in a series of dramatic paintings which have since been published as The Star Wars Portfolio by Ballentine Books.

Ralph McQuarrie had always wanted to be an artist. Even as a child in Montana, Ralph was exercising his artistic drive by going to summer school at the age of six to learn how to draw and work with modeling clay. Fifteen years later he became a commercial artist. His work as a technical illustrator lasted, off and on, for the next twenty years. He eventually zeroed-in on the aerospace industry. As Ralph put it, "I was always interested in military aircraft and rockets. I was kind of engineering oriented." He eventually got involved in films, first by doing some theatrical one-sheet posters and later by working on preproduction paintings. His association with George Lucas seems to have fulfilled a certain desire to create fabulously detailed yet totally alien visions.

A soft-spoken, gentle man, Ralph McQuarrie is quite lucid about his art and its relationship to the elements of science fiction and fantasy. This interview, one of the few granted by McQuarrie, should serve to point out not only the detail and creative input present in his art but to define an artist engaged in a lifelong project of finding the   right outlet for his varied talents.

After completing his work on STAR WARS, McQuarrie did pre-production designs and paintings for GALACTICA, and is now hard at work designing and painting new creatures, new cultures, new contraptions, new civilizations and new adventures that will launch the production of STAR WARS II.

How did you get involved in films?

I worked for the Boeing company until 1965. I began to feel like getting back into commercial illustration, not just doing art for the aircraft industry. I used to do story illustrations for Kaiser Graphic Arts in the fifties, but I wasn't very happy there. I was really interested in fine arts, but I didn't know how to get started and how to survive at it, so I had to keep going back to work at something. About 1965 I came to Los Angeles. I had a little money saved, and just sat around my little house in Venice working, just sort of dreaming and developing ideas. It was something I had wanted to do for a long time, without having any end in mind. No results, no money, no place to sell it - no nothing - just doing what I wanted to do.

But I got a call soon enough from some people who were interested in having me work for them. They had a project to animate the Apollo flights for CBS News and they wanted an illustrator that could paint rockets. I was a pretty good Tenderer and I'd been recommended by someone at Boeing. I went to work for them for quite a few years, off and on, doing those Apollo flights. Working there, I got interested in movies and started thinking about making some of my own. I borrowed a friend's camera, I did storyboards, the whole bit. I also did some storyboards for an educational film as well as promotional work. That got me meeting people in the film business.

None of these contacts were in feature films until I met Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who had been working for George Lucas on THX 1138 [Barwood is credited for the titles and animation]. They had a script which was interesting. People still think it is a good script. It was called STAR DANCE. [Barwood and Robbins also had a film called CLEARWATER in preproduction at Universal in 1974, "a science fiction tale set in the year 2215 AD telling of the conflicts between the survivors who populate a devastated Earth. . ."

I was asked to do some paintings for them, nice big paintings of some of the key scenes, like I would do later for George. For them I did a vehicle which was supposed to go out on this grassy planet surface, and aliens in space suits. The film didn't get done. Now they are working on other projects. Anyway, Hal and Matthew introduced me to George Lucas, about two years before he actually approached me to work on STAR WARS. George mentioned at the time we first met that he wanted to look at some of my slides. He said he was interested in doing a science fiction film - he didn't call it STAR WARS at that time - with a kind of comic book subject matter. When he got ready to do the film he came and talked to me, which was a big surprise because he had done AMERICAN GRAFFITI in the meantime, which was very successful. Naturally I agreed to do what he wanted.

What kind of assignment did you get?

George wanted me to do what I did for Hal, just support his script with visuals. George felt that it was the kind of script that people weren't very impressed with. The idea seemed kind of funky. He envisioned the picture as a real visual experience, much more so than a story. It wasn't true science fiction. George called it a science fantasy, and even the fantasy aspect was non-traditional. He had a lot of ideas. He had comic book pages and other source material he wanted me to see. Once I got to work he liked what I was doing, and he would come by every once in a while to check up on the work. My ideas seemed to be in line with his. George was very specific about most of the work.

How many paintings did you do initially for George?

I think we had something like four when we first went in with paintings to Fox. We used the two robots coming across the desert, the light sabre duel, the Stormtroopers in the hall with drawn light sabres and the attack on the Death Star.

What function does a preproduction painting serve? Does it give the filmmaker a vision of his concept or does it merely serve to sell his idea to a studio?

I think it did both for George. He liked these paintings and they embodied what he was interested in putting across on the screen. I think it gave him a chance to develop his ideas at his leisure, so to speak, rather than working in the heat of production where you've got a lot of people involved and money's being spent at great rates. Then he would've had to struggle with production designers and all kinds of craftsmen. I don't think that he necessarily felt he had to engage an expensive production designer at this preliminary stage because he had his own ideas. George could have drawn everything himself, literally! He draws quite well, laboriously and a little bit crudely, but he can draw.

Lucas gave you a few images, from comic books and other sources and you took the ball from there?

Not exactly. George had very specific ideas, the Darth Vader character for instance. George described him as someone in an airtight garment with a lot of wrapping and black bands and folds kind of fluttering. He said, "Darth Vader will be coming-in like the wind, kind of sneaky, yet big and impressive."

Then Lucas worked closely with you in creating the environment and designing how the people would look?

Yes. In the course of our conversations about the plot we came up with some interesting problems. One of the first actions called for in the early script was Empire troopers burning through the outer shell of the spacecraft that Luke and 3P0 were in, and then we realized that the air would escape. The people in the passageway would have to be equipped with some sort of spacesuit. That's why those masks were installed. In the discussions we thought we could use "breath masks." George coined the phrase, and he said they might be kind of ornate. I didn't know how ornate, or what the nature of ornateness would be in this universe, so I gave them a technical look with tubing coming forward that might support the way they are put together and the way the air comes down through them, with vents, etc.

Are you referring to Darth Vader's mask and Luke's snorkel device in one of your preliminary paintings?

Exactly.

Looking at the artwork in the offices of The Star Wars Corporation, it seems that you provided not only fully rendered paintings but also numerous sketches and designs.

George would give me a specific project. He would have been happy to let me go ahead and do something on everything in the picture, and I almost did. Although my renderings were not always used. Most of the art I drew was used in some form however. John Barry [the English production designer] picked up things that I had in my paintings and used them with a great deal of flair and amplification - his ultimate Death Star architecture, and so forth. He did a lovely job of staging this stuff.

There is a great deal of architectural or structural design in your paintings.

I wanted to make these paintings as close to what would be on the screen as possible. That was a product of, or a result of our wish to make the people at Fox feel that we had a picture that was going to have a quality image, one that wasn't going to be trashy science fiction, because it did have a comic book script. It was going to be a real polished product. Maybe not like 2001, but .we didn't feel that we had to polish our props as much as they did because we were going to have a very fast-moving picture and objects weren't going to be on screen as long, or used throughout the whole picture as they were in 2001.

How many paintings did you actually complete?

I think there are about 21 or 22. All of them were done before the film was even started. In other words, before a production designer was hired. The day John Barry came on was the day I really got off the project and ceased working on designs and paintings for the film. I then started working on the matte paintings and on other projects.

Do you feel that Lucas and his crew attempted to capture your visual designs on film?

Yes, they did, the ones that George liked. Those paintings were a result of our efforts to get down on paper what George wanted, so that they were available when he needed them. Anything that was done later, like Joe Johnston's work, was done in terms of our preliminary efforts.

It is noticeable in your work that changes took place in the characters themselves. A good example is Darth Vader. Your initial drawings were sleek, almost effeminate, with curving lines rather than bold geometric patterns.

I'm not so fond of the lines they gave Vader's helmet and his mask. I think it did more to enhance his great size and to keep his head up - a lifting look rather than a jutting down look that I gave him. It really works better in that sense.

Your concept of C3P0 looks like the robot in METROPOLIS.

That's right, and that is what George was after. He said if it was just like the METROPOLIS robot it would be okay. But I wanted it to look male - not clumsy, and not a big robot clomping around. With 3P0 I did a lot of sketches and I think I made him quite elegant.

Your Wookiee seems less hairy. There is one painting in which it looks rather different than the actual Chewbacca.

At the time I did the painting George really liked the lemur eyes, little rubber teeth, and so forth. Chewbacca was kind of frightening, more so than he was in the film. I think the way it had to play on the screen, Chewbacca was ultimately better looking, almost cute.

What about your early painting of Luke Skywalker as a girl?

That was really quite a major plot change that George had to go through. There are a lot of major shifts in the plot. George just couldn't do all that he wanted to do. Fox thought there should be some romantic interest. I think this is why George made Luke a girl. Then Han Solo would be the robust hero and we could have a little tension between the two characters. That was okay, but at some point George decided to make Luke a boy again and bring in the Princess as a third character.

How did you go about visualizing the alien landscapes and situations, like the Cantina sequence for example?

George wanted this kind of rough, little edge-of-town kind of place, a sort of clay adobe structure. He thought at the time that he might even find a location that would fit his needs. I thought, in the back of my mind, that this place should have little alcoves, little places back in the dark. But I also wanted a central area. As an illustrator, I like to have something for a focus, to spotlight. So I thought of the Cantina as being a central hall which is fairly high, with a skylight and daylight filtering down, dirty light through dirty windows. As you sat back it is very dark and you looked into the bright light, this lonely diffused daylight where the action takes place, filtered with hazy smoke. My first painting was fine, George liked it, but he thought it needed a few little touches to make it look less like a resting place and more like a place that was also part of a society that was highly technological.

Were you dissatisfied with any of the work you produced for George Lucas?

Not dissatisfied, not in terms of my paintings. I would like to be as good a hardware designer as Joe Johnston, but he filled that niche and that was a good place for him. He will ultimately paint as well as I can. We are two different people, but we're quite similar in many ways.

Was there anything that you wanted to do in the paintings you were unable to get approval for?

George gave me specific assignments on most of the scenes that I would paint. He would say, "I'd like to have a shot of this, or I'd like to have a shot of that. If you see anything else, if you want to do something on other aspects and get time, go ahead." So there were a number of scenes that I did on my own, that weren't in the script.

What is important to you as an artist?

I love color. I like subtle color schemes that aren't really splashy. I think I'm very sensitive to color. My mother told me I could name the colors before I could say anything else. I was interested in color as a child, before I can even remember anything else. I will take a scene that I like and decide about the entrance of light. The desert scene is a good example with its raking light. I would never choose to make it high noon because it doesn't look as interesting. But when you've got a raking light, when a moon will stand out in the sky, and with the long shadows, and the warmth from the light which unifies the painting, that is what I like to do.

There is also a high clarity to your work. You really define your subject.

I get interested in the forms, and I sculpt what I'm thinking about to see how objects are formed. I don't let the details go by. I want everything defined that is out there. Some people say to me, don't worry about that stuff, it's the overall effect that counts. But to my way of thinking, the overall effect is the result of all those details. I realize that a lot of little detail doesn't help that much. You can paint rather loosely and still get the effect of all the detail, which I try to do as much as possible. I try not to get bogged-down and do it all. I like paintings that define a dreamlike subject very convincingly. You are convinced that you're there and yet it's a strange place.

TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd.

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