By Alan Arnold - Tuesday, March 20 - 1979
                                            
There is so much expertise remote from the sets, quiet men working away from the clamor of the soundstages.  One example is Ralph McQuarrie, who is to be found in a section of the art department.  As design consultant and conceptual artist he made a very important contribution to Star Wars and is repeating that contribution for The Empire Strikes Back.

McQuarrie’s sketches and paintings are central to both pictures; they were the first graphic depictions of key sequences in the Lucas scripts and as such were indispensable to departments that later developed them into actual sets, space, hardware, costumes, and props.

McQuarrie is a Californian by adoption, for he was born in the Midwest (Gary, Indiana).  He is fifty now and recalls a childhood during which his family was uprooted by the search for a livelihood, moving first to Montana, to the West Coast, and then to Vancouver, Canada, where McQuarrie attended technical and art schools before being called to military service.  Afterward, he settled in southern California and has lived there for twenty-five years.

I asked him to talk about himself.

Ralph McQuarrie:  I’m a visually oriented type.  I enjoy looking at things.  In England, now, I’m enjoying looking at an environment totally different from anything I can see in California.  The shapes, colors, and contours of things interest me, as do structures on landscapes, functional objects, and the effect of use and age upon them.  It’s social history, visual history, and it stands to reason there’s more of it in England than in California!  Machinery, chemical equipment, the hardware of our lives have always fascinated me, and from the age of four or five I got into the habit of making sketches of this kind of equipment.

Alan Arnold:  Did you teach yourself?

RMQ:   When my family moved to Seattle I took a night course in technical art for about a year and learned enough to join the Boeing Aircraft Company there.  I was very interested in planes.  I loved the work and met a lot of people interested in commercial art.  But then I had to go into the army for two years.  When I got out I rejoined Boeing until I’d gotten enough money together to go to California, to attend art school in Los Angeles.

AA:  How long did you stay there?

RMQ:   I was a student for two-and-a half years, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to be a commercial artist.  I thought it would be like selling a commodity, like hats or shoes – lucrative but uninspiring.  I left school not knowing exactly what to do.  So I started working on my own.  I did some illustrations of aircraft, steam engines, other sorts of machinery, and these got me a job as an illustrator with a group that produced corporation-oriented magazines, annual reports, that kind of thing.  I worked there a year and found it interesting.  Then I became a technical illustrator in the aerospace field.

AA:   How long did you stay in aerospace?

RMQ:   Through the sixties.  I worked for CBS News on the Apollo flights, doing animated sequences that couldn’t be covered live.  Then I started doing film posters because what I’d been doing for CBS was really film effects, animation made to look realistic.

AA:  How did your work in feature films begin?

RMQ:  I did a poster for a horror picture.  That was a success, and the picture was a success.  On the strength of that I began to get more posters to do for independent producers.  Then two writers I know showed my paintings to Lucas who at that time was just finishing THX-1138 and about to make American Graffiti.  When we met he mentioned that he would like to do a really spectacular science-fiction picture.





AA:  When did you begin to work with him?

RMQ:   By no means immediately.  He had not yet finished American Graffiti.  When that movie proved successful, he expanded his outline for Star Wars.  He had gone to Universal, but they were not ready for something so different and were probably a little frightened of the budget.  Anyway, who was going to see science-fiction movies then?  Even when Fox purchased an interest in what George wanted to do, they did so cautiously.

AA:  What did you do for Star Wars?

RMQ:   George had ideas about how his picture should look.  In fact, I think the look of the picture was more interesting to him that the plot.  The look of the great vistas, the alien lands, the structures, the spaceships, the robots, the costumes, and accessories was of fundamental interest to him.  George at one time had been very interested in being an illustrator and could have been a brilliant science-fiction illustrator, I believe.  He wanted to get what he could see in his mind onto the screen.  When he wrote he could see these things, but descriptions of visual things in the script were nevertheless kind of sketchy.  I thought that what he expected from me was the look he hoped for – the light, the textures, the excitement he saw in his mind’s eye.  So we’d get together and talk about the scenes that typified the scale and scope of the picture visually.  I also helped visualize the robots with a painting of C-3PO and R2-D2 crossing the desert.

AA:  In what scale do you illustrate?

RMQ:   My paintings measure roughly twenty-two inches by ten inches.  That’s the format I pretty much keep to, but some of the paintings are a little larger.  I made twenty or twenty-two illustrations for Star Wars.  So far I’ve made thirty for The Empire Strikes Back.  In addition, there are lots of pencil sketches.  I think my paintings for Star Wars helped to reassure Fox that the picture was not going to be just a comic strip – it was going to be something awe inspiring.  But I was simply interpreting George Lucas’s conception.

AA:  What kind of materials do you use?

RMQ:   Water colors, essentially.  I use a combination of an acrylic medium, which is a paint that’s waterproof once dry, and designer colors, which are an opaque water color you can use transparently or opaquely.  I place a tone on the board and paint into it so I can relate every value from somewhere in the middle.  I’ll put in something bright and I’ll put in something dark and thereby know my range.

AA:   Although George Lucas is at the center, you surely draw on personal inspiration, too.

RMQ:   George was the inspiration for the Star Wars material.  He’d written down what he wanted and had given me some sense of the quality he wanted to get.  For example, I started to sketch Darth Vader on the information that George wanted him to be a tall, black figure with fluttering robes, incredibly strong but graceful and majestic, too.  I thought he could wear something like a fisherman’s helmet, an enclosing helmet.  So I started to sketch various shapes and designs.  And George acted as a close guide on everything, elimination this or that sketch.

AA:  Yet, presumably, you conceived the look of some of the characters.

RMQ:   That’s true.  R2-D2 ended up like my original sketch.  And, although somewhat changed, Darth Vader was a great deal like my sketch, too.





AA:  What is the source of your interest in the fantastic?

RMQ:   I think it relates to my past experience.  I have always been interested in the way things look.  It wasn’t a practical interest – I wasn’t thinking of how these things could be used.  My satisfaction came instead from simply looking at machinery, aircraft bulkheads, the tooling, the forgings, the colors.  I’m very interested in how bits of things relate to the whole.

AA:  Do you read fantasy?

RMQ:   Not especially.  I have not read all that much science fiction or fantasy.  To tell you the truth, I enjoy fact much more.

AA:  What about the art?

RMQ:   I enjoy the art galleries very much.  I like the pre-Raphaelites.  I like painters who put spooks into their pictures.  Then those paintings become more that just fine art; they have stories to them.  I also like the surrealists, such as Dali.  Modern abstract expressionists I never did get into.  I enjoy the work of David Hockney, who I think is a very interesting painter.

AA:  How do you like working on the Star Wars films?

RMQ:   Essentially, my enjoyment as an artist comes from working with shapes and forms and colors.  What is also stimulating in terms of George’s stories is that they are not set in time.  This gives me quite a sense of liberation.  With this sort of freedom an illustrator’s work is enormous fun.

TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd.

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