By David Houston & Sal Manna - August - 1999

STARLOG INTERVIEW - Painter of Universes

Ralph McQuarrie’s brilliant renderings sold the studio on making Star Wars.

Ralph McQuarrie is a humble man. Sure, without him the spunky little droid R2-D2, with whom audiences laughed and   cheered,   might   have looked very different. Granted. Darth Vader. who was booed and hissed through" most of three Star Wars films would not have looked like he does, either. He might never have appeared as he will always remain in memory- helmeted, garbed in black, with the sinister vertical grill in place of a mouth. These characters have become part of American folklore and world film history, and it was McQuarrie, Star Wars' conceptual artist, who helped bring them to life.

But he isn't one to boast about his contributions. "Who knows what art is? I would like to think my stuff is important, but I don't know if it's any good or not," McQuarrie says. "Artoo could have been any shape. I could have put a tea cup there, and with everyone responding to it, it would take on life. George Lucas isn't too terribly concerned about how it looks as long as it's convincing and not hokey."

If Lucas is the father of the Star Wars saga, then McQuarrie is one of its midwives. It was this tall, quiet and pleasant artist who first took Lucas' imaginative tale and gave it life on paper. Thanks partially to his initial four paintings (R2-D2 and C-3PO crossing the desert: Luke Skywalker and Vader in a duel with laser swords; a sandcrawler; a fighter diving towards the Death Star), 20th Century Fox decided in 1975 to give this idea of a "space movie" a chance.

McQuarrie's Star Wars paintings have shown him to he a rare, if not unique, illustrator. They demonstrate his ability to take verbal ideas and express them visually with such precision, such fidelity to scale, perspective, color and mechanical detail that they can be practically duplicated by the art directors and producers as live-action footage.

Further, McQuarrie utilized such an extensive storehouse of his own knowledge that he actually served as pre-production designer - taking over many of the tasks of the art director. He says, for instance. "I actually designed the Sandcrawler. R2-D2 was my concept. Darth Vader was my concept. And the white stormtrooper costume was mine: George wanted a white costume, but that's about all he said."

His artwork also contains all the drama of a director's story-board. Of the painting that shows the enormous planet of Yavin, with tiny glowing dots of fighters leaving to battle the Death Star and a sentry on a tower. McQuarrie says, "The effect I was trying to get was one of awe-inspiring grandeur."

But his personal philosophy colors all this in an unexpected way: "Today, my philosophy is that life goes by, and it doesn't really make a lot of difference what we do. It doesn't matter to me - or to you. The world will experience what I do or don't do. and that's all we get. If I'm excited about a given thing, and I'm able to do something about it - it doesn't matter.

"If it wasn't my set of drawings for Star Wars that got people excited, it would have been somebody else's. Many people could have done them. I happened to be available and capable of doing the stuff when it was needed - and I did it.

"I am happier now than I was before I started working on Star Wars. I was happy before, but this is a bigger deal. It's more exciting. I was the right person to do Star Wars. I just had the right background."

McQuarrie was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1929. The Depression forced his parents to hit the road, and they settled on the farm of his grandparents near Billings, Montana.

"I had fun with the neighborhood kids exploring caves around Billings - and the airport. I learned to love airplanes at that time," McQuarrie says. "Biplanes were still flying. That was a time when the Air Force was flying around to keep people interested in their projects. These things impressed me tremendously. I bought model airplanes and put them together."

At age 10 during World War II, McQuarrie moved briefly to Seattle, where his father hoped to find work in shipyards or the aircraft industry. But there were strikes and delays, so to get a job, his father returned to his native country, Canada - to Vancouver, B.C. for a shipyard job there. They stayed in Canada until 1948, when McQuarrie was almost finished with high school.

"I wasn't really interested in art," he says. "I was more interested in working in the aircraft industry. Although I wasn't mathematically inclined, I was a good craftsman. I went to a good technical school and learned lots of technical things. I was getting interested in drawing -mainly so I could get my technical things down on paper. And the drawings got to be as interesting to me as the machinery. I suppose I always have approached drawing that way. It's why I'm not so successful as an illustrator. When you look at my drawings, they're not very handsome. They're carefully thought out in some respects, but there's not much attempt to make them elegant. I see my work as competent renderings. As an artist, I think like an engineer."

After Vancouver, the McQuarries moved back to Seattle, where Ralph finished high school, concentrating on commercial art, and where he worked and attended night classes in technical illustration. "I got to a point where I could do good isometric drawings. The instructor liked my work and helped me get a job at the Boeing Company. Not everyone was getting jobs. I was lucky."

McQuarrie worked at Boeing for several years. "There I met people who had studied at an art center. A guy there did beautiful pen-and-ink drawings of ships. I changed my values then. I saw those people and their lives as a way to go. We would watch the planes come and go at lunchtime, and I would sit and draw all day. I was asked to do a few simple things for the publications - technical illustrations."

On the advice of his new artist friends, McQuarrie made plans to enroll at the Los Angeles Art Center, a move delayed for two years when he was drafted for the Korean War. He attended the Art Center for four and a half semesters on the GI Bill while working during the summers, changing his emphasis midstream from illustration to advertising art. "Because, frankly, I felt that an illustrator merely took an art director's ideas and finished them. I felt that advertising dealt more with ideas - problems you had to solve. At least that's how it seemed to me at the time. Since then, I've seen that it's different.

"Ballantine gave me book covers to do, and they said, 'Do whatever you think it should be.' That was wonderful, and I didn't expect it. They let me read the book and decide what to do." His 1970s paperback covers from Ballantine/Del Rey include Alan Dean Foster's Star Wars novel Splinter in the Mind's Eye, The Best of Jack Williamson and The Web of the Chosen.

"I quit art school because I wasn't happy with my personal life. I just dropped out of society," McQuarrie says. Eventually, he assembled a portfolio, went to the San Francisco Bay Area, worked as an artist and then "dropped out again. I just wasn't making it as a person, and my work wasn't sparkling either.

"You can ramble on about life and say no one will give you a chance, but that's not true. People came to me, because they knew I was competent, and said, 'Why don't you come back to work?' I went to work for the aircraft industry again, doing illustrations of helicopters, electronic equipment, soldiers, aircraft firing rockets. During that time, Sputnik had gone off and we were building missiles and so forth. It was a very good era for people like me. They were hiring almost anybody who could hold a pencil. Some of the work was junky, but I hadn't a clue as to what else I wanted to do. I worked off and on for this and that company, and between times I dreamed about my own style."

He was working for Boeing again, in Seattle in 1968, "where I did a lot more illustration, and even though a lot of it was aircraft again, I was painting more and getting some experience with human figures and landscapes."

With another move, back to LA in 1969, he landed a job on the Apollo project at CBS. "That was really my introduction to the film world and animation. I did backgrounds and objects that moved in eel animation, like rockets." And it was there that he met others in the film industry - Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, friends of George Lucas.

Barwood and Robbins - who had worked with Lucas on THX-1138 - were trying to sell a science fiction script to be called Star Dancing. "It was a good script, and I was asked to do a number of production paintings of some machinery, aliens and a space-suited figure." The project was never made, but Lucas - then working on American Graffiti and dreaming of Star Wars - saw the paintings.

"George had his script pretty well along when I came in," McQuarrie recalls. "He had already talked to Universal about it, and they weren't convinced. It read corny and looked like a big budget. Another studio had then purchased the option, to see what George wanted to do. He decided he needed some supporting graphics before he went in to them. So we made four paintings. The first one was the robots coming across the desert; then Luke fighting in the spaceship tunnel and the attack on the Death Star. The painting had the sphere smaller than it turned out to be."

The paintings increased the studio's interest in the script, but the paintings them­selves "turned them off. They could see that this was going to be some spectacular event if these guys could make it as good as they said they could. They said, 'Gee, we think it's going to cost a lot more than you say it's going to cost.' But they gave George a little seed money for more work on the script and more graphics."

McQuarrie was excited by the project, and immersed himself in it. "I really loved 2001: A Space Odyssey, the technical aspects of it; but I was unsatisfied by the story. I wanted to see a science-fiction story done with that kind of fidelity that I could get something out of. George was after that kind of picture.

"I went ahead and made four or five more paintings while George was working on the script, and Gary Kurtz was trying to find people who could create all these props. Colin Cantwell came in to do the models, and I would go to his studio and photograph his models in progress. I put those into paintings as well as I could. When they got updated, sometimes I changed the painting."

It is his early days of creation on Star Wars that he remembers most fondly.

"Darth, R2-D2 and all of that came out of those first three or four weeks in early 1975," McQuarrie recalls. "George gave me a script and I went away for awhile. He said, 'Do what interests you.' It was like hearing music and seeing what you hear. It's whatever comes to you and it becomes yours. That's the fun part. It became less fun as time went on [in working on art for the subsequent films], I had done the best part already and I was just rehashing everything. I kept meeting myself in my thinking.

"It became more and more difficult to keep my enthusiasm up. It was less easy to come up with new things. So many other films have come out since and we had already done the Star Wars thing. I would think, 'Well. I have to come up with something.' But what I would get was nothing particularly different. It didn't click anymore."

If McQuarrie had his way, a few of the characters and some of the hardware in Return of the Jedi would have had a different look. Jabba the Hutt, for example.

"With Jabba, I started out with a figure who could walk around," the artist explains. "George wanted something further out. My vision wasn't where he was. He kept asking for something more far-out. Eventually. Phil Tippett [with makeup and creature design] came up with Jabba, using a model. That's how we worked - all of us working on each other's ideas.

"My Jabba had an old man's face, with great, saggy jowls. George wanted a super slob. But when I think of someone powerful and threatening, I think of someone who can move quickly. Even with Sydney Greenstreet, you could sense that if he got angry, he could launch across a room and squash you like a bug. Jabba is powerful because he's like Adolf Hitler. He can order his guards around. But it seems to me that the Caesar should be as strong as anyone else and the power should come from him."

In many ways, Lucas and his artisans have created a far more complicated world than can ever be put on film.

"That's the problem with these movies," McQuarrie admits. "You can only do a little bit of this or that. It's in the nature of what George set out to do - the premise of the tremendously vast conflict where the figures are seen only briefly. There's as much great stuff that we didn't do. These three Star Wars films could have easily been 12 with so many intriguing side stories. Instead, you're just swept into the scene. George feels you shouldn't describe everything, like the opening of a door, and then the walking through, then going down the hall and into the elevator. You just see him say, 'I'm going home' and show him going through the front door. As long as the audience understands, the action is condensed down to the ultimate."

Although Jabba's castle is largely his work, Jedi production designer Norman Reynolds and others appeared to be doing more of the material which was being accepted to build the Star Wars Universe. Early in 1982, McQuarrie decided to leave Lucasfilm after seven years.

"For Star Wars, I did all the concept art [24 paintings] prior to the film going into production," McQuarrie says. "The production designer, the costumer, etc. were all hired afterward and they reflected what I did."

On The Empire Strikes Back, he did twice as many paintings. "For Empire, we went to greater lengths to get what we wanted. We started before the script was very far along. George had the time and money to want to see as many different things as we could do."

But McQuarrie wasn't satisfied with his own work after toiling away at Jedi for two more years. "I was well into it when I left, but the design work was essentially done. Joe Johnston and Nilo [Rodis-Jamero, costume designer] had much more to say than I, so I let them finish. I wasn't feeling well physically either, and that's another reason I left. I felt I had contributed all that I was going to."

Sometime after his departure, however, McQuarrie ran into Lucas at a party. Lucas suggested that, on a freelance basis, the artist complete some of the paintings he had begun and also execute some new ones based on the finished film.

So, while the Star Wars Portfolio and its Empire sequel were assembled from pre-production paintings, the Return of the Jedi Portfolio actually encompasses only McQuarrie's renderings of the scenes after the film was already concluded. "So, it was an after-the-fact example of what others did," he adds. "I was working in the area of a pre-production painting that isn't a pre-production painting." Most of this artwork - and more - was subsequently showcased in The Illustrated Star Wars.

Since Star Wars, McQuarrie has lent his talents to other films. He is responsible for the spaceship design in both E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He worked on Battlestar Galactica as well, before eschewing other projects. "I've had offers to do other films, but they were all just like Star Wars, such as Battlestar. I did not think George wanted that conflict again."

McQuarrie's artistic process is a painstaking one that values the simplicity of getting quickly to the point. "I start with thumbnail sketches of shapes and pieces usually," he says. "Sometimes I get the idea right away. On Star Wars, many of the first sketches are what finally ended up being done.

"I go off the top of my head. I go for the romantic and what looks interesting while half my mind is occupied with practicality. But much of it operates on the self-conscious level. I don't draw or design something because, let's say, this needs a latch here. I try to think what the audience wants, but it's mostly how I feel."

His industrial design background, how-ever, insists that he be somewhat utilitarian. "I would make up reasons for why things looked the way they did," he explains. "My spaceships, for instance, are based on fantasy propulsion systems. I imagine that gravity is like sitting in a waterfall and Earth is sucking into the particles. They reach a speed when close to Earth, even if they're super-small, that creates a drag which gives you your weight. So, I see my engines as anti-gravity devices. If you cut off the gravity, nullify it, say with a super-heavy, dense umbrella or a magnet that can align the molecules, electrically perhaps, you could generate a fast flow of ether to propel a ship. So, it's like a jet plane, sucking in at one end and blasting out at the other. But there's no flame. You have a glow perhaps, so that lends to the romance and feel. An audience can relate to an engine with heat and sound. They know what's going on then."

Having completed thumbnail sketches, McQuarrie proceeds to the next step. Working with a graphite pencil or fine tip felt pens of various colors, he makes a larger pencil drawing on tissue, sometimes putting different elements of the scene on different levels. He'll then begin painting the background. Using the tissues to transfer the sketch to a 9x20-inch illustration board, he gradually works his way up to the foreground.

"My approach is strictly to give enough information so it feels real, but I'm not after realism. I'm concerned with light but I don't want it to took slavishly like a photograph. George wanted a 2001 - style grandeur. So, I tried to get that scale into the paintings and capture whatever richness is there. I want people to say instantly, 'This picture's about...' "

Although he isn't working on the new Star Wars trilogy, McQuarrie is satisfied by his contributions to pop culture. "It's really a nice feeling to go down the street and see, on the sidewalk, a bubblegum wrapper with Darth Vader's picture on it. And Darth's face on the cover of Time, too. It's interesting to have done something that everyone looks at all the time. You become part of the public happening."
  
He's also pleased that he no longer qualifies as a starving artist. "George gave me a small percentage of both Empire and Jedi,"

 Ralph McQuarrie says with a smile, adding humbly, "It's all a happy accident. You just take your best shot."

TM & © Lucasfilm Ltd.

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