Hey, this is Dave Filoni, executive producer on Star Wars Rebels.
And I'm going to talk about the episode today, Jedi Night.
This episode was a long time in coming... dealing with Kanan and his overall arc.
This moment, building in this episode, is something that I spoke to Freddie... about in the very first season.
I wasn't sure about the details of what was going to happen yet, but I was throwing around the idea that probably Kanan wouldn't make it through the series.
And Freddie was always tremendously supportive of that idea.
And when you're going to do that with a character, especially a major character, when you're going to take them out of the show... you have to make sure that you set everything up to make it meaningful.
There's a responsibility in it.
It's not something that you do that's sensational or for shock value, at least not for me.
It has to be a big part of explaining the story and what we're supposed to take away from it.
I think now there's a lot of overriding sense in films to just, I think now there's a lot of overriding sense in films to just... not follow traditional narratives and heroic story arcs, and to shockingly k*ll off characters and heroes... so the audience plays a guessing game of who's going to go next.
And I think that... your story that is reacting to the overall picture of stories out there in the world instead of being true to what your story intended.
So, in our story, Kanan had to meet his end in order to enable the other characters, not just Ezra, but all of them, to find their path.
We've done many different scenes like this in Rebels... with the shocking whatnot, but the important element here to me is Thrawn and how he tries to get inside people's heads.
It was an opportunity to give a little insight, a little more insight, into the personal background of Hera... that she had possibly had a brother who d*ed when she was very young.
The idea that he would know things about her... that are personal is very invasive.
It shows that, while he likes art and studies it, he doesn't really have an appreciation or understanding for the emotional value of it, for probably what drives the creation of art... what's inside the minds of these people.
He's just a manipulator.
But I don't think art is something that he would really aspire to himself.
He appropriates things.
He takes them and he uses them... often against the very people that made the art or the statement.
This scene is just to let him kind of have his moment... where he's working her to then make what Pryce has to do a bit easier.
And Pryce is just, she doesn't care about things like art.
She probably just enjoys the t*rture moment of it all... the pain and the suffering of someone.
And really, when villains do that type of thing, it's because they themselves are suffering, they themselves are afraid.
Being evil is a very sad, lonesome, horrid thing at the end of the day.
Your powers are all gained through the suffering of others... which is quite, in the end, sad, if you think about it.
Ezra, of course, could key in on Hera in this moment of t*rture.
So, they're going to devise a plan.
Something you see towards the back end of Rebels is the younger characters taking the lead more.
Sabine and Ezra both have to take the lead that Hera and Kanan used to in the early days of the show.
They are following in the footsteps of these parental-like figures.
And they, of course, have their Uncle Zeb here to ask questions and to get them to do their best.
I have no idea why we name everything on Lothal a Loth-something... a Loth-cat, Loth-bat, Loth-rat, Loth-wolf. I don't know why.
Probably just for an ease of naming, that you know they're from Lothal, but it wasn't something that was necessarily set on in the beginning to say they must be done that way.
But we just kind of stuck with it throughout the series.
This scene with Kanan is very ceremonial.
It's kind of him being in a transitional moment.
For this scene, which is very montage-like for us, I talked to Kevin about doing some music that was a bit different than we've normally done it.
I think in some ways there's a rhythm that's slightly more modern and moving as far as the tempo than things that we've normally done for Star Wars, or Star Wars Rebels specifically.
But it's just to set up, this moment of ingenuity and this moment of transformation... and I love how it nicely ends with the Star Wars theme when Kanan is revealed here ready to go.
Just a nice moment.
Now this scene, you're always influenced by different movies and things.
Definitely I drew from several movies that are among my favorites or things that kind of emotionally inspired me over the years.
A sequence here, and I don't always speak about it, but I really love the soundtrack to the film Always... the Steven Spielberg film, John Williams soundtrack... and dealing with pilots fighting forest fires.
And that seemed to me the music, and it was very inspirational for this uplifting effort happening here.
So, there's often a lot of music that I use to inspire the structure, the writing of things that I'm doing... and I'll listen to these tracks relentlessly just to get my mind... in the right moment, in the right space, to create the scenes.
And this scene, I think, came off particularly nice.
Joel and the team did a wonderful job lighting it.
It was a little longer before we trimmed it down, but it expresses the idea.
This scene at different times in Rebels in Season 4, there was a moment where even Krennic would appear in this series, where the Death Star appeared in this series, but because our show isn't ultimately about either Krennic or the Death Star...
I decided to cut those ideas from visibly showing up.
I don't want to confuse the audience.
I know a lot of people would know exactly how they fit.
It just seemed distracting to talk about something that wasn't the primary focus of the show.
It'd be distracting to bring the Death Star into it, or this character Krennic.
Why would we bring him in if he's not going to play a major role in this series?
So I tried to avoid that, and yet get the idea that Thrawn is competing with how we're going to fight the Rebels.
These two guys are, these stormtroopers, actually the same guys that appeared... battling the little Loth-cats out on the runway.
It's supposed to be the same two guys that chase them when Ezra and Sabine stole the TIE fighter interceptor.
They're actually played by myself and Steve Blum... so we reprised our role as these two kind of knuckle-headed stormtroopers, but that was a little bit of a fun thing to do, especially with Steve.
It's always fun to play a stormtrooper there.
They don't have that much dynamic range...
(CHUCKLES) that's why I can do one of them...
(CHUCKLES)
I like the glider element.
I liked our guys masquerading as some kind of natural element or creature to sneak by the Empire.
They don't really pay enough attention to those things, as Kanan brings up.
In a lot of ways, you have to recognize the moments that are happening when you're directing these things, and this is really the last moment, if you think about it, that Kanan really spends with Sabine and Ezra, where he has a chance to impart some knowledge.
And these are things that Freddie and I would talk about as we did this scene.
He knows that this is going to be it.
He doesn't want to tell them, though. He's on the edge of that.
And at one moment later, he almost tells Hera that something's going to happen, but he resists it. He has to be fair to them.
They have to survive, and they have to do what they're going to do... for the good of everyone in the future.
So, to Ezra and Sabine, this mission is, probably similar to any other they've done in this series.
But it's going to turn out quite differently than anything they've experienced before.
It was a trick to play this out, which is how would Kanan know the Kalikori is in there, he can't see it, but I think that, the object's connection to Hera kind of draws him to it, and we see him kind of trying to feel what, why am I sensing something in this moment?
What is in there?
And then he goes and rescues this little bit of family history for her.
This was a big episode that got trimmed down quite a bit.
But in the end I think it flows nicely.
There was a lot of discussion about this upcoming scene now.
We had felt we never really saw this Imperial probe droid do its thing in A New Hope.
We cut away when the mind probe tries to get Leia to talk about... the rebel base in A New Hope, so let's see what is that like here... which is a device reasonably the Empire would use on Hera.
Now it became really important in a discussion in the writers' room... what does it mean to have Hera under this influence?
We can't have that be a thing that she's at any kind of disadvantage when dealing with Kanan or when she's expressing any kind of feelings to Kanan.
I don't want this to be some kind of situation where she is... not in control of her faculties.
We talked to Vanessa Marshall about it, who plays Hera, and I said, you know, "I don't want you to be drunk-seeming, "or reckless-seeming, in this moment.
"We have to find a way that... The way this affects you is that...
"you're just blatantly honest probably, "and is there a way you think you can play this
"where you don't feel like Hera's being compromised as a character?"
I mean, that's what, of course, the Empire is intending to happen, but I like to think that she has a stronger will.
I thought Vanessa did brilliantly at playing Hera as very matter-of-fact and just honest to a fault with the stormtroopers and with not liking this droid.
She was able to make it comical and funny, and definitely Freddie and Vanessa play off each other wonderfully in these scenes all the way to the end.
But I think she was able to create a version of this with Hera where she's not completely lost as a person.
She is more honest probably than Hera normally is, especially about things she feels.
But I think that what you've always seen Hera with is struggling with her personal interests, her personal wants and needs, versus what she does for everybody else.
Of course, you know, with anything we need, in Star Wars, humor to be coming through, even in these very intense stories.
It helps to balance things, and I think again Freddie and Vanessa have never been better than they are here together... with how they're portraying the characters.
It's kind of heart-breaking because it's some of the best dialogue, I think, that we've written for these characters, and yet, it was coming to an end for Kanan on-screen at least.
And that's a big challenge.
And that's a big challenge.
The Kanan-Hera relationship is one that... really begins in the very first short that we released for the series Star Wars Rebels.
And it was something that I felt that we didn't need to play very strongly.
I think these two characters that know each other for a very long time... they know each other prior to us seeing them on the show... that they would have a relationship that's a bit mysterious.
We don't know all the details about it... and that kind of gave them a tremendous amount of depth.
They both have things they are trying to accomplish in their lives.
Hera's trying to be a general leading this rebellion against an empire, Kanan's trying to rebuild his fractured life as a Jedi and mentor this kid Ezra Bridger, and they are both kind of de facto parents to these other characters who've all lost their ways.
They have a lot going on for the characters around them... and then they also...
I don't know if they suppress the feelings they have for one another.
Definitely Kanan suppresses less than Hera, but they're able to see the bigger picture, and they're able to respect in a lot of ways the things the other wants to accomplish, which, I think, makes them both likable, that they respect one another in the goals that each has in life, though there is this personal yearning to be together in a more... committed way I suppose, especially from Kanan.
Again, I have a lot of music that to me spells out their relationship and what it's like, and I've had that for several seasons... listening to songs to kind of guide me to keep me on their path, what's going on in their heads.
There had to be a progression for Hera throughout this episode of coming back to herself... and not being under this kind of whimsical influence of saying what she thinks in the moment from the interrogator droid.
I thought Vanessa also played us well back into that, the more Hera's adrenaline kind of picked up, the more she drops... the idea that she's under any kind of influence.
And then in the end she states very clearly when she says, "It's me, all me," that she's back in her mind, but she still wants to express herself... in this vivid way that she does in the episode.
It became a bit of a comedic thing for me that Rukh is constantly getting thrown off of ledges. There he goes again.
I played that out all the way to his end in the series itself, which I know is different for fans than how it went in the books, but I wanted to be able to do in a couple of the major villains, just not Thrawn, and so Rukh would meet his untimely end in this show.
And we found a way to do it to tie to this idea that he's kind of this strange creature that keeps falling off of ledges, and recovers.
He always grabs onto something, and Zeb at least finally then gets hip to that, and doesn't let up and does Rukh in.
But here, we've had many adventurous escapes.
This was a very fun one. All of this was mapped out pretty intricately.
I thought Saul did a really great job being the episode art director... to make sure everything is very dynamic and interesting visually.
I love walkers. I love the walker pilots, they're my favorite type of stormtrooper, so it's always nice to see these guys around... and involve them in this very important way.
This fuel depot's been around since Season 1, if you look at the early art direction for the capital city.
It's been a set that we've always been meaning to use.
We did some scouting on this set virtually where we are actually standing in a volume on top of this three-dimensional space so I could physically figure out where they would be standing and how to sh**t the cameras.
This was some very challenging stuff to do, and also something that I tried to keep under the wraps quite a bit... even within the office.
For the scenes where Kanan and Hera are on top of the fuel depot coming up, I would sh**t those myself in the office, in my office... just finding some time to do it, and work out... just how the sequence should unfold, which is a bit tricky.
There's a lot of emotional range that I have to get through in a matter of moments to really get you... to be in this place where you understand what the characters are thinking fully, and you're getting the best response... to everything they're thinking and feeling.
This is, in the end, I felt... the Jedi can make a big difference when nobody else can.
And part of what they can do, in a lot of ways... if you think of Star Wars Rebels and these heroes... their story would have ended in this episode, all but Zeb and Chopper, because the Empire is so overwhelming.
They have massively more troops and equipment than the rebels... could ever hope to fight back against.
And there is almost an inevitability, a feeling of inevitability to their victory.
So it takes the outstanding efforts of some people to turn that tide, to turn that power, and all of our rebels are like those people, but Kanan can be the first.
He kind of starts the reaction that's needed by... giving up everything that he is for these other people... by changing what's possible.
This moment, of course, I think, is something fans had wanted for a long time.
To be honest, this second time that they kiss is actually better than the first one, and that's intentional, too... just 'cause they're in a much deeper place in their relationship in this moment than they've been before.
And so, we tried to portray that even through the details... in their animation in that moment.
This is a lot about sound now.
There's really no words that you can put to this.
I wanted the walkers coming in just like these terrible drums, these destroyers.
And here, really the push-ins and pull-backs become essential in this scene... to get you into the minds of the characters.
And you have to have the audience in a moment where they're willing to believe this is possible.
Kanan's doing something rather impossible, but hopefully... you're with him in this moment, and you don't want this to happen, so you're hoping that he's holding that back.
You have to do so many things.
Hera would never let this stand without an effort to save him herself.
That speaks volumes for who she is.
But Kanan's just not going to let that happen.
The moment with the eyes is something that, I actually drew the storyboards, and when I did these sh*ts, I drew his eyes in, and I thought... he really needs to see her in this moment.
I think that's right. I think that makes things feel complete.
And it turned out to be a real key moment in this episode.
And just to make everything very different and feel dynamically different, I wanted to end with this kind of inverted logo.
So you know.
This is kind of to tell you that this is real, that this happened.
This is kind of to tell you that this is real, that this happened.
So, it's a heavy episode, but it's an important episode for the entire framework of Rebels.
And I could probably watch this several times and tell you something different every time we watch it.
I hope that you got something out of it this time.
And we'll do more of these. Always fun.
Always enjoy talking about the show. And thanks so much for watching.