Hey, this is Dave Filoni, executive producer of Star Wars Rebels.
And we're going to talk about Wolves and a Door, one of my favorite episodes.
I like starting with these little lighthearted Loth-cat moments.
I don't know, this is just something I enjoy very much, these images.
It kind of rounds out, I think, the whole feeling of the world for me to start from the point of view of these creatures and then go in.
There were a lot of things to figure out in this episode, as I wrote it. This scene was a lot longer.
This opening scene was probably twice as long as I originally wrote it, and you're always juggling how much you're explaining versus how much you're feeling
"this is an actual conversation that could happen."
As it turned out, I could trim it down and trim it down to just its essentials.
But, man, there were a lot of diagrams and charts that I had to make to try to figure out how they open these doors and what's going on at the Jedi Temple.
And this was a tricky episode.
But the opening part is... It was a fun part because I really was able to get into some of these ideas with the wolves that I'd had, and some of their abilities.
I think it goes without saying that I am obviously a very big fan of Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke.
I think it's unavoidable, you see the influence that it has, as far as how I approach these wolves in this show.
But I've also had (CHUCKLES) a long history of liking wolves, as some people know, that would go back to the film Never Cry Wolf by Carroll Ballard.
It was a very big influence on me as a kid, and I've actually done quite a bit of research and study of wolves, and how they fit into the world and how we can have a role in their existence and how we can help their existence, or, just what their conservation means.
If you want to really delve into that, there are some great resources out there like wolf.org where you can find out information.
But, yeah, the wolf is an interesting creature because it creates such opposing forces in our world, our real world.
They are seen as an aggressive creature, and they're seen as a spiritual creature.
So, that's like the Force to me, light and dark.
And so much of that depends on our own point of view.
Zeb, I think he would be the least knowledgeable of this whole thing with wolves, so, it's fun to play him a little comically.
And I love these wide vistas.
It's almost a sea of grass.
This idea that they're going out into this vastness is always fun.
And now Ezra has his own kind of little language.
That was a big moment 'cause Hera had never put her goggles down until that moment.
We'd almost made it through the entire series without doing that, which would have been crazy.
It was very lucky that the wolf's head was big enough to actually pick Chopper up, so that was a fun thing, like a dog with a bone.
And then, this racing across the grass, which I had a couple different versions of, with dialogue here and there, a way to convey that they're moving swiftly, that every one of the Rebels is now on board with this, mainly because they're doing it for Kanan.
So they're driven to some things that they might not normally do.
But they have no idea how deep this experience is about to get.
And I wanted to play with this idea that the wolves are just so in tune with the world around them that they can just glide right through the grass into the very fabric of matter in the universe here, and that our characters, if they're open to it just a little bit, they're just swept up in this, this sh*t in particular, where they just disappear under the grass, like disappearing into water.
It became quite a technical thing to do, but it was important to get you to this, It became quite a technical thing to do, but it was important to get you to this, which I just had this feeling that within the planet itself, are all these moments.
You're in this kind of more...
You're either unconscious or incredibly conscious, I can't decide.
But the characters are hearing these things.
They're passing through their mind.
They're passing just out of what they know as what they would call real, these experiences, a lot surrounding Kanan.
And we see Ahsoka there mainly to set up the idea that she is going to be appearing in short order in the show.
And so I worked in a couple references to Ahsoka.
It begins in the previous episode, actually, where Ezra meets the Dume wolf, and he brings up Ahsoka.
So you have to lay these things in slowly to prime the viewer that this is going to happen, this character will appear, and who is she?
This, like waking up from a dream, I think, is an important moment as well.
Our characters have taken this step into a larger world.
This all just, I thought, worked really wonderfully and really conveyed what I was after in the story.
And you have a range within the characters, I think, of how much they're willing to believe any of this, or how much they even understand it.
I don't think most of them understand what's going on even.
I don't think even Ezra understands what's truly going on here.
But they're just giving in to this kind of spiritual journey because it's for their friend Kanan, and this is more a step in his world as a Jedi of the world of being more connected to things, the world of impossible things. So...
And these are my leanings as a storyteller, I guess, too.
Now this reveal, there had been an idea, ever since, when I designed the Jedi Temple, I knew it raised and lowered from the ground, so I'd always had this instinct that we should at some point excavate it.
And Henry and I had talked about an excavation of the temple as early as Season 2.
But we'd never really hit upon the right thing.
What's inside the temple? What's inside the temple?
It's always...
The first instinct of everybody is, "It's a w*apon of some kind."
Is it some kind of lightsaber? Is it... You know, what is it?
It's always something physical.
And in the end, I didn't want to do any of that.
There wasn't anything that we could come up with that wouldn't seem a bit cliché, another holocron.
It really is about the experience that Ezra has, and the idea isn't that there's anything in the temple, but the temple itself is what's important, and the ability to enter into this world of gateways, this world of possibilities, and what that could mean powerfully for good or evil, again.
So it's better when it's not something you expect, or something that's, I think, an object.
Very simply, it's just too often the case.
And we've done it quite a bit on this show.
In the last season, everything had to be a bit different and be a bit more meaningful.
And so, we found a way, I think, to do that.
But that was a discovery process.
The two-part arc of this episode and the next were...
In the beginning it was one episode, and I actually had to split it in two because it took me the effort of one episode just to figure out how to open the door.
It had to be a difficult task, and even then, to me, sometimes seems a bit too easy, how they figure out how to get in there.
Just for film buffs, there's probably some obvious influence from films like Close Encounters going on in this episode, a film that resonates within me.
I just really enjoy it and the way they have Devils Tower, the little setup. I took some inspiration from that.
I just enjoy these... I spent a lot of time as a kid in museums growing up.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has a lot of great museums, and I spent a lot of time there looking at artwork, looking at ancient ruins, looking at things from the past, and history, and science, and so, maybe that's influenced a bit of what draws my attention to a story like this.
But Malcolm McDowell here was fantastic as Hydan.
I've been familiar with his work over the years, and I thought it'd be really fun to have him playing this kind of villain that we haven't really had much of before.
He's a little more of an intellectual.
There's nothing really physical about him as a villain.
He's gonna try to out think you.
He's a little more evil for it
'cause you can't underestimate him.
The old mind trick, always a good one. Ezra's gotten a lot better at it.
(CHUCKLES)
These troopers, there's so much debate over if they should actually speak in actual words or not, or just their coded messages.
But I'll let the debate rage on.
I had a story to tell, so they needed to speak English.
It's pretty... Sometimes the decisions are about as simple as that, I have to tell you.
One of the exciting things in this episode, for me, was getting to work with Ian McDiarmid as Emperor Palpatine.
And that was new, we did not have him in The Clone Wars.
But we were able to secure him for Rebels, which is a real great thing for us.
It's just something special to have more performance from any of the original actors from the films, and he brings real gravitas to our show here.
And he brings real gravitas to our show here.
Also, I'm trying to connect a lot of threads from the different stories that I've been a part of over the years.
So the Mortis Gods coming into play is really giving you a look back into Clone Wars and some earlier experiences of Anakin and Obi-Wan and their adventures.
I think that's fun for the people that have been watching these shows for a while. And yet, if you've never seen any of that, it just sets up this idea of an ancient civilization, which I also think is fun.
You don't have to go back and watch those episodes.
They don't really play a part in what's going on here.
But if you know them, you can understand the story on perhaps a deeper level.
The Emperor, so evil for having Ian portraying him once again, and as you know, by the end I was able to have him even portray the Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, not just the evil Emperor Palpatine, which is, I think, again, fun for him to do.
This was a very important moment.
Kanan is not a Force ghost in this moment, it's not that kind of thing. This is a look inside Hera's mind, and how, up to this point, she had never really felt the loss of someone like this.
She had never really thought that they were ever going to fail or not come back from a mission.
So now, the stakes going forward were so much higher because the reality is they can perish on these missions.
And I just thought it made a nice moment for her, to see that she's still thinking about Kanan, that she's being responsible then for these other people.
You know...
It gives you a powerful connection between the two, even with him not there.
This is, again, just one of those moments where you just let the artwork kind of speak for you.
And I had drawn up this kind of star chart with the Mortis Gods in the middle and just...
Kilian Plunkett did an incredible job at bringing that to life in a spectacular way.
I love these constellation maps and star charts.
There's something amazing about them. I've used them in Clone Wars.
There's a fantastic map in the movie Time Bandits.
There's just... There's something really inspirational for me about this idea of traveling between the stars and secret maps and secret ways whether it be secret doors in a house, or ways into the wood between the worlds in Narnia, or through the wardrobe itself.
I think it's something that kids really understand.
You travel through a thicket in the woods and you come out the other side in a fantastic kingdom.
There's just these ways of moving through time and space that are quite magical and hidden and in our subconscious, really, to believe in, so...
Here, the kids are trying to figure out this puzzle, (LAUGHS) and very much I was trying to figure out how this all worked as well.
It had to be, as I've said, believable, difficult, but also easy to understand, so that the audience can be right with them as they're figuring it out.
It can't be something that's too obvious, but it has to be just on that edge of understanding.
And if somebody said, "Well, how did they figure it out?"
Hopefully somebody else in the room is getting it.
I'd wanted to implement 2D animation for a long time in one of our shows, and my friends over at Ghostbot Animation did a great job at making these paintings come to life in a wonderful way.
They've really stayed true to the artwork, and it's just a bizarre, and it's just a bizarre, wonderful moment when these things start moving, and...
Just kind of...
Again, it's nothing that we've done before visually, and I liked the opportunity to do that.
So here, you know, is some explaining, but I think if you're drawn in enough, you really enjoy the explanation.
I rewrote this so many times to make it work.
I had it working a couple different ways and thought, "That's not complex enough, " so again, if you're wondering, yes, a lot of work goes into this and it is a challenge, as you're constantly running out of time to try to figure out how to make this work.
I had longer versions of all these scenes, but you gotta distill it down into what's going to work here.
You need tension between the guards coming and discovering them, and Ezra actually figuring out how to open the door.
So, this is just a fun adventure.
I really looked forward to writing this episode the whole season.
It feels like something I've been trying to say for a long time, and the team just brought it all together so beautifully.
I really enjoy these episodes.
This kind of banter here is a bit tricky with the stormtroopers, too.
The stormtroopers are all very methodical, and they're dealing with reports and what would sound like paperwork, and they have codes for everything, (LAUGHS) the complete opposite of a more artistic-minded community.
Certainly it's a challenge for me to write all this bizarre dialogue,
about m*llitary matters or archaeological digs, but I think it comes across well, and Sabine is using her own mind to deceive these guys, to draw attention away from Ezra.
Very sacrificial here, very self-sacrificing to draw them away.
Matt Wood, not very happy about filling out his own report there as a stormtrooper.
He had a very funny line that we left in there.
Matt, he's a good stormtrooper.
But here's the moment where the painting comes to life, and this kind of stuff just really captivates me.
It could have been more complex... If we were blowing this out in a movie, I would make this a lot more complex, not change the detailed elements of it, but have a lot more moving parts to this transformation.
But I have to accomplish everything within a certain amount of time, and I think this tells the story well enough.
We had to match all the continuity in the painting as it's moving.
In the background of sh*ts to make sure it all matches up.
I got wolves in here every possible way.
I got actual wolves, painted wolves, (CHUCKLES) there's all kinds.
This is the be-all for the wolves in Star Wars for me, I guess.
You gotta do this stuff when you can, and it made sense in the story, so...
I love as they're walking along the wall there.
It's just interesting.
We had a great planetarium, again, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania growing up, and the school used to always go there on field trips.
All this stuff must be bounced around in my head, and years later, (CHUCKLES)
It comes out in a Star Wars episode, which is kind of fascinating.
Again, trying to play a little humor in here, especially with Zeb having eyes on the scene, just to, if you're not believing in this all the way, then you're more on Zeb's side of things.
But just coming up with these magic moments, I was describing this to the team when I pitched this whole episode, I was like, I felt like Indiana Jones explaining how the Ark of the Covenant works to those government officials.
I had a big whiteboard at the story meeting, and Kiri Hart was there, and Carrie Beck was there, Henry, and Steve Melching, and I'm just describing this whole episode front-to-back, I had diagrams of this Jedi Temple, and how they'd excavated, and these moving paintings are happening.
And I can never tell in those meetings if they like what I'm saying, or if they're just like, " Just do it, "we know we can't stop you anyway."
But they ask some great questions that get me thinking on how to really solve for all of this and make it better.
I mean, that's what the team effort is for.
You're a group trying to figure out these problems, and you're a group trying to make these stories come across as best they can.
That's why I tell these stories quite often to the crew working on them.
I work out a lot of problems talking with them and throwing ideas at them.
I'll give them movies to watch.
Just so we're all on the same page telling this story.
There we are, look, I got a magic door with running wolves, which is kind of fascinating.
But this was great effects that Joel and the team were doing, preparing you for the mystery of this gateway, whatever that means, as we're about to leap into the unknown. And who doesn't want to do that?
That's one of the bravest things that you can do is, just leap of faith through the material into the immaterial.
It's practically like a Buckaroo Banzai thing in that moment, if you're familiar, but that's probably out of reach for some people.
But there you go. Well, that's a look at Wolves and a Door, which is one of my favorite episodes. I hope you enjoyed it.
Which is one of my favorite episodes. I hope you enjoyed it.
And I hope that you learned something maybe a little bit more, with some insight into that particular episode.
It's very fun to make, and thank you very much for watching more of Star Wars Rebels.
And, as always, may the Force be with you.
(THEME MUSIC PLAYING)