‘The Book of Boba Fett’: All Trailers and Footage Shown are From the Show’s Opening Minutes
The cast and crew of The Book of Boba Fett continue to be at the forefront of the marketing push of the series. In a new extensive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the show’s trio of executive producers (Robert Rodriguez, Jon Favreau, and Dave Filoni), as well as actress Ming-Na Wen, walk us through the making of the show, from its inception through its promotion. Rodriguez even revealed that the trailers and TV spots were only allowed to use footage from the first few minutes of the show, since the second half of the first episode already contains a massive spoiler.
Indeed, inside the story, The Hollywood Reporter writer says that “the producers have only revealed footage from the seven-episode season’s opening minutes,” and then quotes the following from Rodriguez:
“We can’t use the second half of the first episode because it gives so much away.”
“Things turn up you don’t expect, you see things we couldn’t believe we got to do. Every episode has big surprises.”
THR goes on to say the producers hinted at “familiar faces (or helmets)” possibly appearing in the series. Of course, Rodriguez has been hyping up the series all year long, saying multiple times it will over-deliver. He will be directing three episodes (out of seven), which is great news for fans of The Mandalorian episode The Tragedy, which brought Boba Fett back into the Star Wars picture in a big way. Jon Favreau reflects back on that episode:
“He crushed it. We loved his interpretation of the character, and I pitched him and the studio the idea of doing more.”
As we now know, the studio greenlit the project, but kept it a complete secret. Favreau asked Kathleen Kennedy not to announce it at Disney’s Investor Day, just so that he could have the floor during the post-credits of the Season 2 finale. Rodriguez gave his understanding of how that all went down:
“Even Disney didn’t know we were going to drop it like that. I got to see the inner workings, and [Favreau and writer-producer-director Dave Filoni] kept this a secret from everybody.”
The director has been a diehard Star Wars fan for a long time, and his pitch for Boba’s triumphant in-costume return was unlike anything Favreau and Filoni had ever seen, as we learned watching the Disney Gallery episode on Season 2. He told The Hollywood Reporter:
“I can’t even say this is a dream come true because I wouldn’t have even thought to dream this.”
“I usually avoid premier properties — you’ll never be able to please everybody, it’s a losing game. I’d rather go do something I’ve created so nobody can say, ‘Hey, that’s wrong because …’ I created it, so it can be anything I want it to be. I love that freedom. That changed with Boba because he was a character that was always underserved. It was a character way more popular than he should have been, based on [his limited screen time]. So it’s almost like starting with an original character. You can kind of do anything you want, so long as you make him cool and don’t make him a buffoon.”
Filoni then jumped in with a theory that might explain why fans have revered the character so much despite his limited screentime in the original trilogy:
“I think the design of the costume, especially the helmet, is iconic. The details, from the dent on the crown of the helmet, the emblems, scuff marks, cloak and braids all spoke of a greater story and adventure that the character had experienced. I think it was always fun to imagine what those adventures were. Now we get to tell some of them.”
The Clone Wars creator then added the following about Boba Fett’s place inside the Star Wars franchise as a whole:
“Boba gives us a direct connection to the ‘Star Wars’ saga since he was involved in that story. This creates a nice crossover point for both classic characters and new characters. Much of ‘The Mandalorian’ was new, or had not been seen onscreen. Through Boba Fett, we can weave some of those characters and tales together using a character we know but don’t know a lot about.”
Something that differentiates this project from most high-profile series out there is that its two main actors are 58 (Ming-Na Wen) and 60 (Temuera Morrison) years old. About this, Rodriguez said:
“You never feel like they’re an older cast; they’re so youthful and energized. Tem and I work out together — he really is Boba Fett. And for Wen, I would design whole sequences just to end on her and the look she would give Boba because she’s so badass. Tem knows this is his moment and she knows this is her moment, and when you get actors like that, they go for it and it’s palpable.”
Filoni then added:
“Tem brings the intensity and sense of weathered experience that a well-traveled bounty hunter needs while maintaining a sense of fun and adventure. He had more dialogue than Fett has ever had to deliver, but it’s also a very physical role, and Tem was there for it, training and enduring a lot of action.”
Of course, Wen’s character had been “seemingly killed off” in Season 1. The actress jumped into the conversation at this point:
“There was no ‘seemingly.’ [laugs] It was very clear at the time.”
“They’re so secretive that when dealing with the contracts, there isn’t even a title for the show; it’s all under pseudonym. I naturally assumed I was doing ‘Mandalorian’ season three until I showed up on set. We’ve always dealt with the Empire and the Jedis; this was about these gangster families and has a rawness to it. It’s quite different from ‘The Mandalorian,’ which is more like a Western.”
From the first trailer, the influence of The Godfather on the show is more than evident. Now, Rodriguez confirmed being mostly influenced by Coppola’s gangster movie, as well as King Conan (Robert E. Howard’s collection of fantasy short stories featuring Conan the Barbarian). He added:
“Boba bites off more than he can chew, and we definitely do not make it easy for him. It’s easy to sit on the throne; it’s not easy to stay on. So what’s it like for a bounty hunter to have to suddenly become a leader? Where’s the push and pull in that? What is he trying to become? We really go in depth into the character.”
Rodriguez then looked back at his career, recalling the time he met George Lucas, who convinced him to make the transition from film to digital when shooting:
“George said, ‘You should check out these digital cameras I’m using’ and showed me some greenscreen tricks — and that’s what got me into shooting digital. He was a mentor at a stage where I went from doing films like ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ and ‘Desperado’ to doing [the pioneering all-greenscreen-filmed] ‘Sin City.’”
Of course, that happened many years before he was even involved in Star Wars, which according to Rodriguez happened thanks to his 2019 movie Alita: Battle Angel:
“Jon saw ‘Alita’ and that got me into ‘Mandalorian.’ But the only reason I started doing high-tech filmmaking way back when, in Austin of all places, was because of George.”
When asked if he discussed The Book of Boba Fett with Lucas, he simply said:
“I can’t tell you.”
The show started production in late November 2020, at the height of the pandemic, which could have meant a production shutdown on any given day. For that reason, Rodriguez wanted to shoot as much as possible in the first few days:
“I came out of the gate firing away — ‘Let’s shoot, shoot, shoot because we might not be here next week, we might get shut down.’ But we never got shut down. So I was showing sequences already edited to Jon and Dave after the first three weeks, and they were like, ‘I can’t believe how much you shot already.’ We kept shooting every day like it was going to be our last day.”
“It was a bleak time that spurred us on even more to just make everything as entertaining as possible.”
Of course, when making a project in the Star Wars franchise, one would expect there to be set rules. But according to Robert Rodriguez, there were no studio mandates while shooting:
“There was nobody going, ‘These are the rules.’ It was more like me saying, ‘This color feels very safe and we want it to feel more dangerous, so can we change it to this color?’. And they go, ‘These are the colors we’ve used, so let’s try one of these out.’ But I can’t reveal what.”
When asked if revealing a color is a spoiler, he simply added:
“It’ll be evident when you see the show.”
The story wrapped up with Rodriguez saying a Season 2 is not out of the realm of possibility:
“If people really love it, I’m sure they’d want to make more.”
However, he’s only signed for one season. We’ll find out if there is really room for a second season when The Book of Boba Fett comes out — the first episode will stream on Disney Plus on December 29.
Make sure to check out StarWarsNewsNet‘s episode reviews, as well as The Resistance Broadcast’s The Mando Fan Show, which will be returning this year for the new adventure.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
