For Star Wars fans (via The Force dot Net), The Times Online (UK) has a great feature on the upcoming Revenge of the Sith.
Rick McCallum reveals that the FINAL DUEL is set at 12 minutes in length and that he was told by George, before production began on Episode I in 1999, that, "We're going to get killed on this." Apparently Lucas knew that the first two movies were going to be viewed as containing too much exposition that, from his point of view, was necessary to set up this culmination.
Also nice to see that 'light sabre' is spelled correctly in the various interviews. Here's a snippet from the Hayden Christensen interview if you don't want to check out the full article:
The set piece the fans are most looking forward to is Anakin's long-awaited light sabre duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor).
There was an immense pressure to meet certain expectations, because there was such importance placed on that fight. It's an intricately choreographed fight that surpasses the longest duration of any other fight committed to film, in time and geography.
How much preparation did you do?
It was such an involved fight sequence that I was out in Australia for three months prior, trying to learn it. You want to get to a point where it becomes like muscle memory. It's so quick when you're doing it - adrenalin's rushing through your veins - that there isn't a cognitive sense of what you're doing.
After three months of repetition, you go on set, they call action, you do the fight sequence and your light sabre is swirling all around you. You're not really sure what the next move is, but somehow you seem to find it.
Did you and Ewan get competitive?
Oh yeah. But it was a shared competitiveness - we were each trying to get one up on the other, seeing how fast we could go. It was just so much fun. We had a real laugh with it.
How will it differ from previous light sabre battles?
We're taking it to another level in so many ways. It's longer for a start, the geography that we cover is so diverse: we're fighting in different environments that affect the way we fight. The fighting styles evolve throughout the fight, depending on where we are. It's also a bit of a throwback to the original trilogy, with some of the more epée-influenced fighting styles from the original Obi-Wan/Darth Vader fight in Star Wars.
There's a lot of one handed light sabre fighting. It's just a more fierce, emotional fight. I don't think, in any Star Wars film, you've seen two comrades having a fight to the death. It's all fuelled by really raw emotion, which makes everything that much more exciting. It was really thrilling for me, one of the more exciting aspects of getting to do the film.
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