When chatting with Industrial Light & Magic matte painter Caroleen “Jett” Green, Clayton Sandell learnt something unexpected, the bearded face of Star Wars creator George Lucas was hidden in a matte painting during a scene in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
In the late 1990’s, as production on The Phantom Menace was in high gear, ILM again came calling. Jett was hired as a digital matte artist, working at her old stomping grounds: ILM’s Kerner Blvd. campus in San Rafael, California.
Jett was tasked with helping digitally expand practical sets like the Theed Palace hallway, enhancing the set to make it look like multiple locations. Since the practical soundstage scenery was only built about 20 feet high, matte paintings were used to complete the far ends of hallways and extend the marble columns and floors.
This is where the fun begins.
In a shot that starts at one hour, 58 minutes and 17 seconds into the film (if you’re watching on Disney+), Queen Amidala (Natalie Portman) and her palace guards run down a hallway, finding themselves surrounded by Droidekas and battle droids. In the background of the wide shot, there’s a prominent stone archway. Look at the apex of that arch, maybe squint your eyes, and you’ll see the somewhat-pixelated face of the creator himself. (I will say, watch the highest quality copy you can. It helps.)
For this delightful addition to Episode I we can thank Jett Green, and here’s how the “cameo” came to be. She says that one day as she was working on the matte painting, she realized the oval-shaped area atop the arch looked sort of like a plaque with a blank space in the middle.
“I decided to get a picture of George, and I put it on this plaque,” she tells me. “I thought, ‘Well, that’ll be cool. By the time you shrink that down, his face is just a blur.’”
She showed off her handiwork to one of the Episode I visual effects supervisors, Scott Squires.
“I said, ‘Hey, Scott, look what I did. I put George in the shot!’ And I magnified it up 400%,” Jett remembers. “And he says to me, ‘You know, I think we’re going to have to get George to approve that.’”
Not long after, Jett says George Lucas himself—accompanied by a “huge” entourage— walked up to her desk. Because she admired Lucas and had worked for him for so long, she says she wasn’t at all nervous as she pulled the scene up on her monitor and zoomed in.
“George is really quiet,” recalls Jett. “He looks at it, and he goes, ‘Oh, naughty, naughty.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s you! It’s your face.’ And then there’s silence again. And I’m just sitting there with everybody. And for some reason, I can’t describe the feeling, but— I knew that I wasn’t going to get in trouble.”
A few more tense-ish moments go by.
“And then,” according to Jett, “George says, ‘Okay. Leave it in.’”
Wizard.
Read the story in full here.
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