If you love Star Wars and lore, have I got a treat for you today. With the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story on home video happening next week, Lucasfilm was kind enough to set me up on a phone interview with Lucasfilm VP and Executive Creative Director Doug Chiang about how he and his team helped create the look and feel of a film that had to butt right up against George Lucas’ seminal 1977 classic, Star Wars: A New Hope.
Yesterday, I published a piece about Vader’s Castle, but while the final design may be new, the concept for the Sith Lord’s fortress was based on old Ralph McQuarrie concept art. Other aspects of Rogue One had to come fully from the mind of Chiang and his team. Aspects like the mysterious holy city of Jedha, where Jyn Erso reunites with her childhood protector Saw Gerrara. The nature of the beast means there were gobs of information dreamed up to help shape Jedha that never made it to the screen, because no one likes an info dump in the middle of their insurgency battle.
Some details about the holy city made it into Pablo Hidalgo’s table book Star Wars: Rogue One – The Ultimate Visual Guide, but Chiang was a wealth of information. For one thing, we now know which came first in the chicken/egg scenario that is Jedha and the kyber crystal temple.“We knew that Jedha was built here as a holy city because it was rich in kyber crystals,” Chiang revealed.
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Jedha, according to the Lucasfilm Story Group, is ancient. The moon features some of the oldest architecture in the galaxy, described as “primordial structures” that have been lost to living memory. Anyone who saw the film could instantly see the similarities between Jedha and Israel, but Chiang went into detail as to how much ancient Earth religious sites influenced their design of the cradle of the Jedi Order.
“Jedha evolved quite a bit. Once we knew from a story point what the reasoning was — that this [city] was kind of the religious center for the Jedi — we started to come up with figuring out why Jedha is here. Why is it on this planet? Why is it the way it is? We looked at the historical reference such as Jerusalem and Masada. There were interesting parallels that we then started to use to inform what our version of Jedha could be.
“Why are the kyber crystals here? There’s a one shot, the establishing view of the matte painting of Jedha. In it you’ll see Jedha City is at the center of crater formation. The idea is millions of years ago, a meteor crashed and hit the planet, and created the center, which became the mountain that is Jedha. And because of that event, it’s rich in kyber crystals.
“None of this is ever explained to the audience, but I think intuitively they can start to figure out the pieces. The peak of the crater becomes our version of Masada. It’s been sheared off, then they built the city on top of this and a fortress wall to protect what is precious to them, and they built the temple. So it’s all those layers of history that we try to build into a design, especially for creating something that’s new. We always try to ground it in something historical or something in reality. Because at the end, that makes the design feel more authentic.”
In essence, Jedha is the fertile crescent of the Star Wars galaxy. Between the production design team and the story group, Lucasfilm has peppered the ancient moon with plenty of clues for future authors to dig up. It could be that Jedha is home to the first space-faring civilization in the galaxy, that divergent factions battled over the kyber crystals until they polarized into the Jedi and the Sith (with dozens of splinter groups breaking off over the millennia). I, for one, would be happy to read an entire series of novels or comics set in the Jedha equivalent of the Sumerian Empire. Just saying.