Fans were treated to one of the greatest lightsaber duels when Star Wars returned to the big screen in 1999 for the first prequel movie, The Phantom Menace.
As if Darth Maul (Ray Park) igniting his double-bladed red lightsaber was not epic enough, the Sith Lord’s climactic duel with Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and his padawan Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) led to galaxy-altering consequences.
Qui-Gon was killed, and a young Obi-Wan avenged his master by becoming the first Jedi in nearly a thousand years to defeat a Sith in combat.
According to Collider, McGregor recently spoke about it at Fan Expo Boston. Remembering the epic fight scene he filmed with Park’s Maul, the 54-year-old actor said, “When Qui-Gon’s been cut down, that… it goes up a notch there. All of that fight was amazing to do, getting stuck behind the laser doors and all that stuff. But that part, it’s just next level.”
However, what we see on the screen in ‘Duel of the Fates’ is not exactly how it was filmed.
McGregor revealed that George Lucas had to “over-crank” the camera to slow down the filming speed because he and Park were simply too fast.
“When me and Ray did that fight… George—I’ve got to get this right—over-cranked,” McGregor shared.
“I remember hearing him saying, ‘They’re going too fast. Slightly over-crank the camera.’ So they over-cranked the camera to make it slightly slower because me and Ray were so fast doing this fight. He was worried that people wouldn’t believe it.”
Lightsabers were constantly damaged during prequels filming
The prequel trilogy inarguably has some of the best lightsaber sequences of the entire franchise, and a huge reason behind that is the heart and soul poured into the choreography by the actors involved. McGregor trained in fencing extensively before the filming, and Park already had a background in martial arts that added to the on-screen intensity.
Last year, Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequel movies, revealed to GQ that the Mustafar duel in Revenge of the Sith, which many consider the best in the saga, was not filmed using stunt doubles and was not digitally sped up.
McGregor shared another behind-the-scenes anecdote as a testament to how good he, Christensen, and Park were in the trilogy. He said that a technician on the set was tasked with the job of replacing the blades on the lightsabers after every take for a fight scene, because the blades would be bent out of shape from the sparring.
“They were made of metal: metal tubing, some kind of alloy, I guess. But we went at it so hard that… George would go, ‘Cut,’ and you’d look down, and your lightsaber would be a big, bent shape. So this guy would replace the blade on it every take. You can imagine how hard we were going at it.”