Darth Maul was one of the most popular characters to come out of the Star wars prequels. Now a fan-film, ‘Darth Maul: Apprentice’, has reignited interest in the character. Mike Leeder talks to Shawn Bu and Vi-Dan Tran…
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, a character called Darth Maul was introduced by George Lucas in Star Wars: Episode One. While the prequel trilogy has mostly been consigned to history and some recrimination over certain characters, the one character that truly struck a chord with fans around the world seemed to be that tiger-faced evil Sith fighter . Now thanks to two very talented film-Makers from Germany, Darth Maul returns and gets the treatment he deserves in an epic fan-made film Darth Maul Apprentice, a project that set the internet alight and garnered attention from Hong Kong to Hollywood. Impact’s own Midichlorian Mike Leeder talks to the men behind the movie…
Impact: Gentlemen, please introduce yourselves and give us a little bit of insight into what lead you to this point? How did the two of you came together?
Shawn: my name is Shawn Bu. I’m a filmmaker from Germany and the writer, producer and director of Darth Maul: Apprentice. My biggest influence in becoming a filmmaker was Star Wars. I watched the films when I was 6-7 years old and knew very soon that this would be what I want to do in my life.
Vi-Dan: My name is Vi-Dan Tran, 31 years old, and I studied filmmaking with main focus on directing, storytelling and cinematography. During my studies, I also worked as a stuntperformer for tv and feature films like Skyfall,Cloud Atlas and Agent47. Having a very diverse martial arts background (Wushu, Boxing, Tricking, Free Running, Grappling) I had the chance to work as an action designer for the Chinese film company China Star in Hongkong (2013/14). Being part of the Jackie Chan Stunt-team, I recently worked on the action choreography and ‘action-previs’ of the new Jackie Chan movie The Foreigner. Since 2015, I have been working as director and cinematographer for TV commercials and music videos for Universal Music/Sony Music in Germany.
Shawn: We really came together during our film studies in Germany. We quickly found out that we work incredibly well as a two man team. And worked on dozens of short films and music videos together. Always trying to achieve Hollywood levels of quality. So naturally Star Wars mad total sense to do.
Vi-Dan: Our goal are feature films, of course: Hollywood big budget feature films. We want to become big like David Fincher, Ridley Scott, Darren Aronofsky, JJ Abram or like Jackie Chan. But it’s not the fame or money what makes us driven. We want to become like them because they told stories and change the world with their movies. We want to inspire and motivate the audience, that they become kids again… like us, who watched Alien, Terminator, Back to the Future for the first time or rather like myself when I watched Jackie Chan movies. That moment when you are shocked, entertained and fascinated or even fall in love with a character of your favourite movie.
Impact: There’s been a lot of Star Wars Fan Films, why make a new one and why Darth Maul? How long did you take to put the idea together and then make it a reality?
Shawn: There are so many great and fun Star Wars fan-films out there. But most of them are more amateur in nature. We felt we could bring a quality to a Star Wars film that was never done before and to make it something unique. Ben Schamma, who plays Darth Maul, is a good friend of ours. He portrayed Maul at several conventions before. He can bring him to life amazingly. So that’s why I decided to make a film based on this character. And it was a great opportunity, too, because Maul is a beloved character who got disappointingly little screen time. So this was a great way to give him his own film, where he is the hero. The Idea was developed over several months and the whole production process took about 2 years.
Impact: Did you pre-viz the action before developing the story or did the story and the action develop at the same time?
Vi-Dan: The script was written before and I designed the action afterwards. I spent many days in the gym, at home and in a café to develop the right action design for the story.
Impact: Tell us a little about how you found your cast and who they are?
Shawn: Most of the cast are friends of either Vi-Dan or me. For this film to be taken seriously and differ from previous fan-films we had to get the right actors for the film who can portray the characters perfectly. Because this films also heavily features lightsaber fights, actors were also chosen on their fighting and stunt experiences. The only actor without any previous fighting experience was the Jedi apprentice played by Svenja Jung.
Impact: What kind of crew did you have for the shoot? How long did you actually take to shoot… and if you don’t mind me asking, what was your budget?
Shawn: The Crew consisted of fellow students, hobby filmmakers and professionals. We started out shooting with RED Dragon and ended up shooting with Blackmagic Production Camera 4K. Blackmagic URSA and DJI Phamtom 3 were also used for some shoots. We shot for 18 days over the course of one year. It wasn’t always easy to find the right schedule where everyone had free time. And I myself invested over 25.000€ in this film.
Impact: What were the hardest things to deal with during the shoot and why?
Shawn: There were many challenges. And it was a really hard (but equally amazing) two years! The most problematic thing were the immense outdoor shootings. Weather was always a big problem. And without a real budget, every day we lost was another 1000€ lost for me. We also started out with a way too big of a crew in the beginning and reduced crew gradually for the following shoot. We started out with 28 people on set and had only 12 people for the final few days of shooting. For me personally, a big challenge was to keep the flow and motivation going over such a long period of time. Where a lot of things didn’t work out as well as hoped. But the project was developing well and so it was always a reward to see another vfx shots coming in, another sound effect done, another musical cue composed.
Impact: The fight scenes are spectacular, was it a specific idea to showcase real action as opposed to high-wire or CGI-enhanced action (apart from, obviously, the lightsabers). Were there any injuries or funny stories from shooting the fights?
Vi-Dan: Yeah that was really important! I wanted to show real fights. Especially as we got so many talented action actors on the set, so it had to be this way (smiles). And anyway we don’t have the money for big CGI effects! So I tried to create the action like back in Jackie days: long fight combats combined with fast-beat-edits or long-takes and smooth camera work to show the whole sequences. I am so tired to watch action nowadays. Every time…trying to cover bad performance or sloppy techniques. Of course, in our short everything isn’t perfect though, but considering we had almost no rehearsal and shooting time, I think we created reasonable fight scenes . For references I used the movie Kenshin, cinematic short films of Star Wars Old Republic, Hero, some Jackie beats and some anime fight scenes combined with Wushu- and Samurai /Ninja style.
Fortunately there were no injuries!. But Darth Maul felt once from the wall at the wall-run scene. We tied the rigging setup on some trees. But at one point one of the tree decided to fall apart and the whole setup crashed. Lucky nothing too bad happened to Darth Maul himself!.
8) When you finished shooting how much footage did you have? And then how long did it take to edit and then do SFX, post etc..
Shawn: It was planned to finish shooting and then have a lengthy post-production period. But because of difficulties in scheduling the shootings and the weather conditions, production and post-production ran almost simultaneously for almost eighteen months. After the first days of shooting where finished I started editing and doing lightsaber effects in Adobe. About 20 people worked on VFX on this film… some of them still students and some professionals. VFX work was a very long process. The hologram and temple opening sequence, which was shot entirely on green screen, took over a year to finish! Lightsabers had to be rotoscoped frame by frame. It was an incredible amount of work. We had 6 sound designer working on the sound around the world, including Ben Schamma, Vi-Dan and myself. And another important part of any film, the music, was composed in about 4 months by Vincent Lee. Fun fact: footage was about 7 Terabytes of data in total.
Impact: Did you have any idea of what kind of reaction you were going to get from the film? It was nearly 3 million hits in 3 days ((over 9 million views now)) and SO much positive press, how does it feel?
Shawn: We went into making this film with a certain expectation. Because it was Star Wars and we had a strong vision for the film, we felt that it could become a viral hit. But we didn’t think it would be this big and fast and positive!
Vi-Dan: Of course we are really happy about that feedback, but our attitude won’t change. We still trying to push ourselves to the next level and we‘ll work hard for our further project.
Impact: On that note, what IS next for you?
Shawn: We just came back from Los Angeles. We had some meetings with US agencies and big companies because of this short. They acknowledge our talent and want to support us. Now we’re starting to work on new film ideas, scripts and proof of concept projects. Our next step will be feature films.
Vi-Dan: From June I will travel to Beijing and Sydney to work on Jackie Chan’s next movie. I will work again for the action design department.
