On
April 2nd, Star Wars bookshelves will grow with the addition of
several Episode III tomes. Del Rey Books will release the Revenge
of the Sith novel by Matt Stover and The Art of Star Wars: Revenge
of the Sith and The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, both
by J.W. Rinzler. For a preview of what's to come, here are
interviews with both authors and excerpts from their works.
Matt Stover's previously published works include Heroes Die,
Blade of Tyshalle, and Iron Dawn. He has written two Star Wars
novels already -- Traitor, a book in The New Jedi Order series,
and the first hardcover of the Clone Wars novel series,
Shatterpoint, wherein he examines Mace Windu's return to his
war-torn homeworld.
With Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas's monumental
epic draws to a close, tying together the original trilogy and the
prequel trilogy. How did you feel when you wrote the final lines
of the novelization?
I was shaking, and I practically burst into tears -- but that
probably had a lot to do with the book being about six weeks over
deadline, and that I'd been writing twelve to sixteen hours a day,
fueled by Hershey's dark-chocolate Kisses and vast quantities of
coffee and tortilla chips!
Once the adrenaline rush had faded, the feeling was primarily
one of tremendous satisfaction. Not only has Mr. Lucas succeeded
in tying together the entire six-film cycle (and elegantly, too),
but I've managed to weave in a significant amount of the Expanded
Universe material in as well -- having started in the Star Wars
realm as an EU author, after all. I was really trying to bring the
whole Star Wars Universe together in this story, and while Mr.
Lucas, in his line-edit, decided to excise a fair amount of the EU
material, he also left a fair amount of it in... so I guess that
makes whatever's left just a hair short of "G canon,"
for all the purists out there.
I also, as anyone who has read my Star Wars fiction -- really,
any of my fiction -- knows, have an almost overwhelming desire to
lead people to question their assumptions and preconceptions... to
unsettle them a little bit. I think the film, when people really
look at it and start thinking about what it means in the context
of the entire Star Wars saga, will do exactly that. This is not
just a cotton-candy movie. Which made writing the novel an
intensely satisfying experience.
Were you chosen to pen the novelization based on the
positive reaction to your two other Star Wars books, Shatterpoint
and Traitor?
Well... I'm not sure that positive is exactly the word.
"Strong" might describe it better. While it seems that
most fans liked the books, there's a sizable chunk of fandom that
can't stand me or my work -- in fact, I think they have a club...
The word I got through Del Rey is that LucasBooks thought I was
the best writer to handle the darkness of this story. I mean,
that's a lot of what I'm known for, after all: the psychological
breakdown of characters under extreme moral pressure. After
reading the script, I surmised that another reason they might have
wanted me for this story is my reputation for having a... certain
touch with personal combat -- because there is a buttload of
fighting in this story. Am I allowed to say buttload?
Well, there's a lot. As I went along, I found myself struggling
to figure out just how many different ways one can narratively
evoke Jedi (and Sith!) in combat ... (It turns out there's a
buttload of those, too, in case anyone's interested.)
Did you work from a final script, or was the script
evolving as you wrote? How much freedom did you have to improvise
or fill in gaps in action and character motivation?
I worked from the script as it stood at the close of principal
photography, though there were some plot changes and rewrites that
I had to adjust to as Mr. Lucas got into the process of editing
and reshoots. I stuck to the script(s) as closely as I thought was
appropriate for a novel; there are necessities in novels -- where
someone can go back and read a transition again and take the time
to think, "Hey, wait, what just happened here?" -- that
in a film you can scream on past and leave people to figure out
later. Mr. Lucas gave me a great deal of leeway in dealing with
the dialogue and the details of this and that, as long as I didn't
alter the sense of the action. The one place where I really had no
freedom at all was in the characters' motivations: Mr. Lucas had
an exceptionally clear idea of exactly why everyone was doing
what, and he wasn't about to allow me to mess around with that
even a little bit. After all, the "Why" is what this
story is really about... and the funny thing was, there didn't
turn out to be any gaps in motivation. It was all there: a real
depth of human insight went into the creation of this story, as
simple as its shiny surfaces might appear to some people. When I
couldn't understand why someone was acting in a particular way at
a particular time, it turned out that I just hadn't been looking
deeply enough. In the end, it all turned out so clear -- and for
me, anyway, so true -- that the character arcs have the same
tragic inevitability as the mechanics of the plot. In a very real
sense, they are the mechanics of the plot.
When you met with George Lucas, what did the two of you
discuss?
Mostly what I talked about above. I went into the meeting with
a list of very detailed questions about "What was Master So
& So thinking when he...?" and "Why, exactly, would
Anakin want to..." I had a list of questions from Jim Luceno,
too, relating to Labyrinth of Evil, and so we managed to get into
quite a bit of the direct backstory -- the details of the
relationship between the Lords of the Sith and exactly how and why
the Separatists had set up the operation we see played out in the
opening minutes of the film. And, of course, we spent quite a bit
of time talking about the specifics of Anakin's fall -- what,
exactly, drives him over the edge, when it happens, and what has
led him to it. And, of course, we had to talk a bit about the dark
side...
You mentioned bringing questions from Jim Luceno into
your meeting with Mr. Lucas. How closely did the two of you work
together on your respective books?
We corresponded quite a bit. I needed to understand how he was
going to portray the relationship between the Sith Lords, and some
other details of the backstory, especially where Obi-Wan and
Anakin had been and exactly what they'd been up to, and I showed
him the Introduction (the section that fills in a bit more detail
of what's covered in the film's opening crawl) I had written to
Revenge, that sort of thing. Fortunately for me, Jim is such a
professional craftsman that by the time I was polishing the climax
of Act One, I had a full draft of Labyrinth to work from, to
minimize continuity issues. As I said above, part of my aim here
was to create a novel that would work as part of the EU as well as
a companion piece to the film. In fact, I understand that Jim's
follow-up will, in a sense, bookend Revenge to make it the pivot
of an EU trilogy that begins in Labyrinth and ends in Dark Lord.
I'm looking forward to it.
The term "novelization" is used to describe
your book, but perhaps it's more than that. A novelization is a
film that has been, as it were, translated into book form; but
your book, while faithful to the script of Revenge, goes beyond
the mere transposition of one medium into another, which, sad to
say, seems the fate of most novelizations.
I was never interested in writing novelizations. I'm still not.
Especially not for Star Wars. It's too important to me. I didn't
set out to write a novelization so much as I tried to back-create,
from Mr. Lucas's story and script, a novel as I think it might
have been if he had been making the film based on it, rather than
the other way around. I wanted it to be not just a good
novelization, but a good novel. A great story on its own terms.
You should remember that I started as a fanboy, many years ago; I
saw A New Hope more than twenty times in the theater. I saw The
Empire Strikes Back nearly thirty times. When I was writing
Shatterpoint, I dropped in a little piece of my personal history,
just for my own amusement: the numeric recognition code that Mace
exchanges with the Halleck, translated into numbers, is -- to the
best of my recollection -- the date I first saw ANH. It was,
appropriately, a Saturday matinee. I was fifteen. I rode my
bicycle to the theater...
This is the point: most novelizations are written under extreme
time pressure. They hire writers who are good and fast -- and they
have to be fast. Me, I'm not fast... but they didn't ask me to be.
I got the script in December of 2003, and I turned in the novel in
August of 2004 -- that's almost triple the amount of time given to
the usual novelization. And we were still working rewrites and
adjustments -- to smooth over changes Mr. Lucas was making in the
film during editing, and to accommodate the changes he made in his
line-edit of the novel -- all the way to the first of this year.
Because everyone -- not just me, but Del Rey, LucasBooks, LFL and
Mr. Lucas himself -- thinks Revenge of the Sith is important
enough that the book should be as good as it can possibly be.