The Mandalorian and Grogu brings Din Djarin and The Child to the big screen, and the movie expands the franchise by taking us to some new and exciting locations.
From Grogu's surprisingly elaborate mud hut and a newly redesigned Razor Crest to the interior of an AT-AT, it expands this Galaxy Far, Far Away in ways we've rarely seen. The production also revisits familiar designs, props, and locations while finding new ways to make them feel fresh for a theatrical adventure.
We recently spoke with production designer Andrew L. Jones about the immense amount of work that went into creating The Mandalorian and Grogu. He explained how the team drew inspiration from Yoda's original Dagobah hut, The Volume's role in the movie, how they approached finally showing fans what's inside an AT-AT, Easter Eggs you might have missed, and more.
In The Mandalorian and Grogu, the evil Empire has fallen, and Imperial warlords remain scattered throughout the galaxy. As the fledgling New Republic works to protect everything the Rebellion fought for, they have enlisted the help of legendary Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his young apprentice Grogu.
"The Mandalorian and Grogu is a fun, pulpy reminder that Star Wars doesn’t need to grow up; it just needs to be entertaining," we said in our review. "Jon Favreau's action-packed love letter delivers exactly the crowd-pleasing adventure fans have been craving."
Check out our full interview with Andrew on The Mandalorian and Grogu in the player below.
I’ve got to start by talking about the forest set and Grogu’s mud hut in this film. I’d love to know about the design of that, the deliberate connection it seems to have to Yoda, and maybe what it tells us about their species. How was that process for you in working on that?
Yeah, that was an interesting one. We definitely went back to Dagobah and Yoda’s hut and studied that. We found some really great photographs from the original set. That set was extraordinary because not only was it very complicated—with water and roots and everything—but it was also elevated so that Frank Oz and others could get underneath and do the puppetry. We did that as well. We had to elevate sections of the forest set to get the puppeteers underneath.
You know, rather than Yoda, which was like Frank Oz with one arm up, we’ve got these complicated animatronic characters that are puppets. One character can take four people, so you can imagine it got pretty crowded down there.
But yeah, that little hut set was made as a model, of course. We had to do different versions of it: from Grogu getting the idea and clearing out the land, to him just starting, all the way through to putting the mud on. There were more steps in there than made it into the film. Each one of these had to be a separate set that was brought in. We shot it in several different places. We shot it on a Volume set that had the virtual extension and the physical foreground. And then separately for the interior, we had it up on a platform. For all of our puppet sets, they were all elevated to about six feet so the puppeteers could be underneath operating it.
So yeah, that was a surprisingly complicated set. It’s what Jon referred to as a TARDIS set, because you need a little bit more space inside than the exterior would suggest just to get a camera crew in there, and all the lights and so forth. And then it all had to be ripped apart so they could get the camera over here and there, and then go back together and get sealed up with mud. So that was quite a science project, but a lot of fun.
The Razor Crest returns in this film. It’s the same ship but obviously a newer version. How did you go about creating the interior of that and giving life to Mando and Grogu’s home away from home?
Yeah, that ship has been with us for a long time. That was built for Season 1 and repurposed and reconfigured. Originally, it never had an exterior surface because it’s not really a Star Wars convention to look in through a window like that—the sensor of the camera is usually inside the space. But we ended up using it for Season 2. When we went to the ice planet, we used it for an exterior, so we had to build an exterior. And then, of course, this is a new one, so we had to paint it and reconfigure the outside.
And also it got a little bit of a renovation. Amanda Serino, our set decorator, got in and fixed it up and souped it up a little bit. Because Mando’s was a little bit of an aftermarket modification. But this one wanted to be a little bit cleaner—straight out of the Army, the Air Force stockyard. But it’s a beast of a set. You know, it’s got to come apart into all these little pieces for filming. They’re filming machines as much as anything. So the glass comes out, all the walls come out, and then they’ve got to all go back together and fit. But I love that little set. It’s travelled around with us. It’s been through a lot, but it’s survived all the exploits.
There are so many great sets in this film. I loved going inside Mando and Grogu’s home on Nevarro. And then obviously we go inside the AT-AT, an area we haven’t really explored before—maybe briefly in other films, but we really get to see inside one of those. Was that part of the fun on this project: to take us to places we haven’t been before in Star Wars?
It really was. Our job—myself and Doug Chiang, the co-production designer… and of course Doug has been living and breathing Star Wars for years and is such an authority on that and such a brilliant designer—part of our job is to respect the legacy and everything that’s been created, and part of it is to broaden the scope.
Something like the inside of the AT-ATs, for example—there isn’t a lot of filmed reference of the inside of one. There’s a little bit from video games and a little bit of artwork that was done but not used. So we were into new territory there, and we wanted to do it faithfully. You can hardly tell, but at the door at the back, when Mando bursts in, there’s a couple of speeder bikes on the back wall that follow the example from the video game. But we were kind of into new territory both for the design and the use: What are they travelling with? What are they storing? How are they using that?
And that was an interesting set because Scott Fisher, our special effects lead, came up with this wonderful way of having the head of the AT-AT move back and forth and have a flexible neck. So when the head is looking around like that and you’re looking through from the back to the front or the front to the back, you can see the neck moving. That was quite extraordinary to see. But yeah, we really want to, if it’s a legacy piece like that, get that right and have a compelling set inside so people are like, 'Ah, so that’s what’s in there. That’s how they use that.' And that was another set where it was done in lots of little pieces—you know, the roof, the interior, the little bits of the front. The head is a separate piece just for the sake of filming.
Another favourite of mine is the bar that Janu was hiding out in. It reminds me a lot of the cantina in Galaxy’s Edge, actually, with the creatures hanging from the ceiling, the drinks, the food we see scattered around. That must have been a really fun one to design and quite challenging as well, because it looks like such an intricate set.
It really is, and that was a British art director, Ian McFadyen, who led that one and did a wonderful job. The inspiration for that scene, I believe, was the hard bar from the movie Hard Boiled—the scene at the beginning of that. But yeah, Amanda Moss Serino did a wonderful job dressing it with all of those cages, and we worked with Legacy Effects, who created all the little creatures in there.
But that was a sort of a new world, a new aesthetic, and we were trying to make it look sort of pre-modern. Part of the definition of that would be that architecture and interiors are made from modular elements as opposed to big pre-die-cast or poured-in-place concrete or whatever sci-fi material that might be. So we were kind of looking at old Chicago and old cities that were kind of in that period before modernism and just starting to work with new materials, and trying to reflect that. You’ll see it on the exterior of the buildings with these sort of our sci-fi version of bricks and tiles and so forth.
You mentioned the Volume before. Obviously that’s been such a game-changing piece of technology for films and particularly The Mandalorian franchise. How important was it to this film, particularly after what you’d learned from working on three seasons of the series?
So the Volume is a wonderful thing. It’s a lot of work, you know, because it’s not just you make a virtual environment and stick it up on the wall and run in there and film it. The way that we treat it is that you have a set that’s like you would have any other set, and then for a digital extension, rather than going into blue screen, you’re going into the Volume. Back in the day, you would have done a hand-painted backdrop. That was the wonderful technology they used to use. This is just a fancy version of that, but in all those cases, it’s really a lot about the set in the foreground, and this is just sort of additive.
The beautiful thing about the Volume is not only is it a beautiful thing in the background, but it contributes light globally to your set. I’ve got some examples of sets that we’ve put in there—very reflective, beautiful sets. And they work perfectly with the background. But then occasionally—very occasionally, because it was very robust software—it would all break, and the whole Volume would go white, and you could see what the Volume is actually contributing to the set because all of a sudden the set looks kind of flat and boring and not really that great. So it’s like a version of the old matte paintings, but it creates the incredible lighting.
On this movie, we didn’t use it as much as we would do on the series, proportionally. I mean, generally it would be about 45% of the sets on the TV show that we would use the Volume for. Less in this case because the sets were just bigger. They were just so big. And we needed them to be big for the big action sequences. And the opportunity to use the Volume on more contained sets—it’s extraordinary for that. It’s really wonderful technology, but when you’ve got running-and-gunning action sequences, it’s more challenging for that. And so we ended up just having to do a lot more building.
I got to see this film in IMAX. I’m very excited now to watch it at home as well. But as a Star Wars fan, I’ll be scouring every scene for Easter eggs and details. But was there anything you managed to get into the film that you think fans would have missed?
Amanda, our set decorator, she’s the one who does that. A lot of—I mean, obviously the Dejarik was a big drop. And we do have dressing in the bar—you know, little pieces that have recurred. And a lot of times, pieces that we’ve made previously, we just, for the sake of economy, have a library of set-dec pieces that we’ll pull out and reuse again. So in Jenu Coin’s office, we have the Jerba, which we had created for Jabba’s throne room when it was Boba Fett’s throne room. And it had originally been in the second movie, flanking the carbonite block with Harrison Ford. So I mean, that’s the sort of thing—all the way through there you’re seeing pieces that have cropped up before.
What’s it like to work with Jon Favreau as a director when it comes to production design? Does he have very specific ideas, or is it a real collaboration as you’re bringing this franchise to the big screen?
Yeah, he’s a wonderful collaborator. Jon, Doug Chiang, and I have a really good rapport. He sort of trusts you to go out and do it, but he’s got really great ideas. So a lot of times we’ll have reviews as we work along, and he’s always course-correcting, and it’s often surprising. You’re like, “Oh, huh, hadn’t thought of that.” And so he’s got this great vision, and it’s really great working with him both on the movie, on TV shows, and on other projects. You get into a situation where you get it to a place you think it’s really going there, and he’ll come in and just open it up to these new possibilities—based probably on story ideas that he’s got that open up the possibilities.
I just wanted to jump back to Easter eggs. There’s another one that’s a super fun one that I don’t think many people got. It was in the food pod with the Martin Scorsese-voiced alien character making the sandwiches. One part of the process of making the sandwich is to take a ladle and go into a mudhorn egg and pull out some of the yolk and put it on the sandwich. I don’t know if that comes across too clearly, but that was a fun one. We had made a mudhorn egg for Season 1, Episode 2, I think. So that’s in there. That’s quite a fun one.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is now available on Digital and coming to Disney+ on September 2.