Jon Favreau on The Mandalorian showing Star Wars’ darker, freakier side

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

In just a few days, we may finally get our first real look at The Mandalorian as it was revealed earlier today that a trailer for the Disney+ series will premiere on August 23rd at Walt Disney's D23 Expo in Anaheim, CA. I'm pumped to finally see what this new series will look like in action. As is typical with STAR WARS, and Jon Favreau, The Mandalorian will be breaking a few visual-effects barriers. "We're using game engine technology, virtual camera work and virtual production that we developed on Lion King, applying those learnings to designing a project where you could use virtual sets and virtual set extensions using real-time rendering," Favreau told THR recently. "Which is something that people talk about but we're the first people to actually apply it to a production."

With this visual-effects technology getting all the more impressive in recent years, THR asked Jon Favreau why you would ever need to film anything on location.

Every film is a puzzle, and there's a freedom that you have as a storyteller if you go to the real environment; it affects you and the human element. When you see Lawrence of Arabia, how much of that is informed by really being there and not shooting it in Calabasas — I think you get a different movie. The way I work and the stories I'm telling are geared specifically toward what this technology has to offer, so I could not make Episode IX using these tools.

"If you notice, there's a certain look that the Mandalorian lead character has, there's a size that the spaceship is, there's a scale that lines up with the original trilogy," Favreau continued. "I'm trying to evoke the aesthetics of not just the original trilogy but the first film. Not just the first film but the first act of the first film. What was it like on Tatooine? What was going on in that cantina? That has fascinated me since I was a child, and I love the idea of the darker, freakier side of Star Wars, the Mad Max aspect of Star Wars." What little we've seen of the series seems to point to Favreau succeeding in that regard, but hopefully we'll get to see for ourselves very soon. Jon Favreau said that he was actually the one to approach Disney about the series, adding that he wrote four of the episodes before he even had a deal. "There's an opportunity to tell a story that's bigger than television," Favreau said, "but you don't have the same expectations that a big holiday release has, which to me isn't that type of Star Wars that comes out of me. The type of Star Wars that I'm inspired to tell is a smaller thing with new characters."

Starring Pedro Pascal as the titular bounty hunter, The Mandalorian also stars Giancarlo Esposito, Gina Carano, Nick Nolte, Carl Weathers, Emily Swallow, Omid Abtahi, Taika Waititi, and Werner Herzog. The series is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order as we follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic. The first episode of The Mandalorian will premiere when Disney+ launches on November 12, 2019.