The Star Wars Villain That Even Scared George Lucas
One of the biggest challenges in creating the Star Wars prequels was creating new character designs that equaled what we had before. It would be difficult to develop a villain design as cool as Darth Vader, but George Lucas was confident that concept designer Iain McCaig could come up with a very scary Darth Maul. The artist did his job a little too well, coming up with an initial design that Lucas found too frightening to put in his film.
George’s Instructions
This weird story starts with the instructions that George Lucas gave to McCaig for designing Darth Maul. For the prequels, the Star Wars creator was somewhat notorious for giving only the most basic descriptions of what he wanted others to create. When it came to making a new Sith Lord, Lucas merely instructed McCaig to create “a figure from your worst nightmare.”
His Worst Nightmare
The veteran designer decided to take Lucas very seriously and took inspiration from his worst nightmare: “I’m inside a room during a thunderstorm. The hours pass by and I suddenly become aware that there’s a lifeless face pressed against the window. It’s dead, but it’s alive, staring at me through the rain. “
Using this nightmare as his template, Iain McCaig set out to create a Darth Maul very different from the one we eventually saw in The Phantom Menace. The artist stayed mostly true to his nightmarish vision, but he added flourishes like metal teeth and “blood red ribbons falling over the face instead of rain.” Having done exactly as he was instructed, McCaig gave Lucas his sketch.
New Instructions
According to the artist, George Lucas almost immediately turned the early drawing of Darth Maul over. He then gave McCaig some new instructions. With the kind of deadpan humor that rarely made it into any of the Star Wars films, Lucas told the designer “now draw me your second worst nightmare.”
Clowns?
This time around, McCaig didn’t take the advice of George Lucas quite so seriously, and fans of Darth Maul should be quite grateful for that. As it turns out, the concept designer’s second worst fear was clowns, and he always stressed over “what they’re feeling behind those painted smiles.” He even feared one clown in particular, but it wasn’t Pennywise: instead, he confided that “I’ve had nightmares about Bozo the Clown since I was three.”
Spider-Maul
Eventually, of course, McCaig landed on the now-familiar design for the scariest-looking villain in the prequels. He later recounted that the entire design process took up most of the three years of pre-production on The Phantom Menace. It’s possible this process would have gone much quicker if George Lucas had more input into what he wanted Darth Maul to look like; then again, the Star Wars creator should likely be commended for how much trust he placed in the artists who brought his galaxy far, far away to life.
With all that being said, it’s a bit charming to think that there is a Star Wars villain design that scares even George Lucas, and the final version of Darth Maul was certainly worth all this trouble. Ironically enough, the later Star Wars show The Clone Wars would bring the character back and briefly give him robotic spider legs. For this slightly arachnophobic writer, this design change ended up making Maul into a more nightmarish vision than anything that ever scared Lucas.
