Actor and animator. Interviews by Ian Failes.
In the Star Wars prequels, actor Ahmed Best portrayed Jar Jar Binks, beginning with Episode I—The Phantom Menace (1999), providing both an on-set and motion captured performance and the character’s distinctive voice.
Rob Coleman was Industrial Light & Magic’s animation director on the prequels, overseeing the transformation of Best’s performance into a fully photoreal computer-generated main character, often considered the first of its kind in live-action film history.
When Episode I was released, the backlash against Jar Jar Binks came swiftly. Many felt, at the time, that the character was too slapstick and appealed only to children.
Now, 25 years later, Best and Coleman reflect on that criticism, what went into the groundbreaking visual effects work, and how it set the scene for the discussion of motion captured performances to come.
This article was originally published in issue #1 of befores & afters magazine.
AHMED BEST: There were a lot of people jockeying for the Jar Jar part because nobody knew exactly what it was actually going to be. George Lucas told me that Robin Williams was campaigning for it. And Michael Jackson, too, which I confirmed, because I met Michael Jackson with George. That was a weird day.
The first thing I did was a screen test at ILM with George, and that’s when I put on the mocap suit. No one had really seen anything like this before, especially for a major motion picture as a main character. There had been a lot of other CGI characters in movies before, but nothing walking and talking with other actors. I had no idea that I was going to bridge that gap.
The amazing thing was to see those targets like ping-pong balls. I saw them move, and it moved like me. I thought, ‘Oh, this is gonna be something special. This is gonna pioneer.’ I had no idea it would change movies, but he really did. Jar Jar changed movies.
In terms of Jar Jar’s performance, George and I were talking about Buster Keaton, and that final battle scene is like a Buster Keaton movie. George would say, ‘Well, this is the kind of Buster Keaton move that I like. Could you do that?’ There’s this one scene where I’m hanging off a tank, and then I flip onto the tank, and the canon hits me in the nuts, and I do a little scream and everything. Well, we did that. I did that with a motion capture suit, and the Jar Jar head, and the feet. They captured that whole scene with me at ILM, and then animated over it.
I became important, I think, when they wanted character. That’s because they could animate these things, but how would it make sense in context? For example, the scene where the droid gets stuck on my foot and starts shooting people; they didn’t know how to do that. Well, they had an idea of how to animate that, but the reaction from me to this droid stuck on my foot, to me shooting these things—that doesn’t really come to life from non-performers. They could imagine what it could be, but having me in the room cuts down on that guesswork.
The team at ILM did an amazing job. I mean, Rob killed it. I remember one time, though, I was walking through ILM, and there was an artist who saw me and said, ‘I’ve been working on your arm for three months, just your arm, for three months.’ And I was like, I don’t know if should apologize to this guy or what. I just said, ‘You must be tired of looking at my arm.’
When all the backlash happened with Jar Jar, I thought, ‘Y’all should’ve got somebody else.’ I felt like it was my fault. I felt like I let everybody down, and that was very painful for me. I was just looking at my performance and going, ‘All of this work that we all did, I just tanked it.’ So I always felt guilty about that. I wanted that character to stand out in a way that it was supposed to, because when you’re involved with something special and you really know it, you want it to be received in that special way. I really haven’t talked about it much because it’s still very painful and still very raw. Here was this thing that was supposed to be a springboard into doing more challenging work and it didn’t do that.
George actually knew that was going to happen. Back then when all the controversy started, he told me, ‘Twenty years from now, nobody’s going to remember this. Twenty years from now, the kids who love Jar Jar are going to be adults, and they’re going to change the narrative.’ And he’s partially right. Also, so many kids love Jar Jar now. I don’t think George was cognizant of the social media onslaught that would happen, but he was right about Jar Jar.
Another thing happened with Jar Jar and that was what role the performer plays. There’s this idea that motion capture involves an actor, and then the animators come along, and then that’s it. As if it’s these two separate things, the actor, and then the animators. And what’s ironic is, with Phantom Menace, I didn’t get very much attention. The animation did. Nowadays, it’s all the actors, and the animation almost gets no attention!
I don’t know how that happened, but I have to say that it’s really a symbiotic relationship. It’s both. The animation, and animators who do motion capture animation and work, are so incredibly great—Rob and his team were just so great. And the actors who do motion capture are so incredibly great. And that’s how it becomes believable. That’s how the characters live. I don’t think you can have one without the other.
ROB COLEMAN: There was a small army of people who brought Jar Jar to life. Our movement/performance studies came 100% from Ahmed Best. We gathered his actions on the computer with motion capture, which was brand new to me at the time. I was on set in England for two weeks and watched Ahmed first- hand interacting with the other actors, doing his performance. I was then able to chat with him between takes; my interest was in his thinking behind Jar Jar’s movement and how he carried his body. I studied his posture and how he walked; I was looking at the overlapping swinging of his arms and where he shifted his weight. I loved the joy he was bringing to that character as a young actor.
After watching Ahmed, I knew we had to lift the bar in our animation performance with the ILM character animators. The challenge was that Jar Jar needed to be as alive and believable as the real live-action characters, Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi—they were all going to be sharing the same screen.
We were pioneering work in motion capture, but I didn’t think about it at that time. I saw my responsibility as bringing George Lucas’ characters to the screen the best way we could. Ahmed was cast as Jar Jar because of what he could do with his body. It was vital that we get Ahmed’s performance into the digital character.
With the help of Jeff Light, the ILM motion capture supervisor, we achieved that. It was Jeff who said to me, ‘We can do this. We can totally do this.’ I was a keyframe animator; I didn’t know anything about motion capture before this happened, but I knew that we would be successful if we could capture Ahmed’s charm and physical actions.
Sadly, over time, I think some people have forgotten about Ahmed’s contributions. Thankfully, there seems to be a lot more love for Jar Jar these days because the kids from 20 years ago are now older, and are now saying, ‘Give him a break, Jar Jar was a great character. We love him!’
I will never forget flying back from New York with George after the premiere of The Phantom Menace. His publicist had given him a stack—perhaps three inches thick—of the movie’s printed- out reviews. The critics did not like Jar Jar. George said to me, ‘You look upset.’ I said, ‘Of course I’m upset! I worked for two years on this thing, and people hate him.’ He said, ‘Woah, Woah. Wait a second. Hold on. What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘They hate Jar Jar,’ and then he interjected, ‘No, no, no, look at how they’re writing about him. They’re treating him like a real person in the movie, and yet he is computer generated. You should be incredibly proud of yourself.’ That was a perspective I had not considered—George was right, we had achieved something pretty special.
When we started up production on Attack of the Clones, I was still stinging from the backlash with Jar Jar. I was desperately afraid that we would screw up the digital Yoda and that I would be known, from then on, as the guy who brought Jar Jar to the screen, and the guy who wrecked Yoda. It took me six months to even build up the confidence to work on the Yoda sequences. With Ahmed’s help, along with some others, I was able to get a picture in my head of how Yoda would move beyond what we had seen the puppet Yoda do in The Empire Strikes Back; how he would jump around and fight.
Ahmed helped me understand how to approach the Yoda fight in Attack of the Clones because of his martial arts background. He opened my eyes to several different potential sources that I could tap into that could help me figure out how Yoda might move—these included some anime shows and martial arts movies.
It did, however, take me years to embrace Jar Jar again. Twenty years on, I’m, of course, incredibly proud of the work that we did. I’m delighted that the young kids for whom George had created Jar Jar, have embraced the character, and I feel a lot better about it now. I think it is terrific that Jar Jar and Ahmed are finally being honored.
George did say, when we were finishing The Phantom Menace, ‘You know, there will come a time when digital actors and animators or motion capture performers and animators will be put forward for the Best Actor category.’ I remember laughing and saying, ‘That will never happen.’ He just said, ‘It’s going to happen.’ Now I think, perhaps, it might happen one day. The reason for that might be thanks, in part, to what Ahmed and ILM started back in 1997.
