what's going on today we're going to be going over the revenge of the sith
behind the scenes bonus dvd um we're going to be going over the
becoming sidious webisodes this is particularly all about palpatine
with ian mcdermott and george lucas however there's one scene in particular
that i'd really like to go over in today's video it's around the 5
minute 45 minute mark so you can skip ahead to that
uh probably 6 minutes 45 after i talk um basically it's where you'll see you
it's anakin showing up where mace and palpatine are
fighting now this of course isn't in the movie we never got to see this however
it is in the book and also it was supposed to be
in an original script and this is why it was even shot and this is what we see
here so let's go ahead and check it out if you didn't know that i played darth
sidious and also palpatine although of course i never admitted it
in public and george never admitted it on screen
palpatine represents the devil he represents the pure evil the dark lord
of the sith who is purely out to get more power in his
greed i'm appointing you to be my personal
representative on the jedi council primarily when you look at episode 3 it
is the story of anakin skywalker's full but one of the things i find more
interesting is the whole arc of the character that ian plays as
palpatine insidious it takes us back to the old
return of the jedi days absolutely it does i haven't seen a polished comic
since those days and you young skywalker we will watch
your career with great interest if you wanted a subtitle for these
movies you could it could be fathers and sons
i need your help sir and while palpatine isn't we must assume
anakin's natural father in this film he's certainly a father figure for him
so then you can pull him yeah you say i've known you
since you were a little boy everybody believes it's darth vader
who's the really ultimate bad guy but the guy who's truly evil
is palpatine he has manipulated this whole saga
ian does such an amazing job of playing the puppet master you know he
pulls each string with such charming yet evil precision i
think one of the factors of the character plays is temptation
and anakin is tempted and indeed seduced by what
palpatine has to say and has to offer you wanted to see me chancellor yes
anakin come closer i have good news people i think will find him very
conflicted and understand his plight but at the end of the day he wants this
thing called power it's all really well embodied in one scene at the
opera where palpatine shares a story um an old sith tale
which very much impressed anakin at the you know the very core of sort of his
fears and desires palpatine sort of tightens his hold on
anakin and instills very profound notions of
grandeur the dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some
consider to be unnatural ian has been amazing to watch i mean
he's just he comes from that that english stage background where he
learns the lines he nails it every single time and it's
interesting to watch george just sort of sit back and just go
ah you know it's like he knows the character
ian knows the character it's a no-brainer yet
it's incredibly powerful the sith will rule the galaxy
we shall
very good when you're just playing a scene with another actor and it
it has a scene that has a chance to develop that it's a dialogue scene in
which there are many beats you can make different choices not ones
that interfere with the continuity but you're able if you can find them in
yourself to offer george and the editor lots of
different things that was perfect wasn't it absolutely
perfect ian ian's one of the few actors who actually likes to get made up
he you got to remember he comes from the theater comes from one of the best
theaters not only as a director but a wonderful actor
all actors who really are playing a different character all together
really love to get into the kit because that helps them
so much become this other person that they're playing i really feel i know
palpatine and and the other guy i think we're allowed to talk about now uh
quite well we've been intimates for the best part of 30 years and i've been
switching between those two characters as you would
imagine so in and out of two different makeups
on a regular basis i think these guys are getting really good now
and they got it down to an hour and three quarters now i think they could
probably do it in their sleep they certainly do it in mine what kept
you my phone when i read the script not only
did i have a lot to say but i had a lot to do that he seemed to
have turned into action man ian is a classical shakespearean actor
you know the last thing in the world that he can
do or wants to do is be a jedi master you know he is not a jedi master he's
got to be even more powerful than the jedi
you know so it's not a that was not a day that he relished i knew we'd be
shooting those scenes in about five days i didn't have that long with nick uh to
get up to speed relax there you go it's gonna look mean
we had to incorporate in into those sequences
we learned to move at a specific speed and sort of dexterousness that ian just
doesn't have yet because he wasn't focused on doing that and then backing
up yeah but i didn't know he could use it lights
and twice as fast in fact no 500 times as fast as anyone else
and sometimes you know he would not be looking and
i whacked him you get hit and those things hurt when you get hit
i think it really came off i was very worried about it when we were shooting
him and i know it wasn't coming there's anakin ian was
both of them were walking over he did a great job we're going to talk
about it because he's invited close-ups it's a fight of the
two of them sensing who has got the greatest strength and then boom you're
right back in face to face with them great sequence
i suppose i've been given a great opportunity with this part
these parts now you've created the arch villain of all time
but i guess it's all in a day's work
i've been waiting for this as palpatine has for
20 odd years but i can't think of anyone who's
been allowed to undergo so many changes over a whole period of time never mind
over four and now five since i'm now part of the
empire strikes back movies so it's been a it's been a very
interesting journey and it's been very nice to wait till the end to do i
suppose um the most rewarding and most
challenging part so in a sense i've had uh
about 25 years to think about it so if i've got it wrong you know it's
entirely my fault so that scene that we saw with anakin
walking over the bodies unless of course that was just a rehearsal scene or
something like that but i don't think so because they were
rolling camera now that scene was in the book and we can see it was
actually shot as well in the book anakin actually shows up so
he walks over the head of kit fisto he sees kit fisto's head on the floor
and he sees uh he doesn't see mace or palpatine he just sees a blur
of red and purple that's how fast they were moving
they were moving in levels that anakin didn't even know existed so in the sense
where he could not even track them as people they were just blurred colors
that's all it was a fusion of red and purple moving so
fast so this also shows you that mace windu
is so above anakin in a lot of senses where
okay sure maybe you know his midichlorian level wasn't as high his
potential in the end wasn't as high as anakin's
would have been had he not lost obi-wan however at this point in time he would
have creamed anakin no problem if they had fought i'm pretty
sure of it so this scene that we saw shows anakin
walking over the bodies and there's a blooper actually in the film
and you may have heard me talk about it and if you haven't then you'll find this
quite interesting so when palpatine is fighting mace we do there are several
scenes where we can actually see anakin
skywalker's lightsaber hilt in palpatine's hands the reason for this
is because in the original script which now
we see with anakin being in the scene behind them
has to do with mace showing up with the jedi to confront palpatine and arrest
him and palpatine is supposed to use
anakin's lightsaber to fight them so he doesn't
have a lightsaber he's like anakin please help me you know toss me your
weapon so i can defend myself and anakin does and that's what we saw
so that was supposed to be what the
original scene was and we actually see them i guess redoing that with anakin
out of there or they completely just photoshop him out of there i guess
perhaps i wrote a scope wrote a scope i'm out of
there but i think they reached out in essence what i want to convey here is
that mace and sidious were originally supposed to
be fighting in front of anakin and anakin was even supposed to be quote
unquote helping palpatine by throwing him his lightsaber
which i think would have been pretty sweet
um but it would have really undermined and i can see why george changed it
because it would have really undermined in in my perspective that whole pivotal
you got to make an answer right now kind of moment and seen
where mace is about to kill him palpatine says you must choose and it
really heightens the tension of everything more so than if anakin you
know was watching them fight and he was in the background and you
would just kind of be like well what's anakin doing at this point is he
just observing like what like what's what's the deal
so that's something i wanted to talk about i think it's really cool that
i never even saw that man i never even saw that um annika was in the background
this was actually messaged to me by the assistant editor on the vader fan
film mod and uh he was like did you know anakin was in the background in this
deleted scene i was like what the heck i didn't even realize that
i knew it was in the book i knew it was in the original script but i didn't know
he was actually there i never like saw that so i thought that was
pretty neat anyways wanted to share with you guys let me know what you think of
the original fight and uh if you prefer the original script
version of anakin throwing his lightsaber to to palpatine
or the way we got it in the film i think this way that george chose makes
it a little more um
a little more um you know at the end there's a little more uh at stake and it
really makes that pivotal turn uh very dramatic overly dramatic which
is what you want very stressful scene catch you later may the force be with
you