Natalie Portman & Liam Neeson's Schedules Forced Star Wars To Replace Them With Sticks
The bigger the studio movie, the more moving pieces you have to contend with. You've got myriad departments toiling away on set design, set construction, costume design, sound design, stunts, visual effects, ladder storage and so much more. There's also the nettlesome matter of wrangling actors.
We kid actors because, for the most part, we love them. They're extraordinarily inventive creatures who can vanish into a part via Method burrowing or subtle, barely perceptible adjustments. They can get precious about their choices and throw a tantrum or ten, but if you earn their trust early on and talk to them like actual human beings they're marvelously directable. Hit the jackpot, and they'll make you look like a genius.
Oftentimes, the biggest problem with actors, especially on big productions, is availability. You book them for a certain chunk of time, and then they're off to the next gig. This can prove problematic when you invariably have to do reshoots (commonplace on movies of all shapes and sizes, and not an automatic sign of trouble). Depending on how busy they are, getting folks back in the same place for a few days (or longer) of shooting might not be logistically possible. This forces the director and producer(s) to scramble, as Hugh Quarshie learned during the making of "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace."
Taking the notion of a wooden performance to a literal extreme
Quarshie had been acting for over 20 years when he landed the role of Captain Panaka in George Lucas's feverishly anticipated "Star Wars" prequel, but he hadn't done any CG-heavy films prior to this (the shot-quickly-and-cheaply "Wing Commander," which came out two months before "The Phantom Menace," doesn't count). So the notion of playing a scene opposite a character to be created later was new to him.
In the days before performance capture, this was accomplished by having flesh-and-blood actors talk to a stick with a tennis ball affixed where the creature's head would be. So, in theory, there was nothing new about Quarshie's challenge when he came back to do reshoots by himself. But as he explained in issue 212 of Star Wars Insider, he wasn't acting opposite a CG-alien. He was interacting with an unavailable-at-the-time Liam Neeson and Natalie Portman. Per Quarshie:
"[T]hey stuck a cross on a pole to represent Liam, who is six inches taller than me, and another, lower one to represent Natalie, and I was filmed talking to a couple of crosses on two sticks! It was slightly puzzling and pedestrian, but when I saw how skillfully they merged those shots into the film. I was amazed and very impressed. It wasn't filmmaking as I had been used to, but acting has had to evolve just as filmmaking has had to evolve. It was a learning curve."
Considering that some big-time actors sometimes have their scene partners deliver lines to their stand-ins, a couple of sticks might actually be preferable.