One Scene In Star Wars: Attack Of The Clones Had Ewan McGregor Ready To Hurl
In between George Lucas' 1999 film "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace" and his 2002 follow-up "Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones," many changes took place. Most notably, the events of September 11, 2001 immediately changed the way people wrote about and talked about movies; discussions were being had in earnest about the place of fictional widespread violence in a nation that had just experienced it in reality. Would it feel acceptable to cheer for a cinematic building explosion while bodies were still being discovered in the rubble of a real one?
Additionally, digital photography and digital projection experienced a great push at in the early 2000s, and Lucas was keen to make the newer technologies an industry standard. Even more than in "The Phantom Menace," Lucas filmed his actors against green walls, only to insert digital backgrounds and even several digital characters in post-production. "Attack of the Clones," by some measures, had 70 full minutes of animation within its 142-minute runtime.
Those two major shake-ups of the zeitgeist will explain why "Attack of the Clones" is so tonally dour as well as so visually murky.
It was also a headache to film. Ewan McGregor, who plays the sword-swinging wizard Obi-Wan Kenobi, was involved in a scene wherein he and Hayden Christensen leaped into a high-tech flying car to pursue a shape-shifting assassin through the skies of the city planet Coruscant. The backgrounds were fake, but the hydraulically suspended speeder that seated McGregor and Christensen was very real, and it jostled the actors around to the point of nausea. McGregor recalled the experience in a 2002 interview with Star Wars Insider Magazine.
Stop trying to make retch happen
Thanks to movie magic, one sees two Jedis on a high-speed chase while impossibly tall skyscrapers whip past them. In reality, the actors were on a stationary set on a decidedly not-stationary thrill ride. McGregor described it thus:
"There's a speeder chase sequence at the beginning, which I'm really looking forward to seeing. [...] But to do it, we were on a speeder that was rocking about, and it actually made you feel sick after a while. It was like going on a fairground ride over and over again, where you're not allowed to go have a hot dog — you've just got to keep doing it. The actual chase sequence will be something to behold, but it was just a sick-making experience!"
McGregor, as far as he admitted, did not actually vomit. His job also clearly involved being suspended, as during the speeder chase, Obi-Wan fell out of the car and began to plummet to the planet's surface below. Because the buildings are so tall, however, he falls for quite a long time, allowing his compatriot to fly down at top speeds, level out the car, and catch him mid-flight. Obi-Wan was not astonished by this, saying merely "What took you so long?"
McGregor was astonished twice. Once when he was feeling queasy on the day of filming, and again when he finally saw the completed sequence with its digital effects added. it looks quite different from his day in front of a bluescreen. McGregor said:
"When you see the finished film, it's quite awesome. [...] It's strange — it's like watching somebody else, because the bit you did was surrounded by blue, and then you see this whole thing around you. It's bizarre."
Bluescreens were never used in "Star Wars" again.