The Biggest Challenge Star Wars' George Lucas Faced When Creating Darth Vader
Even though his character's backstory has been explored to death through a myriad of books, prequels, TV shows, animated series, and more, Darth Vader remains one of the best movie villains of all time, especially if you're only looking at the original "Star Wars" trilogy. Not only is he a scary, menacing, deadly presence in that original trilogy, but he also has a tragic arc, eventually redeeming himself despite a lifetime of terrible deeds.
The redemption would come later, though. For the first film, originally titled "Star Wars" but commonly thought of now as "A New Hope" (since there are so many other movies with "Star Wars" in the title), writer-director George Lucas had one main goal: make his big bad villain scary. Darth Vader had to be an ominous presence from the jump. The audience had to take one look at the guy and immediately know he was bad news. And for Lucas, that proved to be a little tricky.
How do you make Darth Vader scary
Darth Vader is, of course, Anakin Skywalker, once thought to be a prophesied figure who could "bring balance to the Force" (whatever that means). In the end, Anakin was tempted to the Dark Side and engaged in all sorts of horrible deeds. He was also badly disfigured and ended up having to be fitted with a cool-looking half-robot suit that helped keep him alive and kicking.
But all of that would come later. When audiences first sat down to watch "Star Wars," they knew absolutely nothing about Darth Vader's backstory. They just knew he was the bad guy. And George Lucas had to figure out how to make that mysterious bad guy scary, and that was tricky. Speaking with Rolling Stone, Lucas said: "I had to make Darth Vader scary without the audience ever seeing his face. Basically, it's just a black mask. I said, 'How do I make that evil and scary?' I mean, he's big and black and he's got a cape and a samurai helmet, but that doesn't necessarily make people afraid of him."
Lucas realized the way to make Vader scary was in how the character carried himself. "His character's got to go beyond that — that's how we get his impersonal way of dealing with things," said the filmmaker. "He's done a lot of horrible things in his life that he isn't particularly proud of. Ultimately, he's just a pathetic guy who's had a very sad life."
As we all know now, Lucas pulled it off. Darth Vader was pretty darn scary. His cool, iconic costume helped, as did the physical performance David Prowse coupled with the killer voice work of James Earl Jones. All of these elements came together to create one of the most memorable movie bad guys of all time. Even though we now know that Darth Vader was once a young kid who kept yelling "Yippee!!", he's still pretty scary.