As a fan fave, Boba Fett is largely known as the legendary bounty hunter in the “Star Wars” series, but the animated series “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” will take fans to a young Boba, at ten or eleven years old. “Clone Wars” supervising director, Dave Filoni, talks to IGN about how they tackled the storyline of a young Boba Fett. Here are excerpts from that interview:
Q: It’s no secret that Boba Fett has such meaning to Star Wars fans, so when George [Lucas] came in and said, “OK, I want to do a Boba Fett story,” what was your reaction?
Dave Filoni: It’s exciting, because when something like that comes from him, then I know that we should be doing it. It’s always important to me that it’s motivated by George, that it’s the story he wants to tell, and he weighs in on what he thinks and what the scenarios are going to be. But the challenge was going to be: how do we keep this guy mysterious and interesting, when telling the story about when he’s 10, 11 years old — and not giving away so much about him? I didn’t even want, at the end of it, to really know Boba as well as you know Anakin, when you start to see him as a little boy. It had to be different from that, even though there were going to be some similarities. Yes, they’re both kids, but Boba’s a very driven kid. He’s very focused, and because of the death of his father, he’s trying to decide what to do with all of that anger, all of that revenge feeling. It was a great point to come in on his character, and contrast him against Aurra Sing and using the Jedi to see where we can take his character.
Q: How much conversation did you have about what exactly would be the angle on the storyline? Obviously, a lot of fans have wanted to see what Boba would have planned for Mace Windu after Attack of the Clones.
Filoni: George always comes in, and he has a plan—”There’s gonna be this episode where he infiltrates this way, and he’s being guided by Aurra Sing,” and we have a lot of the logistics of it worked out. When you get down to the details you start discussing, and you realize, well, Boba’s still 10 or 11, right? He’s not gonna be any match for Mace Windu one on one. Mace is gonna be like, “You’re a child,” use the force, push Boba to the ground and he’ll be arrested. So you have to make sure that Boba’s really cunning, and he’s really shadowy and clever – which also helps maintain him as that mysterious bounty hunter in the future. The way that he works to try and achieve his ends is a lot more dubious and a bit sneaky. It’s kind of a hidden way of moving, with him and Aurra and the other bounty hunters, because taking on a Jedi, for them, is a big deal. It’s not something that they would do lightly or without a plan of some kind. Those are all the kind of things you have to think about, and most importantly that he is young, and when you get down to it, even though later he’s the famed Boba Fett bounty hunter, at this point he’s just a kid. So we have to take that into consideration – it doesn’t mean that he’s not dangerous, but it kind of would affect how some of the other characters also would look at Boba. “Well, he’s just a kid.” Is that a deceptive notion, right, that he’s just this young kid, or is there some truth to that, what’s inside him?
Q: We’ve seen Aurra Sing on the show before. We certainly see that she gets the job done. Was it an easy call to have her involved in this storyline? I know some of the Expanded Universe stuff had her and Boba interact, so was that something you kept in mind?
Filoni: Oh yeah. It was pretty much a given that Aurra Sing was gonna be involved with Boba. I think somehow, at this point, it’s Star Wars folklore. I think I mentioned [at some point] to George that there had been some stuff written about Boba, and he was with Aurra. It made sense, because we knew he needed to be mentored by some other bounty hunter, since Jango is gone, and I really wanted to have Jaime [King], and give her the opportunity for a much larger role. When she was Aurra before, I think she had all of one line in “Hostage Crisis.” I’ve known Jaime for a while, and I just knew that if I could get her a lot more center stage, that she could really develop that character into this really malevolent, evil woman that I think we all wanted her to be, so it was really fun to get out there with Daniel [Logan] and see the two of them work together.
Q: Another character who is sort of famous among the fandom for their very, very brief onscreen appearance is Bossk, who you’re introducing here as well.
Filoni: The fun thing about Bossk was that — and I know everybody is so excited about it — anything we do with Bossk will be more than Bossk ever did before. He wiggled his toes, barely, and that was cool. But it was fun to have him there. The biggest questions that [concept artist] Kilian Plunkett and I gave ourselves was, “Are we gonna put Bossk in that yellow flight suit, and what is that saying about Bossk?” He has very little fashion sense, from the prequel era all the way to Empire Strikes Back. There’s something so iconic about him in that look, and we don’t know Bossk well enough that if he wasn’t in that outfit, we might not assume it’s him. So we just went for, I think, where the fans are comfortable with his look, and, yeah, it was fun to get him out there. I had a lot of plans for Bossk, mainly because Mary Franklin, who works for LucasFilm, is a big fan of Bossk. And you know if you’ve seen the trailer, Plo Koon is in some of the episodes, and I kept threatening to have Plo Koon run Bossk through.
Q: It’s clear that Aurra is this dark mentor, motherly figure even, for Boba. But what does Bossk make of this kid? Does he see any potential in him?
Filoni: Bossk is a guy that – he’s there for the money. That becomes very clear. He’s not a very mentorly guy. It’s pretty cut-and-dry for Bossk. “Hey, I’m gonna get paid. This is a big job.” Maybe he’s in debt somewhere – he’s stuck in a hostile situation. So it’s worth it to him to try to take on Windu at that point. His motivations are pretty clear. I really just wanted to focus on the Boba-Aurra dynamic. It’s kinda fun that when you see Slave I and you see Bossk, it kind of fits together nicely. He gets to do a lot of piloting, good ol’ Bossk, so that’s good for him.
Q: This season, especially with the episode “Bounty Hunters” and now this storyline, you’re definitely delving more into the bounty hunters in general and the idea that they don’t all share the same morality, and we’ve met some who seem at the end of the day not so bad, and then we have someone like Aurra Sing, who maliciously kills people. Is that kind of a fun thing for you to delve into, and to ponder where Boba Fett lies on that spectrum?
Filoni: The original idea, I think, for George, with the bounty hunters, in Star Wars, was they’re the old gunslingers. They’re the old Western cowboys, and when you watch old cowboy films, something even as modern as Silverado, there’s a whole range of these guys, from Kevin Costner, who’s quite goofy, fun-loving and exciting, to some of those guys who seem like rattlesnakes, they’re so twitchy and evil. So we needed a cast of bounty hunters that had a lot more dynamic from the beginning of the season to the end, where you get Cad Bane in there, and he’s the pinnacle of… He’s cool-handed and also very evil, very cunning. He can handle working with a guy like Sidious rather easily and even brush off some of the things Sidious says, because he’s so sure of himself. [Compared to] Aurra Sing, who just outright seems pretty evil and intense, but then she’s taking on Boba, so why would she do that? That’s an interesting question. And to Sugi – she has her own kind of moral code, and she argues with Obi-Wan, is kind of irritated with him that he sees her as just some bounty hunter, the same as the pirates. It’s important to have those different characters and dynamics, and in a certain way, Han Solo was like that. He’s not dissimilar from Sugi when he started out. He really came around in Empire and Return of the Jedi, and he’s part of the Rebel team; he was out there for the money [in the beginning]. There’s a whole world of those guys out there, and they’re a lot of fun to play with.
Q: Now that you’ve introduced Boba into the mix, while I know you don’t want to use him all the time, do you think it’s something you might revisit? Especially because you have the Death Watch out there, a lot of fans would probably be intrigued the possibilities of some meet-ups.
Filoni: I think for sure. Boba’s such an interesting character, and like I always say, it’s a careful balance of: I don’t want to overdo it; I don’t want to inform everybody of every detail of this guy’s life. But I wanna make sure that he’s gonna be back, because I think people would be very interested in Boba Fett when they learn some of the things they’re going to learn in the finale. They see him in this new light, with new information, so I imagine he’ll be back at some point and for that matter so will Cad Bane.
Check out a clip from “Death Trap”
See Boba Fett this Friday! The three-part second season finale of “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” begins on April 23rd with “Death Trap” and on April 30th with “R2 Come Home” and “Lethal Trackdown” on Cartoon Network. The finale should see the conclusion of the Mandalorian War. The animated show returns with season three in October.
[Source] IGN
