Darth Maul was really, really hard, because all I had as a precedent was Darth Vader. I think, maybe for two years, I was trying to out-helmet Darth Vader, and I almost had a nervous breakdown doing that because you can’t. You absolutely cannot! It’s a perfect design — you know, skull and a Nazi helmet, it does not get better than that. So finally I decided, “All right, well, heck, take that darn helmet off. Let’s see what’s underneath.”
That’s when I started playing around with the face. I thought there should be some sort of connection with the face underneath and the machinery of the helmet, so I started putting things on the face. Patterns and things, which I intended originally to be circuit boards, or I would carve the face up and let it be light from inside the head that would connect with whatever it was. Just crazy stuff.
For my designs, I never just generically design a person and try to impose a design on it. The design comes from the personality. So I would get everyone in the art department to pose for me, and you just stare at them and say, “What kind of Sith Lord would you be?”
Gavin [Bocquet], the production designer, said, “Don’t make me look fat.” [Laughs] So I put a headdress that covered his chin and then I put a Rorschach pattern on his face, and George seemed to respond to that really well.
And then, and this is several years into it, the script shows up. And Darth Maul is described as “a vision from your worst nightmare.” That was all I needed, because that’s a very clear direction, and I know my worst nightmares.
I drew my worst nightmare, which was that face that’s peering in the window at you late at night, and it’s barely alive. Like a cross between a ghost and a serial killer staring in at you, and it’s raining, and the rain is distorting the face. So I drew that, a stylized version of it, red ribbons instead of rain, and put it in a folder, and at the meeting passed it over to George. George opened it up and went, “Oh, my God,” slammed it shut, handed it back, and said, “Give me your second worst nightmare.”
I tried to figure out what I’d done wrong in my thinking, because you don’t want less, ever. I started thinking, “Star Wars is not real life. It’s mythology.” So I looked for my first best mythological nightmare, and that’s easy, because that’s clowns. I was scared to death of Bozo the Clown as a kid. So I made my big scary clown, and I’d run out of faces to draw, so I used mine. I drew myself into a clown. The patterns became very stylized patterns of the muscles underneath the skin that give expression to the face.
I think that wonderful performance from Ray [Park], put into that makeup, with Nick Dudman’s awesome misunderstanding of my drawing — because I had given him black feathers, and he thought they were horns — is what created Darth Maul.
