Every C-3PO Costume Explained By Anthony Daniels | WIRED

oh hello I'm Anthony Daniels and this is every version of c-3po from the Star Wars movies plans what are you talking about [Music] [Applause] you know I am famous for having turned down the opportunity to be in Star Wars back in 1975 I hadn't wanted to meet a director called George Lucas but I did but it wasn't interested in his sci-fi movie until I saw Ralph McQuarrie's conceptual artwork of the character he had created this Android figure that was standing looking out of the frame towards me and really connected I fell in love with it I slightly think Swee'Pea fell in love with me but I'm not sure the concept of the character was actually based on a film from way back in time metropolis by Fritz Lang and in that film the the powers that be created a fake human to try and encourage the workers to behave and George had brought McQuarrie create something similar the similarity would be that neither of us the original actor Hoel myself could actually move in these costumes very well when I read the script I really like c-3po so I was very very happy to go the next day to Elstree Studios in North London and be cast for the part and I don't mean did I get the part no I mean that I was actually covered in plaster to make a mold of my body that would be the frame to make the actual robot suit well I have to tell you that being cast in plaster is not something I would recommend especially the day where they shot straws up your nose so that they can model your head eventually they're in the studio was my figure in white plaster with very little clothing on it wasn't a pretty sight but then came along Lismore the sculptor over the next few weeks Liz began to cover my white body with gray modeling clay and she built up the shape that you eventually see in the finish figure all these little lines and curly cues and shapes were a reference to that Fritz Lang movie I'd be in the studio most days and they would try out a new piece on me it might be an arm or a leg or a neck or head or or something and sometimes they were paper prototypes sometimes there's a plastic thin plastic the most interesting thing for me was was when it came to through PIOs face I remember coming into a room and there were I think six heads on the kind of high table and actually they were all terrific in in their gray clay there was this one and I said to George this is the only one I don't like is this one at the end is it that's one we're using in my defense he didn't look anything like he turned out because when he turned out in gold I felt Threepio it was beautiful there's no way Threepio can ever exist without a whole team and that was right from the beginning first of all across George Lucas who thought of the idea Norman Reynolds and then down to Phil McDonald Maxie my dresser who was not from the wardrobe department but from props because basically I was a prop Maxie and his his fellow workers would join in a team because I needed more than Maxie it turned out it was way more complicated to costume than anybody thought and so on that first day I think there were six people coming in from all angles to dress me up in it and I really rely and have always relied on the kindness of the crew and the people who really care about making me as comfortable as long as possible which wasn't that gradually they built up the team under Norman Reynolds who worked with a plasters Department and the plastics department all these clever prop makers and they came up eventually with all the bits and pieces to make a robot and I tried it on in the special effects studio at Elstree and for the first time I had that suit in its entirety around me it was horrible I had completely lost connectivity with my body the world I literally blundered around the studio because I couldn't really see about the eyes in the center and I had no idea what my elbows were doing which were way bigger than my elbows my shoulders were bigger my legs were kind of trapped after about 15 minutes we took it off relief I never saw it again until a month later they're out in a tent in the desert and there were all the pieces seventeen pieces I think laid out and gradually over a two hour period they covered me in this gold we started off with lack tights and a black leotard and a black hood the next bit would be slightly more sensitive area the front and the back and these were two pieces of very thin plastic to be in vacuum-formed and they put these around me and over the course of thing then they took gold tape and stuck that down the side so now the two parts front and back had become one next really complicated there was the top half of the leg that was attached to the bottom of the calf with a sort of well literally a bungee cord either side that stretched down between two nodules this allowed the the piece to work like that to keep them locked together with the knee which had these kind of interlocking fragments like that they came down and to get that on Maxie my dresser in the team turned it the wrong way I put my foot through it all the way down and then when it was in there they turned it round and pinned the back on so now my leg was locked in there before that they they put on my deck shoe a deck shoe being a little rubber soled canvas thing with the kind of white rum around there and nice blue canvas top sort of thing you'd wear if you were out sailing but here we weren't this was mainly the under shoe because the top of three POS foot was all the foot there was it was just a foot bang a gold cover that looked beautiful again made out of very thin plastic and then we came up to the top section the front and the back I was locked in there I wasn't going anywhere we'd had this suit then an arm came up I had black cotton gloves on as well and then a hand and these were strange pieces of just knuckles and joints and things glued onto black cotton gloves Maxie had glued them on the night before the glue had said before we could take them off and basically we had to wrench them off my hands for me to go to sleep that night we had two necks one was split down the back and pinned together and that was for the camera to shoot from the front the other one was for the camera to shoot from the back and that had a split on the front I know stay with me I think we've been two hours doing this hour and a half at least then came the final torture which was to take the face and the back almost like an easter egg cut in half right put them together like that and here's the clever bit mother seemed a good idea at the time they took the kind of earring thing here and they pointed it through the hole in the side of the face which joined to the hole in the back of the head and then hoped it through into a bayonet fitting like a lightbulb out of action light bar in the neck trouble was that this was quite hard on the day because you had to lighten up these holes and the pin and push against something that pushed away when you pushed it after half an hour I'm not exaggerating they finally long these pins into shape and at which point they the same banner tight-fitting but far easier just to pieces so we had the whole Threepio look and that first day when I walked out into the desert nobody had ever seen that that shape that figure before and through the little pinhole eyes I could scan all the people in front of me the crew who were standing as there as the Morning Sun rose up over the desert and their reaction was extraordinary they were variously either very charmed or completely crazy they just Wow look at that sort of thing and finally Threepio was complete apart from one thing that Maxie put his hand up behind 3p O's back and under that little backplate there's a tiny swish that connected the six batteries within that little box to a wire that came over inside my head that had been joined to another wire which was connected to the eyes so we had a full circuit from those little eyes and so with a flick of the switch suddenly Threepio had become alive for the very first time my friend c-3po of course looks fantastic but there was one thing that at that point was missing because one of three pios attributes he loves to talk use the translator fluent in over six million forms of communication how was this going to happen I'd had six months to think I don't know I'm only a droid and not very knowledgeable about such things so here was day one and I still didn't know what was gonna happen what was I gonna do I was there in the desert I was hurting I was pain I had learnt the words sort of I never been in a film so the word action was terrifying quite terrifying but at that moment something came to my aid some kind of movie magic some kind of force whatever because at that moment that precise moment Threepio came alive by sir my first job was programming binary load it is very similar to your vaporators in most respects can you speak bocce of course I can say it's like a second language to me I miss all right I couldn't say it on the day I think that my nervousness my discombobulation of everything made me flub the lines like crazy third time I got it wrong George kind of frowned and walked over instead Threepio in the eye and therefore me in the eye you can say anything you like don't worry about the voice I can fix it later I was embarrassed because there's an actor I like to get the lines right so then I carried on and in that case on the fourth take I said my said my first job was ba-ba-ba-ba-ba what to bring cut of course George knew that he could put in a proper voice later because when your head is inside a bucket you don't sound so good that sounded horrible Cobra because we possibly used that kind of vocal quality even though the microphone was here and a little microphone cable was going all the way down my back into my pants those two bits of plastic start together and the transmitter was shot somewhere really quite warm yes I was speaking to you all the time out of my butt the huge success of a new hope meant that suddenly we were making a second film The Empire Strikes Back number 5 I know the math has always confused me a bit but Threepio was back there again and now people that had a chance to kind of study the cost him a little more some things were changed to make things easier for the Empire Strikes Back the the question was basic and the same and some of the improvements maybe save time but it was still a struggle to to be c-3po the shoes were one piece they were no longer the deck shoes with the cover they were opened at the back and my foot went in and then believe it or not again with the gold tape they were too taped up tied sometimes with shoe laces one thing I want to remind you of back in the day in Episode four Threepio didn't have two gold legs he had won silver shin a lot of people didn't notice it and the reason is it was kind of subtle and the silver actually reflected the gold of the other and also in the desert it reflected the gold of the sand to certain extent that John Jay the beloved stills photographer nipping shooting stills all through the shoot on the last day in the desert he came up to say times why are you wearing a silver leg today and I thought I'm blind cameraman I've got to rest before I fall apart my joints are almost frozen people still argue does Rubio have a silver leg the point of the silver shin that would come to haunt me many years later in the force awakens was to say that Threepio had had a bit of a history that he'd had some kind of drama before this you know and but it was so subtle that hardly anybody noticed the Threepio was there and still fairly mobile I had in fact been tap-dancing on the Muppet Show just a few months before but again I I was younger certainly don't know but this is our beginning the world right for The Empire Strikes Back I also had well Threepio had new hands they still didn't work but there were new and they were one piece plastic very much looked like the originals but have been made on a new mold and split open under here and I would wiggle my hand in wearing a black glove too you know wearing plastic on your skin is not nice so the glove was still essential just as a cover me on the inside so now I had these beautiful plastic gloves that were this shape and whatever I did they remained this shape it was like curse of the plastic hands you can do and my joints are freezing out eventually they they would soften with body heat and so on said that it could with pressure bend them like this if I wanted to point over there I would by the side of my body curl these fingers around hold them against my body with my finger extended and then at the last minute on cue go oh look I think if I stay there much longer you know they were not great again the wrong materials or different everyone was trying this is not a criticism it's a list of facts okay the pants section as well call them those two originally were in two pieces the second film these were one piece and they were we remade we made a little casting and this part of my body hit by now I was I was in urine to the humiliation and things actors have to go through to key to keep apart you know and so they they made this kind of little mini section statue at me and then cast that in a kind of heavier rubbery plastic which meant that it was one piece so you couldn't just wrap it around me I had to wiggle into it and again a rather kind of undignified wiggling motion if you study c-3po close-up freeze-frame and look at various parts of his body there are wear marks this machine I guess you get that anyway but if you look here you'll see that within moments the gold finish because it was a paint you see there are score marks here with the painter totally gone absolutely no it's grey metals aluminum here this is difficult for the team because they need to find a gold finish that were detached with plastic which was semi semi mobile so again you'll see all sorts of flaking but the overall effect as the movie sweeps by you know sealing this stuff you don't want to see you're not looking for that you're looking for the whole story of the gold character that's going on these adventures with his friends there were a lot of fun things in the Empire Strikes Back but the scary thing and the fun thing was reading on the page Threepio in Cloud City something's going on in this Scientology oh so he goes in and you hear him say oh I was out of a job i scurried through the next few pages he wasn't dead yet he wasn't finished Chewbacca went and found bits of Threepio as they headed towards the fiery furnace of meltdown one of his great dress Chewbacca was there to drag him and put him in his bits and in there and so now three BIOS performance my performance was it in pieces literally in pieces Mayhew who was Chewbacca at the time had a bag of bits and I've got to tell you that if you look carefully some fan has just discovered there's an arm and a leg and a other bit nervous in the valley in fact there are two arms both right arms got it wrong love it because I had all sorts of spare bits and they just chucked bits in there and didn't notice that they had two right arms anyone alone had to be a mistake you've got to forget them and the clever thing there was Chewbacca Peter Mayhew he had a blaster and on this end was a piece of fishing wire attached through the costume to this so when he did that my head on the back was being animated by a fishing wire so get the whole thing alive the more fun was when he put my head on backwards only way to do it was to take a Threepio head cut out the back of the head so his face was here looking that way my face was sticking out of the back which from the side is a bit difficult because this bits longer especially this bit so this vide 'king out to the side so they stuck gold tape on it and I promise you if you freeze frame in that video on three on Chewbacca's knee you will see for a moment a kind of thing here and that is my nose something not everything is perfect in Star Wars not everything is photoshopped out there's little moments but then there were other moments that I would be on the floor with my arm up through the Threepio chest into the face so that I could animate it a bit like an old ventriloquist puppet as I spoke the line so I could animate as I spoke and when you put them together the audience believes it's one phenomena the scariest bit for me was with Threepio is standing in the middle of the fork and corridor and he's holding a limb you didn't have to fix the hyperdrive Chewbacca could do it down there the leg is missing now these days you do it with green screen technology adjusting your clever computer stuff then no it was me standing on one leg with my other leg curled up behind me so in line with the camera so you couldn't see it and holding this and balancing and speaking and shouting I'm standing here in pieces and you have delusions of grandeur I managed not to fall over but it was kind of scary because falling in that costume is not good so sitting down moment was even more fun because there's a point later on where Threepio is sitting on a box and Artoo's there and he's got a foot and a welding torch and he in my book he was saying and I'm saying where do you think it goes um the three viewers legs are sticking straight pretty much out to the camera so how did we do that how did we have me sitting footless on a box discussing how to attach my foot yeah you're right I wasn't sitting on the Box I was kneeling on the floor through the box with my feet coming out of the side pretty much it is me always in the Threepio suit although young jim was the one who actually fell off the cliff when the sand person attacked Luke Skywalker [Music] Jim is making props Department apparently he was dispensable because if I'd hurt myself filming would have come to a halt for a while whereas Jim wearing bits my costume nobody cared bang I could have done it it was easy just out of camera onto a mattress a bigger stunt was in Return of the Jedi caviar on Jabba's barge and by now three psi is hanging out salacious crumbs fooled it there and I am edging towards the top of the hand read the handrail was missing on Jabba's barge and I'm blindly I mean I'm now seeing one eyed with restricted vision think about it and I'm about 60 feet up and as we get to the rails he cut because I had stood as though I was going to fall over she was behind me the motorized artery is like you're nudging me forward that's part of the film we get to my fall position cut and then I relax and then Tracey Emin stunt person came in and she was wearing a rubber suit heaven knows what it felt like and she stood there and I showed her my hand position and she took it she stood there and it said action and she went forward and when you watch she twists round in the air and falls out of shock few of England mattresses and on underneath the mattresses piles of cardboard boxes and what they do is absorb the shock bit like the front of your car and she was absolutely fine of course she's a pro she was wonderful here's the thing you don't know maybe a couple of hours later she was back up on deck she'd taken off the rubber suit she was no longer Threepio she was Princess Leia and she is the one who sweeps across to the barge over there to the skiff wonderful skilled woman dude I guess I won't mention my name well it's a real pleasure to meet you of course not all Star Wars is in the movies right some of the most amazing spin-offs have been a great joy to me and the chief one star to us know in a kingdom very very near Disneyland if you haven't had been written starters at one of the Disney parks I suggest you stop watching this video and go right now because it is a superb rendition of the story in a way that involves you Threepio is there to welcome you in the space bordered Disney is there with our two hottest mending with having ship and of course getting it totally wrong and in any blows happen it's a very exciting night but to do this they needed an animatronic c-3po so Tom Fitzgerald the producer the head of the design team at Imagineers at Disney it got me into a studio and and said where he told me the whole story and I was sold from the moment I heard it and then he said Penn our idea is for you to come in this little mock-up said understand just in new jeans and a shirt and play the scene c-3po it was kind of funny we had a camera and I had a sandbag over one foot and when I lost why said well that's where all the engineering for the animatronics comes up into the frame that is through c-3po and animates his actions so we need to if you wouldn't want to keep still on that leg and we filmed the scene they recorded my voice and my action so when our to test the ion cannons and here I had a console and I was poking buttons and r2 is helping things blow up and they were using this as a guide he also asked me to look at the audience who were coming in two passengers who were coming down the space board around around around and they would be at this point about Madden oh six feet 8 feet below me looking up as they went by I turned in the console and dr. people and then carried on waters day and of course the inevitable happened when I stood there alone in the space ball before we opened possibly rehearsing stuff I stood looking up at 3pf thinking just how brilliant Disney had been in in in making a real robot out of a fake robot and at that point as I was kind of admiring he turned and looked straight at me I'm getting goose bumps right now many years had passed after Return of the Jedi and I actually thought you know Star Wars was never gonna happen again I'd got on with life it was okay and then a phone call would I go and meet George Lucas Leavesden studios in North London of course and we had a meeting about this new film and you said you're you're created by Anakin yeah you're built by Anakin he's a kid I just thought that was brilliant to have the sweetest character pretty much in the universe to be made by one of the artist villains ever so that was cool how it was achieved was a puppet and the puppet was built at ILM Industrial Light and Magic by Michael Lynch one of the prop makers and designers r2d2 so beautifully put it you mean Nate he did my part so sure my it was exquisite was totally believable as the insides of this and they they didn't actually offer me the option of puppeteering it you know Michael knew how it worked and it was his thing I got a service disappointed I would have liked to have had to go so basically I was there as the voice often trying to match movements that weren't particularly mine but as George said young it's just been made by a kid what do you expect not that one that one but it was a total different dynamic physical dynamic I accepted it by choice and I was fascinated by the puppet which was really heavy and although they tried to take out as much heavy material but it's still way not tongue them intellectually a ton and of course was extremely realistic you could totally believe this was the inside so there we had the first film and obviously if you're making a prequel you're making number two a prequel and at this point I said well you know I'd feel better if if you'd let me try and puppeteer it because kind of it's my head my brain my thought process be careful what you wish for there I was with Dom Bea's my new team head leader and Justin Dix who would come back into the story dressing up as puppet Threepio now there there's a Japanese art form theatrical art form called Bunraku where you have the most beautiful puppets and they are animated by performers who were dressed in black and knew the audience except they're not there it's fine it's called suspension of disbelief and so this creature was attached to my feet so his his heels were touched my toes his knees to my knees his waist to my waist etc and the arms were on the end of sticks at his elbow so that I could animate to some extent where he was touching things the head attached to my head to a helmet like that the only trouble was of course that his face was in front of my face so I couldn't see I had to guess who I was looking at another challenge the whole thing pretty much rested on a heavy harness like a Steadicam harness that can take a lot of weight and distribute it around your frame and I rehearsed for days in creatures shop Hatsune Australia and and could walk pretty pretty well in it and all that kind of thing I was absolutely ready for my first shot having the most touching conversation with padme amidala who in the middle of the night because she couldn't sleep was talking calmly and kindly with Threepio and asking him if he was happy there and he said well I'm not unhappy the people are lovely but being like this like one naked if you'll pardon the expression it wasn't easy for him and in this scene you suddenly have a the inner mind of this beloved droid who had suffered for 18 years for his nakedness and of course she in Padme being very clever so but there's a box of coverings right here why oh my I never noticed truly one of the best lines and I read it when you came back there's Natalie Portman holding the face of Threepio and meantime Dom bees had stuck the back of the head on me and around here had put fridge magnets I also had the lights three peers eyes on a special rig that Don had made a bit like spectacles so just the eyes and Natalie on action had to maneuver this face not quite I think about the 13 she did it and there was three P oh how as the shape of three people for the first time and everybody was exquisitely happy especially 3ba so right from the beginning the film we reshot the Threepio scenes they're happy puppets happy we shot them on blue screen green screen any screen with the gold suit that Justin Dix had done a wonderful paint job on to make it look rusty so here's a clue if you ever go up to the rusty Threepio just scratch a bit and you see his gold skin underneath the big difference here was that because he always started off shiny but their Georgia seminar he needs dirted down and kind of made to look grungy and stuff so he was always a bit grungy a bit oil covered and covered indeed not so much in oil but in shoe polish and table wax in the script I really didn't have much to do that it was really concentrating on the decline and form of my Creator Anakin Skywalker I mean it was tragic not the Threepio we would ever find out and he still doesn't know sir you know keep the c-3po is Lucas of course iconic gold a dirty gold to begin with and then bright shiny gold for episode three but then came a bit of a twist on this clever piece of scripting Threepio suffers an accident in in some kind of robot factory and he ends up with the the body of a battle droid I'm so confused and and to do it what we did was in fact film me in full Threepio costume and then they they animated a suit around me I had a blaster but again three POS hands were so difficult to manipulate that they actually had a wire the gun wanted me said I could hold it like that and I learned a fun thing as I came towards the camera the line was dying Jedi dogs died I will admit those weren't the precise words I said because I'm wanted to get a laugh but what was interesting is I found that you couldn't go die Jedi dogs died or whatever words without going you've got to make the thing live for you you know and that was kind of exciting and totally daft actually c-3po has no memory of it so it's cool for Revenge of the Sith which was obviously going to be the final film they had made the the collar the the neck a little bigger so that it grated on me rather less and sort of didn't constrict my Adam's apple all day it wasn't nice to wear but in a rather soft away they'd change the process of the courser into a silicon which was light and not exactly breathable but it was more pleasant than the thick rubber thing that I had on before so all the time people were making little adjustments for my safety in welfare they're not very grateful and you have a special standby painter who would come and dog the costume just to take the shine off in the camera department had another trick they go hold your breath stones and like hairspray in the face but it was dulling spray because you don't want that costume to be too shiny because it reflects everything but here I was magnificent in shine eventually I would be at ILM and see somebody watching frame by frame by frame every moment that I made and in Photoshop replacing the green with gold how amazing that I had thought that after episode six that was it Return of the Jedi and no we had the prequels new word for us all one two three four five six that was it wrong hopelessly wrong because of course the phone call would I care to work with JJ Abrams he asked me would you just like to do the voice and I said no but I would like a new suit of course that's Jay David Merriweather a total genius in the special effects science department constructed a suit for photographs and any material he could get anything I could help him with and he came up with the whole suit exploded on his computer to die was miraculous absolutely miraculous a lot of it was the same new material for the middle piece for the Panzer section the amazing thing he did was to insert some pieces here and here that stopped me being snapped by the meeting of these two joints but the big thing this half-hour screw here screw here became a bag a and after all these years magic after each shot take it off put it back on take it off transformed my life filming adored working on that film adored it apart from one argument right at the beginning with the director with JJ what's with the red arm it shows some history you mean like the the silver shin in the first film a new hope yeah exactly but that was too subtle to notice exactly that's why it's red I did not like the red arm okay I thought it was too big to avert to clumsier jest yes so every day on the set I would say to JJ no forgiveness ever he would love I so persecuted JJ on the set of The Force awakens about the red arm I gave him no no water at all and we finished and that was it and then I go to see the premiere and I'm looking at this shot yeah there's the Falcon now rising through special effects and there is Threepio waiting with a gold arm JJ had given me a final gift he changed the color in post-production three POS got a gold on further Force awakens and indeed for the last Jedi Threepio it was 3d printed and of course it makes it easier to prototype because it's all on a computer and you go there's not quite right etc that was fine still Wade surprising amount actually but the Panzer section was made of a different material the kind of new material that was fine and it was paintable then it moved gradually it stiffened up the the material didn't react well with the atmosphere but gradually as we got towards the end filming I was really sick realizing how difficult this was and there was nothing I could do about it tried to fudge it try to trick so you don't notice it so much of course you will know won't you part of the the wonder of three PS look when he is that Brian Gould is that he doesn't start off that way at all starts off with just an ordinary plasticky looking thing white in this case but then the vacuum plate a silver finish onto it so you put it in a vacuum chamber with silver foil and it sticks to it but then the clever thing so you've got a silver droid so then the paint department the art department take various colored lacquers that cover the silver but but making it make it gold and the silver gives it lift and life and brightness but you need and you need that if you started with solid gold it kind of would be a little dead so they thought this out and he looked magnificent once the red arm had gone of course what joy to be asked to be in road 1 s 3 p.m. he just one scene walkthrough like Alfred Hitchcock who was that droid yes I was there it was the same suit of course but it just Shawn out of that very dark and forbidding set and there was 3 p.m. and I I did a little trick I got fully dressed in my little tent my easy up tent and when I was ready they opened the entrance and I walked out nobody knew I was going to be there it was a huge secret that Threepio was in this shot it was a really good moment but it was soon over and so we come to the rise of Skywalker what it's all been about where we were heading and here was Threepio again - the red arm JJ was indeed forgiving what a brilliant fanatically agree but there were receives with the suit still the fixing was great the arms the hands for the first time they made hands that actually were jointed like my own fingers this is brilliant it meant that if I wanted to pick something up I could do and that was so good in the first in the first sequence in the sand tunnels with the dagger oh it's one of those I cannot tell you what it felt like it was total freedom back in the day it would be sorry you know I would have dropped it here I was catching it looking at it there were other changes no were not so good by now the section that we know what we call it that material really had stiffened down it was like wearing concrete Underpants I had a wonderful part in that film I had dog being in it but I had a lot of movement to do a lot of running about a lot of strange terrain made these tunnels judging by the circumference of the tunnel walls there and so gradually towards the end when it became almost impossible to move in that little section we found ways round him thank goodness for ILM because we we were able to do all sorts of sequences that I couldn't do wearing the full middle of the suit and indeed when I was climbing up two arches freighter of that rock face there was me but but I was wearing only the as it were girdle part of the middle section the rest of me from the hair down was covered in red dots and for other sequences it was the same when something was impossible we took away that bit of the costume stuck red dots down my legs as reference for ILM and they drew in three Pio's missing limbs absolute magic first day and the rise of Skywalker who is awful I was delighted to be there with the crew and Daisy and Oscar and John and of course JJ but by what I said because the San tunnels was a very enclosed set it had to be it was it was a tunnel - and it was very hot it was hot because we had lamps in there and also there was atmosphere a bit of a bit of smoke to make the lighting look really cool as opposed to the hotness that it was and it was real perspiration time and one of the magic things there done was to give me a little vest very thin material but on - it was sewn fine plastic tubes little thin plastic tubes that circled like an underfloor heating system except it wasn't a heating system it was the cooling system and what happened at the end of a take was they would attach me to a black bag very smart but in it was water with lumps of ice and in the bag onto a tube was a circulating fan so would shoot water up the tubes down the tubes opportune all around my chest and back it was fantastic it was immediate it felt like a heart attack it was really weird but it did keep me cool could he take it for so long young cool now I'm cool totally cool disconnect me for sitting there in that terrifying scene the red eyes sitting down in that costume is not possible so we went for the full bikini section of that yes I whispering to this amazing codpiece the rest of the suit was cut away so I could sit down and you don't you don't see it you don't expect to see it you don't see it maybe if you can freeze frame and come in zoom it's that serious about it you'll see the difference but of course we also had the red eyes when I first looked in a mirror at me Threepio with the red eyes I got to tell you it was it was quite shocking because he'd never been like that before we had eyes of different intensities sometimes they were actually operated by radio from the electric system over here that if I was in very bright light ambient light then they would need to make the eyes bright so they were sharp if it was in a gloomy cave for instance they went dim the lights so they weren't too piercing so all the time you've got a crew behind me adding 2 to 3 peers value as a character quite amazing but the teamwork that goes into making bits of the Threepio work on the whole for the better I can actually take this moment to say thank you guys thank you what you I love remembering how Tracey Emin played c-3po falling off Jabba's barge and then how she played Princess Leia sweeping across the little skiff over there and stuntpeople actually around a valued frankly I I've wanted there to be an Academy Award from for them that it hasn't happened yet films like mmm the ones we're talking about really depends on the stunt people so many time time after time so I was very very glad to have a stunt person of my own Michael birch he was my stunt double but when we were talking about the wonderful speeder sequence in in Jordan in Mehsana the desert magic there were sequences there was shot on very fast running vehicles and Mike was there being three pio in the distance running at 70 miles an hour and in case the car crashed he was not allowed to be roped on he had to have the ability to freefall off the vehicle can you imagine standing upright in a crazy rubber suit in the wind and the heat and everything at 70 miles an hour wondering if you're gonna die whereas I when I was on the real rig which was like this wonderful fairground ride that kind of shot us around it brilliant fun but there I was wired on to various bits of the scenery so that with a certain latitude I couldn't go further than that so I was totally safe I had the best time ever are you doing their appeal taking one last look my friend there we are saying thanks for listening to me talking about c-3po not not so much today as a character but as a costume and of course as such I'm the actor who wears something that's been created and maintained and and fixed and fiddled with and cared for and loved by a whole team of people who have made this character look so good and so convincing in all the Star Wars films and both iron Threepio was saying really guys and gals you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,241,640

Rating: 4.9444985 out of 5

Keywords: anthony daniels, anthony daniels interview, anthony daniels wired, anthony daniels c3po, anthony daniels c-3po, c-3po, c-3po wired, anthony daniels c3po acting, c3po bts, c3po behind the scenes, c3po making of, making of c3po, c3po design, anthony daniel breaks down, explains c3po, anthony daniel c-3po interview, anthony daniels wired interview, star wars, star wars c3po, c3po history, c3po star wars, c3po costume, c3po costumes, c3po costume design, wired

Id: 8fCqhpV2SG4

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Met him at my first comic con. So freaking polite and well spoken. 11/10

[u/hitchens1949]

“We’ll fix it in post. Can someone get me a coffee?”