Courtesy of Jamie Benning
Star Wars fans usually know how to use their talents to make some creative works and Jamie Benning, an editor in the television business over in the United Kingdom, put his skills into creating the extensive Star Wars Begins.
“I’m a big Star Wars fan,” Benning said in a Skype interview. Benning was using Final Cut Pro and rather than wait for a project to come along so he could put it to use, he went ahead and found something he could “sink his teeth into.” That turned out to be creating documentaries on the original three Star Wars films using archival footage and audio from “All over the place!”
Most of the material used has never been made commercially available, so Benning had to do his own digging. When he was younger, he taped everything that came on television related to Star Wars and living in England turned out to be a huge advantage. “Occasionally you hear people talk about their roles in Star Wars,” he said. Most of the films were shot in England and when the films were re-issued in 1997 for the original’s 20th anniversary, there were a lot of interviews out there, which supplied him with plenty of material.
Some of the material that has been made available to any Star Wars fan, such as the Biggs and Luke deleted scenes had to be worked in, but did cause a bit of trouble. Those scenes have not been available since a 1998 CD-ROM release that has been incompatible with every computer out there, unless you have one that still uses Windows 98.
Still, Benning was able to rip those scenes and put them in. Initially, he and a friend planned on restoring them, “cleaning them frame by frame.” His friend was able to complete the work on just the first scene, but it proved too time-consuming, so he just included them as is. “That’s why some of the other scenes look all digitized,” he said. Other deleted sequences were completely restructured by editing tricks, like his complete reconstruction of the original Jabba the Hutt scene.
Not everyone has discussed every single sequence of the films and for those parts, Benning used quotes from the 2004 DVD commentaries, rather reluctantly. George Lucas is always changing his stories about how the films were put together and he has “…forgotten the details” so those commentaries are rather “sanitized.” By using contemporary quotes from 1976 (the beginning of Star Wars’ shooting) to 1983 (the completion of Return of the Jedi), Benning is able to provide a better picture of what actually happened. The films “just evolved at the time…It shows what Lucas could do when he couldn’t get everything he wanted and we know what happens when he can.”
