The latest episode of Disney+’s The Mandalorian blew people away with its focus on character and action thanks to Deborah Chow’s direction. This may have marked Chow’s first step into a larger world, but she is also set to direct Disney+’s highly anticipated Obi-Wan Kenobi series with Ewan McGregor reprising his role as the Jedi Master from the Star Wars prequels.
Chow recently spoke with The New York Times about directing The Mandalorian, specifically her experience working with the series’ executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. These two have worked within the Star Wars franchise for quite some time with Filoni having created the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels while Favreau voiced a character in The Clone Wars and created and wrote The Mandalorian. On working with the duo, Chow said:
“One of the biggest benefits is that I just spent the last year in the Star Wars universe and I had great mentors, coming in under Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. Absorbing that, I feel, was the best training I could have had to take on the next one. So much of it just feeling it and understanding it, on an instinctual level, to know what’s right and what’s wrong with it. And there’s so much knowledge — every prop, every costume is important. Every detail really matters.”
The untitled Obi-Wan series will take place 8 years after Revenge of the Sith as it explores what Obi-Wan did during his exile and how he helped protect Luke Skywalker from afar. Some of this time period has been covered in Marvel Comics’ Star Wars title and a little of Star Wars Rebels, though obviously with such a large gap there’s a lot of story to tell. It’s because of this that Chow is excited to dive into Obi-Wan.
“There is so much going on between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope that hasn’t been explored,” Chow explained. “The idea of being able to go into a character journey plus the politics and plus all the vastness of the Empire and what’s going on is exciting just because it feels like a proper period of history and sometimes that is hard to do in two hours. Sometimes with two-hour movies there is always an imperative for the action and the plot to move particularly fast and quickly and to go from action sequence to action sequence and there are many more aspects to storytelling that I find interesting.”
Obi-Wan will run for six episodes and will be written by Hossein Amini (The Alienist). Unlike The Mandalorian, which has a rotating staff of directors for each episode, Chow will direct the whole Obi-Wan season.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR6clDBNVLc
