Church’s work on the Tripods for War of the Worlds was a four-month race to the finish. All War of the Worlds images ™ & © 2005 Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks. All rights reserved. Images courtesy of ILM.

EW: The film’s shooting locations included Switzerland, Thailand and China. Did you look to those cultures for inspiration?

RC: The interesting thing was that they decided where to shoot based on our illustrations. For instance, the idea to set the Wookiees right next to water was something that I kind of came up with to differentiate them a bit from the Ewoks (the forest-dwellers in Return of the Jedi). We looked at Bali, Hawaii and China, which has these exotic limestone rock locations.

EW: Because of what was destined to happen to arch-villain Darth Vader, you knew you’d have to depict some hellish environment.

One of the advantages of working with George Lucas is that he gives the design team a lot of time to experiment and explore new ideas. Above is Church’s concept art of the Alderaan Saucer Platform.

RC: Exactly. The planet Mustafar was going to be volcanoes, but to what extent? Ron Fricke, who had photographed Koyaanisqatsi, went to (Italy’s) Mt. Etna and shot a lot of footage, which was used as elements in the volcano battle toward the end of the movie. Mt. Etna was erupting and he shot some fantastic stuff. It’s interesting to point out that technically, up until the last day before shooting, we never had a final script. And we only got a first copy of the script about six months into the project. Before that, it was George saying things like: “Let’s have a sinkhole planet that Obi-Wan visits.”

EW: So you weren’t constrained by a script.

RC: Not at all. It was fantastic. We knew where the story was going, of course, but George really wanted to see what we had to offer. He loves working that way, whether ideas get in the movie or not.

EW: So George was willing to risk having concept artists going down some dead ends?

RC: We went down a lot of dead ends. But the one thing that George gave us was lots of time — even though it never felt like a lot of time — to explore and develop these different locations. He knew exactly what his story was; he just wanted to see how visually stunning we could make it. Ninety percent of what we designed got chucked out, and will be used in the future for other Lucasfilm properties. It goes on and on. That’s why working with George is such a pleasure. He loves the artwork. He’s the only guy that I know who puts his money where his mouth is. He has this huge air-conditioned vault where he stores all the artwork.