During production, Church switched between the roles of concept designer and art director. The Wookiee planet Kashyyyk is seen here.

EW: As the production moved along, what was the relationship between the production designer and the concept artists?

RC: Since we were working 20 feet away from George, he shared ideas with us all the time. We basically had eight months to a year to work completely by ourselves to come up with the look of the movie. Then Gavin Bocquet, the production designer — who I’ve worked with before — started coming into our meetings along with visual effects supervisors, John Knoll and Roger Guyett. They looked at the artwork that we created and had this kind of tug of war about which was the better or cheaper or more effective approach to each shot. “Should we build this? We have x amount of square footage on the sound stage.” That was the back-and-forth with them. If it was something tangible that they could build, that was one thing. But there are tons of things in the movie that defy a practical technique. They would decide the proportion of what would be built, and then I’d work closely with the production designer. I’d break things down, flushing out the details and translating the drawings in many cases via 3D blueprints. Then Gavin’s team would build it.

Those guys were in Australia, so during much of the building process I would go over to George’s house where he had this virtual link set up to have meetings in realtime. I would bring my drawings and they would bring theirs. George and Gavin and I were just sitting there talking as if we were all in the same room.

Church’s work on General Grievous’ bike led to his being asked to design the Tripods for War of the Worlds.

EW: You’ve remarked in the past that once production gets underway, your job shifts to becoming more of an art director. Was that the case with this film?

RC: Definitely, though it was completely non-linear. Near the end of the production, when George would come up with an idea for a new sequence, I’d have to become a concept artist again. But for the most part, I would work with John Knoll and Roger Guyett at ILM. I’d go to matte painting dailies and model shop dailies and walk around and look over the shoulders of the modelers. It was a solid year-and-a-half of being in the trenches at ILM and art directing those guys. I originally had started working for George at ILM, so it was a homecoming for me.

EW: One of the big animation challenges of this film was the all-CG villain General Grievous. Did George give you specific directions about him?

RC: He said two words: “Droid General.” We asked, “Could it be a robot?” “Yup.” “Could it be a creature? “Yup. It can be anything you want.” So everyone in the art department did passes on it. Dozens of drawings were done the first week, with no real positive reaction from George. So everybody went back to the drawing board. Then (concept artist) Warren Fu did the design that was 99% of what Grievous became...

EW: Grievous wears a cape that’s a key part of his style. Do you get involved in things like cloth design?