Note from Connie: This excellent, heavily illustrated book covers
George Lucas's career from his student days to 1992.
The section relevant to Willow is reproduced below. The book has approximately
twenty Willow-related photos, most of them large, but only the less commonly seen
ones are displayed here. Instead of my usual practice of alternating text and pictures, a
gallery of thumbnails is presented after the text to achieve a reasonable fit on the
page. Click on the pictures for a larger image.
The text is brief but interesting, although it perpetuates the unfortunate
misconception that Bavmorda is killing all infant girls. There's nothing to suggest
that in the movie or any of the source material; instead, it's specifically stated
that Bavmorda needs to capture Elora alive.
George Lucas's fascination with mythology as the fountainhead of great drama runs through most of the films he has had a hand in. But the purest and most primal expression of his love of mythology is undoubtedly Willow.
It is a magical tale, set in a medieval past, of the finding of an infant by a colony of little people called the Nelwyns. In a gender reversal of the story of Moses hidden in the bulrushes, the baby, Elora Danan, has been hidden by her nurse because the wicked Queen Bavmorda has ordered the destruction of all female babies. It has been foretold that one of the infants will be her successor. The baby of the prophecy is indeed Elora. Willow, the 3-foot-high hero who finds her, sets out to return the infant to her rightful destiny.
Willow was played by Warwick Davis, whom Lucas met when he was cast as one of the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi and whose charm, agility, and intelligence persuaded Lucas that Willow could indeed be cast with little people.
Along the way, Willow recruits a full-size rogue, Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), a sort of Han Solo of the forests, who will eventually confront the evil queen and her protective two-headed dragon (one of ILM's proudest achievements). There is also a Vader-like figure called General Kael.
Many of the story elements - the child of destiny, the good caretakers, the skeptical elders, the monster to be vanquished, the dark castle where a malevolent ruler terrorizes all in sight - have, in various permutations, been the stuff of folklore and mythology for centuries.
Lucas's first and only choice to direct the film, which had been scripted by Bob Dolman from the Lucas story, was Ron Howard. Howard, an eighteen-year-old when Lucas first cast him in American Graffiti, was now a director with three successful films (including Splash) under his belt. "I wanted somebody with a sense of humor and somebody who would be good with the human side of this," Lucas says. "It's so easy to get overwhelmed with the effects and the logistics."
Dennis Muren, whose love of special effects began in childhood and who had joined Lucas as a motion-control camera operator for Star Wars, was a special-effects supervisor on Willow. The film was, he remembers, "an awful lot of work under the most difficult possible conditions, which is doing effects work in daylight instead of dark or nighttime. It's three times harder. There was this two-headed dragon at the end, and there were these Brownies that had to be all over the place." (The Brownies, Rool and Franjean, were mischief makers 9 inches tall, played by Kevin Pollak and Rick Overton, who, in some amazing visual effects, are involved with both the larger little people and the full-size actors.)
The visual astonishments further included a goat who evolves through the forms of several other animals, before our very eyes, before she is revealed as a kindly sorceress named Raziel (Patricia Hayes), who is just emerging from a curse imposed by Queen Bavmorda (who was played to the hilt by Jean Marsh). "George," Muren recalls, "said he didn't care what happened in between, but he knew the scene started with a goat and ended up with a woman." Muren and his wizards turned to computer-generated images to bring off the seemingly miraculous transformations.
The casting of Warwick Davis and the other little people, a bold departure since they are not merely incidental but are central to the plot, lends Willow a particular and affecting charm. As Sheila Benson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, Willow "leaves a friendly glow and a sense of a magical world lovingly evoked."
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| The sword-brandishing General Kael (an unusual name but not unknown to filmmakers) is a vivid and menacing figure in Lucas's celebration of the power of myth. The general's headgear, vaguely Oriental, and his symbol-rich clothes underscore the film's implicit message that myths are both timeless and universal. His steed is a horse fitted with horned armor. | Joanne Whalley as Sorsha and Val Kilmer as Madmartigan, the film's full-size heroes, ride into danger. | Chris Evans, an artist at ILM, works on a meticulous matte painting that will become the background for one of the film's sweeping pastoral scenes. | In this composite image from the film, Evans's painting merges undetectably with the stream-cut landscape in the foreground. |
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| Warwick Davis as Willow, with his wife, carries the infant girl he has found hidden beside a stream near the Nelwyn's village. | Surrounded by troops, Madmartigan, Sorsha and Willow face an uncertain future. | The two-headed monster guarding the castle was rather suspiciously named the Eborsisk, a critical choice. |
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| Director Ron Howard, a long way from the lovesick teenager in American Graffiti, goes over the script with the veteran actor Billy Barty on location in England. | Maneuvering the dreaded, two-headed Eborsisk monster, an ILM artist makes the minute adjustments that will, in stop-motion animation, bring the Eborsisk to life. | Putting a scene together, Chris Evans begins the process by painting a matte - a traditional process that may be largely replaced by the use of digitally processed computer images. |
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| A model maker, sitting amid a miniature version of a rocky promontory, puts final touches on the entrance to a cave. [Note from Connie: not really. This opening is where the live-action footage will go.] | The camera reveals the relative size of a second model of part of the same terrain, made larger than the first to allow for close-ups. | Taking flight at ILM, one of the Fairies hangs in space for a special-effects shot watched by effects supervisor Dennis Muren (arms folded) and Lucas. |