Mark Interviews 1990+

Life after Luke

From Luke Skywalker to Wing Commander to Black Pearl, the man who will never escape being Anakin Skywalker's son talks to Kevin J. Anderson about life after STAR WARS

Mark Hamill, best known for his role as Luke Skywalker in the STAR WARS trilogy, has not been idle since his pivotal role in George Lucas' magnum opus. In fact, he's appeared in a wide range of genre films and TV shows, among them Slipstream, The Guyver, John Carpenter's remake of John Wyndham's Village of the Damned, Steven Spielberg's SeaQuest DSV series and even Batman: The Animated Series (as the voice of the Joker). In addition, he's appeared on stage in The Elephant Man and Amadeus and has just developed and co-written an unusual new five-part graphic novel for Dark Horse, Black Pearl. He currently stars as Colonel Christopher Blair in Origin Systems' award-winning interactive computer action series, Wing Commander.

At the recent Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia - America's largest science fiction, comics and gaming convention - Hamill took time out from signing autographs and performing before a packed auditorium to chat to SFX about life after Luke Skywalker...

Let's start by talking about the Wing Commander CD-ROM, which seems to take up a lot of your time at the moment...

I really have a special affection for the people at Origin Systems, the creators of Wing Commander. They're very down to earth, creative and friendly people. I found it refreshing that they had an enthusiasm about entertainment that can get lost in the more cynical Hollywood of the Big Deal. They have a freshness, a sort of a blur between fans and people actually producing the product. So I was completely delighted with the experience, and I'm glad to have done the sequel. I've stumbled into an aspect of the entertainment industry that's still very much in its infancy. I'm sure they'll look back fondly at this product when they have it on a chip the size of a fingernail and they can create hundred-million-dollar movies inside your computer.

You're on the cutting edge of technology. You wait a year and then it's a whole new ball game.

Yeah, exactly. That's really why George waited so long to do his next trilogy because now he's able to do things that were prohibitively expensive before. He can create gigantic sets on the computer - and it will stand up to scrutiny on a 70mm image, which is what everybody is aiming for. You think you've seen everything - then you see Arnold Schwarzenegger's adversary [in Terminator 2] walk through bars like that... I mean, it's really astonishing. And the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park! I haven't seen George's movies since they were in the theatres, but people say they look dated now. That's probably why he's fiddling around with the special effects for the Special Edition so they don't look completely anachronistic when you stand them up against the three he's going to make with those big CGI kind of advances.

Wing Commander stars many well-known actors - John Rhys-Davies, Tom Wilson, Malcolm McDowell... What are the differences between acting for a computer game and a film?

The computer game scripts are incredibly big and daunting. You realise that you're becoming a piece of a mosaic. Performing an interactive game is much less satisfying dramatically than being in a live play, where you have a beginning, a middle and an end, and where you and the audience go on this journey and they're with you the whole way until it's over.

Movies break down that process, of course, but computer games break it down even more, because you're giving people alternate scenarios. But in some scenarios, as an actor, you become more covetous of your character - 'How could I be so sensitive and warm and receptive to this idea here, and then, on this call, bite his head off like I'm a hard-ass sergeant?' All the actors are saying, 'Boy, they'd better play A-A-B-B-A-B-A-B if they want my true interpretation of the character!' I have a sudden vision of these guys trying to show their agents how good they are in scene, and having the agent play the game but choosing the wrong plot threads and the actor crying, 'No, start again!' and then the agent saying, 'Darling, I don't have time for this, please!' Everyone is saying, 'Gee, I don't know. Is this [interactive computer games] bad for actors?' And I say anything that increases jobs for actors is good for actors. Any jobs.

On the other hand, I'd be worried if I were a set designer, because there are people who do these things in camera, inside the computer. There'll be a time when they're only printing an element of the actors, who're going to be in these non-existent sets. And I don't think it all has to be for special effects movies, where you recognise how spectacular it is. The best ones are probably going to be the kind where you don't even notice the effects. The characters go to the Pentagon, for example, but the actors didn't really go there - they just went outside the backdoor of ILM!

Are you involved in the creative process at all, with the game storylines?

No, it's Frank DePalma and Terry Borst. These guys are amazing and I have to give them credit. At first I only committed to do the one game, so when they came back with the second one I thought, 'Well, it better be good.' I mean, it can't be just the same thing all over again, because the war is over! But this one had a beginning and a middle and an end that you could really relate to, as well as all the elements people liked about gameplaying along the way.

Let's talk about some of your television work. Seeing some of the fans and collectors of STAR WARS memorabilia here, it reminds me of Gather Ye Acorns, an episode of Amazing Stories you starred in about an eccentric collector of old objects...

I loved doing that and I thought they wrote it for me, but Timothy Hutton was going to do it originally. I was the next choice. I asked if I could have a script, but they said, 'No, it's Steven Spielberg!' It seems to have been written for people who have an obsession or whatever you call it that makes them go to conventions like this!

People here have said to me, 'I regularly went through the bins out at ILM.' And while autographing, I would see items and ask, 'Where did you get this?' - stuff I myself have never seen - and I'd hear, 'You know, I lived just off the lot' or 'I used to go down after work...' and I thought, 'Wow, that's foresight', because personally, I have lost some valuable pieces.

Here's another story I've never told anyone - and it's true. When I went to do STAR WARS, I was moving to another apartment. I was sort of upgrading, not because of the movie - I made much more money on TV than I did for George's movies, since we were all unknowns back then - but I didn't want to move all this stuff. At the time, I was collecting lots of boardgames and puppets and mechanical things. I was single, I was making a lot of money on TV, and so I had a pretty sizeable collection.

I gave a friend of mine maybe 40-50 game and/or toy-like objects and two big boxes of clothes - including the first jacket I'd ever actually had made for me. (Maxfield Blue on Santa Monica, and I paid way too much money for it, but it was nice, and it was mine, and it was made for me.) I'll give you his first name - Bill. You know who you are, Bill! But to cut to the chase, I've never seen this stuff since... And I started thinking... because when I go to these conventions I see things and can't remember whether I still have them or did I give them to Bill 'to hold for me'? I don't even want to think about it!

So, tell us about this new graphic novel you're working on, Black Pearl.

Dark Horse Comics are releasing it in September. My cousin Eric Johnson and I wrote it. Eric and I have knocked so many stories around over the years, but we finally decided to develop a project that I could direct as a motion picture. That meant we had to pick something cheap! You know, Ron Howard had to make Eat My Dust before he made Splash. So I' guess I'm looking for my Eat My Dust.

And we found it in Black Pearl. We wrote it to be this prowling, dark almost docudrama-take on the tabloidization of our society in general, focusing on that insatiable fatalistic appetite that everyone seems to have.

It's always fascinating to me why we accept as a child that someone would put on a disguise to do good deeds! When you grow up and look back on that, you say, 'Wait a minute, how did that slip by my kid-like radar?' I remember sincerely believing that Batman was cooler than Superman because he was 'realistic'. I'd forgotten that was my attitude, and at about 18 or 19, when I looked at one of these Batman books again, I realised it was ludicrous!

So I wondered if there was a way to do that hoary old chestnut about a guy who puts on a costume. For our purposes, the film couldn't be expensive, it couldn't be a period piece, so what could we shoot right now, where someone who came into a room in disguise would be seen as a crimefighter? We couldn't let the audience doubt for a second and couldn't ever let them ask what's going on. Could that work? Could we make it? Or would such a character just look stupid? If a guy came into this room wearing a costume and a mask, you'd just go, 'Uh, sir? Can I help you?'

We first wrote Black Pearl as a screenplay, which we showed to some people with marginal success and some encouragement. It's not a major studio film - it's got to be defiantly independent. You can't have a whole bunch of people saying, 'We don't know' and 'We're gonna have to reshoot that ending...' You've just got to go with it and do it handheld, like Hard Day's Night, in 28 days. I'd love to do it in black-and-white, but they won't let me.

As a graphic novel, Black Pearl has taken on an identity all of its own. At first I thought we'd just illustrate the screenplay, but it doesn't work like that. We found the chapter stops first, and then we'd try to look at each component and understand how it would work with its own character for each issue. It's taken on a tone of its own. I don't like breaking it up and I don't like seeing it as a two-dimensional thing with word balloons. By definition, this project has been a difficult thing to translate, and I don't think the movie will be the same as the comic book.

Were you able to select the artist who worked on the comic?

Like anything else, you see who's in your price range and what people's schedules are like. There are people we would have loved to work with, but someone would say, 'He only does painted pages', or 'He's too slow'. That was the comment I heard the most from Dark Horse - too slow.

In the end, we went for H.M. Baker, who's got a very fluid style. He drew Ghost. Unfortunately, he lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which caused difficulties. If, for instance, I'm trying to get a certain look for a guy, I can just call up a US artist and say, 'Make him look like Frasier's father.' And if he doesn't know already, he can turn on the show and see exactly what I mean.

In one conversation with our Bosnian artist, for example, we had a translator who sounded like Fearless Leader on Rocky and Bullwinkle and we couldn't really talk. So Eric and I cut out pictures from TV Guide and took snapshots of locations. We needed reference photos of the most obvious things... In the script, we'd say, 'A guy sits down to an American breakfast,', but what's this Bosnian artist going to draw? Maybe a boar's head and a wheel of cheese? He doesn't know what a waffle looks like! So we went to Denny's chain restaurant and took photos of our food.

Black Pearl is a lot of things. I think it's a thriller, but it's also funny. Our story is about a lonely person and it's about a very strong person who knows herself and knows her abilities. Hopefully, it will help readers see what truly is heroic about people in everyday life. People who don't put on costumes. People who know who they are and know that they should be helping other people. People who do it in practice without praise. Schoolteachers do it every day of their lives for very little money.

You've also become quite popular as the voice of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. Anything else new on the animation front?

Well, Wing Commander has been adapted as 13 half-hour animated shows, and, as many people are well aware, I've been an animation buff myself for years. At the time I thought, 'Ah, I know this character, I can do him in my sleep.' No problem. All I have to do is show up - with animated scripts I could just go in and read them. You don't even have to memorize your dialogue. You just have to know the story.

Having accepted the deal and all but signed the contract, it would be very awkward to pull out if I changed my mind, but then I realised that they're talking about this taking place 20 years earlier.

They said, 'Give me a young Mark Hamill', so we've got to get my character Christopher Blair at 22. Thankfully, with animation, you can get away with it!

It's this knack I have for picking franchises that go backwards instead of forwards!

Mark Hamill, thank you very much.

SFX Magazine, 1995