Jamison Jones interview | Rookie One | Rebel Assault II | Star Wars

Jamison Jones

Rookie One (Rebel Assault II)

Interview: September 2010

---

How did you get started in the movie business?

I’ve been a professional actor for almost 20 years. I started my career during one of my summers in college when I was cast in a theater production that took me to the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. We performed two new plays; Tennessee in the summer, about the life and times of Tennessee Williams and Purple Hearts, based on true events about three soldiers trapped in a sunken battle ship in Pearl Harbor.
After that summer I moved to San Francisco to study acting at The American Conservatory Theater and on my graduation I was cast in my first movie with Lucasfilm called Radioland Murders. So in a sense George Lucas gave me my start.

Your first encounter with Lucasfilm was the movie Radioland Murders.
A year after Radioland Murders you got cast as Rookie One, the main character of Rebel Assault II; a video game that had real live footage included. How did you get this part?

The Rebel Assault job came as a pleasant surprise. I was working on Angels in America at ACT at the time and got a call from my agent for this LucasArts video game. When I went to the audition, they were packed with people and I had another appointment across town. I waited as long as I could, but after an hour I told the casting assistant that I was leaving for another appointment, not really knowing what I was passing up. The next day I got a call-back to come and meet the director and I hadn’t even auditioned. Hal Barwood was the director and we hit it off right away. It wasn’t really much of an audition, more of a creative meeting where he told me all about the project and the concept about Tatooine and the Rebellion. I walked out of that meeting and drove home where a message was waiting from my agent about the project. They had offered me the part and we would start right away.
The scenes that were shot for Rebel Assault II were among the first Star Wars scenes shot since Return of the Jedi.
Can you share some of your memories regarding the shooting these scenes?

The environment on the set was great and working with Hal was a collaborative experience. This was also my first blue screen shoot and I didn’t know what to expect. We used all of the original costumes from Return of the Jedi which for me was the coolest thing in my life at that point. You see I had grown up in Geman and we didn’t have an English speaking movie theater in our neighborhood. We happened to be in the Netherlands when Star Wars came out in Europe and we watched it on an enormous 180 degree wrap around screen and lucky for us it was in English with Dutch subtitles. I was mesmerized. My brothers and I loved the movie so much that my parents drove us to the Frankfurt airport 13 times to see the movie again and again. So, to be working with these original movie pieces was a thrill.

Did any strange, weird or remarkable things happen during the making of Rebel Assault II?

When I saw the actor playing Darth Vader enter in his full regalia, I was instantly thrust back to my childhood and have to admit that I was struck with a little bit of momentary panic. The shoot itself was pretty smooth other than a major move for me in the middle of the process. My wife and I had already made plans to move back to Los Angeles and I had to fly back up to San Francisco to finish the work. The hardest part of the shoot was reacting to the things that would be added later as we shot on an empty blue set that would be filled by computer generated environments later. The funniest moment for me on the set is actually my blooper Easter egg on the game itself. Vince, the creator of the game was standing in for Admiral…Ackbar, the ”fishy guy” and was standing on a ladder doing the voice. I had been off the set at a fitting and came back to a room full of cadets and extras that were rehearsing the scene and prepping for my arrival. When I got there we started shooting and the voice that Vince was using to enact the moment was hysterical, combined the twisted expression on his face required to emulate the characters voice was killing me. I hadn’t been in the room and didn’t know what he was doing and I couldn’t help myself and busted up laughing. Everyone else was so serious that it made it even worse.
In which way(s) was the making of Rebel Assault II different than shooting a motion picture?

Well for starters, I became a puppet you can manipulate in the game by shooting me in 24 different positions that would later allow the user to actually move the image of Rookie One as they played the game. The blue screen work like I said earlier had its own challenges. I recall one scene where I, as the character of Rookie One, knocked out a storm trooper and put on his suit to avoid detection in the enemies’ base. Let me tell you, those things are almost impossible to move in and the helmet is almost impossible to see out of. In the scene I had to run through the blue sound stage pivoting around blue marks on the blue floor that would later become boxes and debris and other set pieces, run up a flight of blue stairs and crouch behind a blue nothing, that would later become some sort of mechanical unit I was hiding behind. It was crazy trying to make all that happen and look like I knew what I was doing and where I was going.

I’m sure you played the game when it was released. What did you think of the final result and did you enjoy playing as ‘yourself’?

Well, I’m a little embarrassed to admit, but I couldn’t play the game very well. I kept getting stuck trying to get the Millennium Falcon out of the darn cave, so I had to have Vince, the game creator play the game and output it to a video tape so I could see the game and the videos in their entirety. After I saw all that I loved it. It’s always hard for me as an actor watching myself, but all of that aside I thought the team did a great job.
Since you were a Star Wars fan before you got cast, it must have been a dream coming true I guess.

Well, as I said earlier in the interview, I lived in Germany when the first one came out and overcame great obstacles to see that movie as many times as possible. One of the great moments of my young career was working on that game and all those original artifacts, only to be trumped by a trip to Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch for a lunch with the director a year after the game came out. What an amazing facility and it couldn’t be set in a more beautiful location. I also wrote a personal letter to George Lucas asking for an opportunity to work in the new movies that where casting at the time, but it wasn’t in the cards for me.

You currently run Jones Films; a Film Development and Production company based in Los Angeles and New York.
Can you tell something about your current projects and the things you do at Jones Films?

Among other things, we are currently in development on a 1920’s prohibition gangster movie set in Detroit about the notorious Purple Gang. It’s an amazing story and we’ve developed a great script.

At Jones Films you also train actors. What is, according to you, the one thing a beginning actor should always keep in mind?

We have a class on Monday nights in Hollywood that’s all about the art and business of acting. I think actors have to remember that this is a business and that you have to be smart about your career and the choices you make. Having the right representation is important as well. Not the biggest agent, but the one that will push you in the right doors. This business is a bit of a game of chance but I do believe that talent and tenacity will rise to the top and if you’re seen by the right people (directors, casting and producers) that you will have a career. Maybe not Brad Pitts’ career, but one that’s still worth having none the less.

What do you regard as your biggest achievement as an actor? And what do you regard as the highlight of your career so far?

I think some of my best work as an actor has been on the stage. I’ve done a great deal of work in television, most recently Burn Notice; what a blast working with Bruce Campbell, and one of my favorite films was with Christian Slater and William H. Macy; a movie from a few years back called He Was A Quiet Man in which I play the antagonist to Christian’s introverted office drone who goes postal. I believe much of my best work in film is yet to come and I look forward to the number of opportunities that are currently on the horizon.

Is there anything you want to say to the readers? Here is your chance!

Thank you seems the most appropriate thing to say. It’s funny that a video game could have such an impact on people, but it has and a great many people have approached me and raved about what a great game Rebel Assault II was and how they were obsessed with it in their young lives. The great moments in life are fleeting an ephemeral and as much as we want to hold on to the great moments of the past, I think the most important thing to do is to move forward. I hope I have the opportunity in my future to work with the Lucas company again; it was a great experience and a highlight. Thank you to all the fans that bought and loved the game and made it a piece worth remembering.

Hal Barwood interview | LucasArts | Star Wars

Hal Barwood

LucasArts

Interview: August 2010

---

How did you get started in the movie business?

My father ran the local movie theater in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I grew up. I was exposed to every kind of movie ever made from an early age, and I guess the experience festered in my brain. Sometime in high school I saw Bergman’s Seventh Seal, and its weirdness made me realize that movies were made by individuals with ideas and not manufactured like Ford automobiles.
At about the same time I read an issue of National Geographic that was all about the construction of Disneyland. I thought any place that embraced airy fantasies so enthusiastically was my kind of society, but I didn’t know how I was going to get there and join up. During my college years, I began making short animated movies in 8mm. Then I heard about USC’s famous film school, applied, and won a fellowship. That was my ticket west. So I married my childhood sweetheart, Barbara Ward, and we migrated to California, me to study movie-making, she to teach.

You worked on THX1138, the famous George Lucas movie. You knew George from USC. How was he in those days? Did you expect he would become as big as he is now and your paths would cross again (at LucasArts) 25 years later?

George was always George. We all thought he was a tremendous talent from the very beginning, a precocious master of movie material. All of us in that USC cohort admired his imaginative work and his organizational skills. I didn’t imagine the magnitude of his career, but I did think he would be a big success.
Our paths never really uncrossed. The reason I wound up at LucasArts was because, through my friendship with George, I got to know a number of the early employees of what was then called Lucasfilm Games.

In the late 70’s you had a small part in the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. How did you get this part?

Well, Matthew Robbins and I were screenwriting partners. We wrote Steve’s first feature, The Sugarland Express, and he kept us abreast of the developments on Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After a couple of screenplay drafts by other writers that didn’t ring any bells, Steve himself did a draft and showed it to us. We liked it, but thought it needed a lot of help. Steve liked our suggestions, so we wound up doing a lot of re-writing. Instead of a credit we got a percentage and appearances in the film.

In the early 80’s you produced and wrote the great movie Dragonslayer. Can you share some of your experiences regarding that movie?

Thanks for the kind remarks. Matthew and I were looking for an exotic concept that might grab attention, but not attempt to compete with Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Alien. We thought we knew how to do a fantasy by grounding it in historical iron-age reality. We were right about that, but wrong about grabbing attention. It wasn’t a commercial success — but I still love it.

If I’m correct you joined LucasArts in the early 90’s. Why did you make this change from movies to games? And where and when did you get an interest in games?

It was in the middle of Dragonslayer when I realized I wanted to pursue another childhood passion — games. We were preparing one of the most difficult sequences, the burning of Valerian’s village, and it was a logistical nightmare for me, the producer. One of our actors didn’t read his call sheet and was off in Ireland. We were building very expensive thatched huts on a farm in suburban London that had to burn without setting fire to the local countryside. We had 200 extras dressed in burlap we had to check for wrist watches and sneakers. We had a choreographer teaching them how to dance an iron-age gavotte. We had to reveal Valerian’s gender. We had to light the whole thing with moonlight, which meant tall towers with cable stays and 10K arc lights. When all the goods and services were delivered and the cameras started rolling, I found I had no desire to watch my partner Matthew direct the action. It should have been among the most exciting moments of my life, but a few months earlier I had purchased an HP 41C calculator, the first little gadget that could do alphanumeric displays, and I was happier sitting in my trailer teaching that thing to play a Dragonslayer version of Hunt the Wumpus than to be on the set. I knew right then I was in the wrong business, but it took me 10 years, another movie, several more screenplays, and a couple of ambitious Apple 2 projects to make the switch professionally.

One of the first games you worked on was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. You even wrote the story for this game. A lot of fans (including me) think that story is the best Indy-story outside the movies. How did you come up with the story?

As part of The Last Crusade project, George’s group built an adventure game based on the movie. The guys involved, David Fox, Ron Gilbert, and Noah Falstein, didn’t want to do another one, but they wanted a follow-up. I had gotten to know them through George, and they decided that I knew what I was doing, so they brought me on board. The group had been handed a script for the purpose. It had been rejected as a fourth installment of the Jones franchise, but management, which didn’t know any better, thought it would be good enough for a game. It was rejected for a reason, though, and I thought it was hopeless. Noah agreed, so we marched down to George’s wonderful research library and started thumbing through Dark Mysteries of the Past -type coffee table books. We opened one of them up to an illustration of Atlantis arranged in three concentric rings, and we both thought, wow, this looks like a game.
That’s not enough for a story, however. Atlantis, unlike the Ark of the Covenant, never had a historical basis. But I knew that Plato was the origin of the myth — at least in written form — and we decided to fasten on Plato’s reality to give the thing legitimacy. Orichalcum, the mysterious metal he wrote about, seemed like an ideal McGuffin to lure the Nazis if we could pretend that it harbored atomic power. And then we needed a companion who was connected up with the whole problem, so I cooked up Sophia Hapgood as a fellow archeologist. She was kind of a shadow version of Indy — sharp, capable, fascinated by antiquities, but she jumped the ethical tracks after finding a supernatural amulet in Iceland.
Noah, more sensitive to the delicate sensibilities of adventure game players than I was, thought we should cater to varying tastes by instituting three paths through the game emphasizing either wits, fists, or team play. He then went off on another project, and I spent long agonizing months making that idea work. Whew, I’m still tired.

After Fate of Atlantis came another popular game. You directed the live action cut scenes of Star Wars: Rebel Assault II. How was that, directing scenes that come as close as possible to directing a Star Wars movie?

That was the era — don’t blink, it was brief — of Multimedia. Remember? Anyway, live action video was briefly in flower, and I was the only one at LucasArts who had ever directed a movie. So I got recruited by Vince Lee, the project leader. It was great fun, very intense, because we had almost no budget, and we had to work very fast. We also had to solve a lot of production problems: how to integrate 3D models, how to capture the video material, how to do it all against blue screen. Digital movie-making years before it became the current practice.

What are your best memories regarding working on Rebel Assault II?

The speed. I think we were in production for five days. Most game development takes years. Fate of Atlantis took two years; my last game at LucasArts, Red Rock took almost four. So blasting through a project like Rebel Assault II was exhilarating. Oh yeah, our CEO quit in the middle, I remember that too.

In 1997 you created the game Yoda Stories; a desktop adventure game. (I must admit: I played this game for hours….I really loved it) It was the Star Wars version of the 1996 Indiana Jones desktop adventures game. Where did you get your inspiration for the Yoda game and the short stories?

Both of these Desktop Adventures were casual games before such things had a label. I love storytelling in games, and I wanted to build games with broad appeal. I thought the key was to minimize players’ time commitment, and provide lasting value with replayability. Convincing management to make these things, however, was an agonizing process, because no one had yet plowed the field for me. The casual game business, now prominent, was undiscovered territory.
The Jones game was a little bit experimental — it was the first replayable story game ever, I think. Yoda Stories — another quick project that we turned out in about eight months — was a better idea. The story premise works perfectly, just like the second movie, with Luke learning his trade from the Jedi Master. We made big improvements to the structure of the puzzles, and we introduced a simple campaign mode. I’m very proud of both of these games, especially Yoda. Figuring out how to do algorithmically-driven puzzles and stories was a genuine accomplishment. I still play them now and then.

Then, in 1999 you did another Indy game: Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. Again, I’m curious regarding how this story was conceived.

I was at a dinner party with George one evening in the mid-nineties, and he casually mentioned he had an idea for a new Indy movie, to take place during the 1950s. I thought, hmm, what kind of exotic artifacts might my favorite archeologist be after in that time frame? So I guessed — Science fiction? Roswell? George froze, and even though he wouldn’t confirm it at the time, I knew I had guessed right. So years later, when I wanted to drag Indy into the 3D action-adventure game genre, and when another Indy movie looked out of the question, I proposed it. Word came back, “Don’t go there.” Uh-oh, the movie wasn’t dead after all, but unless I could squiggle up an alternative tale, my game was.
In desperation, I started making lists of all the ancient mysteries that Jones hadn’t already tackled. The Tower of Babel is a well-known idea with some basis in fact as a companion to the famous hanging gardens of Babylon. I thought we could make use of the Babylonian god Marduk as a supernatural force and bring the Russians along as well. Looking back, I’m glad my Roswell proposal was denied. I like my story much better than what turned out to be The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

What are you currently up to? Do you have new projects and is there any chance you’ll work on a new Star Wars or Indiana Jones game?

These days I’m a freelance consultant, designer, and writer. I do small projects for various clients. Most of the time, I’m not that busy, so I’m also working on some small one-man game projects in Flash. My Star Wars and Indiana Jones days, much as I enjoyed them, are over.