By: Dominic Jones
Matt Wood, voice of General Grievous in Episode III and
The Clone Wars, and Supervising Sound Editor on Episodes I, II, III, and VII, was at
Toronto Comic Con this past weekend and took part in a Q&A hosted by
InnerSPACE's Morgan Hoffman. During the Q&A he discussed many
Star Wars projects, past, present, future, and cancelled. I was in attendance for the event, and here are some of the highlights!
The biggest tidbit Matt dropped at the event was that he is working on the upcoming animated series Star Wars Rebels. He said,
"I'm doing some work on Rebels. I'm looking to kind of godfather some younger folks to get on there and give some opportunity back. I think that show's fantastic, but I'm probably going to have my hands full with Episode VII when that comes down the pipe. But I want to make sure (Executive Producer Dave Filoni) is happy and that we can re-capture some of that magic we had on Clone Wars."
He also discussed the now postponed (cancelled) series Detours saying,
"I don't know what will happen with Detours, but I worked on all those episodes. We did those during Clone Wars...We did those right around the time of the Disney deal. I don't know what will happen with them. It was fun working with Seth (Green) and Matt (Senreich) from Robot Chicken...As soon as the word came out that we were going to do Episode VII, which was very surprising to everyone, most/all of the resources of the company have gone towards that."
When asked about how he found out about Episode VII he described the situation as,
"I remember I got called into a meeting and it was like, 'Just hypothetically, could you put a budget together if we were to do Star Wars film?' 'Why? We're done, I talked to George directly and he said we're done.' 'Well just hypothetically.' So I kind of took what we were doing on Star Trek Into Darkness and used that as a guide, and not even knowing that they were going to get JJ (Abrams) do the film."
Matt also addressed his experience on The Clone Wars saying,
"We started out very child friendly and I think we did go a bit off the rails there into our darkness. The end of season 5, in particular, I hope I'm not spoiling it for anybody who hasn't seen it, I just thought that the way Ahsoka left the order was so poignant and amazing, I'm even getting a little emotional even thinking about it! It was so good the way that was done with the music and we all felt, I think at that moment, as a crew that the show was really special. We did it to such high technical standards too, George just wanted it to feel like mini movies! It was shot in the aspect ratio of films, the way it looked, we had a full orchestral score on those episodes, we had a full 5.1 soundtrack, and then just world class actors doing to voice roles for that, and everyone just loves Star Wars. And George put so much time and effort behind the show. It was funny that they put it on Saturday morning cartoons with everything else, it just seemed a little out of place. I'm glad it's on Netflix now so you can watch it now. We all really loved that show."
I want to thank Matt for coming out to Toronto Comic Con and discussing Star Wars with his fans! We can't wait to see what he and his team have in store for us with Rebels, Episode VII, and beyond!
