‘The Mandalorian and Grogu’: Jon Favreau on Pulling Off the Oner During the AT-AT Fight Sequence

Director Jon Favreau knew there was a responsibility in being the director who would bring “Star Wars” back to movie theaters after seven years.

Favreau told Variety, “People care a lot about ‘Star Wars’. ‘Star Wars’ has been around for 49 years; it’s about to be the 50th anniversary, and it’s been around because people care, and people feel emotionally connected to it.”

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“Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” takes place after the events of both “The Mandalorian” season 3 and “Ahsoka” season 1. The Mandalorian, known as Din Djarin (voiced by Pedro Pascal, with much of the physical performance done by Lateef Crowder and Brendan Wayne), and his sidekick Grogu are now working as bounty hunters for the fledgling New Republic.

Favreau, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dave Filioni, doesn’t waste any time before dropping audiences right in the action. The film opens with Din Djarin and Grogu on an AT-RT (All Terrain Recon Transport) as they mount an attack on another of The Mandalorian’s unnamed Imperial Warlords. When the villain takes refuge inside the AT-AT, a chase ensues with Din Jarin boarding the AT-AT and attempting to capture said villain.

It was also one of the biggest sequences to pull off.

Favreau explains he wanted to give Lateef Crowder a chance to shine. Crowder, an expert in martial arts and the Brazilian martial art capoeira, has been working with Favreau and on “The Mandalorian” since the beginning. Favreau says he sat down with Crowder and said “’Let’s design something that takes full advantage of your talents and abilities. Let’s choreograph something as a oner and let the camera do the work.’”

Shooting a feature film gave Favreau the time needed to fully build out the sequence. His creative team also built out “the back of the inside of a walker that moves and swings as though it’s inside something that’s lumbering along.” They even built a head that moves and swings, so that when Din Djarin gets to the neck, you see the perspective shift. Favreau says, “On every level, we leaned into something that was more difficult than what we could do, but it does get thrown away like a John Wick action sequence in the middle of it.”

The sequence allowed everyone to shine. “The artists who designed what the inside of an AT-AT looks like for the first time in live action. We’d seen it in video games and other things. The new Snow Trooper outfits; that’s a mixture of what you see underneath the veil, which you never saw before,” Favreau says, “All these weapons, and then the choreography of all these stunt performers coming together and building it all into a shot, and of course, Ludwig Göransson’s music, which is this crazy percussive. It gets your heart going, so it just allowed everybody who’s been with us from the beginning to notch it up a level.”

Favreau points out that the scene that appears as one continuous shot was very real and not stitched together through the magic of editing. With the action so immersive, the fact that the sequence is a oner was not entirely noticeable, which is exactly what he intended: ”You shouldn’t notice it, but you feel it.”

If that fight sequence proved to be a challenge, casting legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese and getting him to make a cameo in the film was a “painless process” according to Favreau.

In the film, Scorsese voices a four-armed, fur-covered food truck vendor. Favreau, who had also played an Ardennian cook, Rio Durant, in “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” joked “They share the same last name, so maybe they’re related.”

Marvel casting director Sarah Finn was on board to cast “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” and the two brainstormed names. Werner Herzog was one idea, and another was Scorsese.

Favreau had doubts. “Why would he even consider this?”

Enter Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who offered to give Scorsese a call. Favreau says, “She called him, and she said, ‘Yeah.’ That was it.”

Looking back on the interaction, Favreau says getting Scorsese to record his lines was a “dream come true.” Scorsese would improvise his bits. He says, “To be able to sit there with one of my idols and work a scene out and have him get laughs…”

Favreau says the animators leaned into the sequences and “just leaned into it. It’s some of my favorite animation in the movie.”

He hopes audiences come along for the ride, whether it’s a first-time watch or if someone is already a fan of the franchise. “I think about Space Mountain when you get off, and the tears are streaming back towards your ear. It doesn’t matter if it’s the first time you’ve been on it, and if you’ve been on it a lot, you want to go on it, but you want to bring somebody who’s never been on it. That’s what ‘Star Wars’ felt like to me when I was watching it when I was young, and there’s something fun about sharing things with others and turning them onto something you think they might be into.”

He continues, “’Star Wars’ is a live experience, and hopefully we capture that.”

Filming for Imax meant there were fewer guardrails in place. “We could say, what are things that we never got to do? And also, what does this Imax aspect ratio afford us?”

He had tinkered with aspect ratio in season 2 of “The Mandalorian: Chapter 9: The Marshal.” leaned into the 4:3 aspect ratio of Imax for those sequences with the Krayt Dragon.

With Imax on board as early partners for the film, Favreau says he looked at how Christopher Nolan and Ryan Coogler had used the format. He says, “If I’m going to go to the movie theater, it’s going to be because it’s going to be a unique experience where I feel the energy of the people around me, and I’m seeing an image, and could make an extremely immersive experience.” He continues, “If it’s framed properly, as Chris and Ryan do, your image is at the center, and your peripheral vision is taken up by what’s happening above and to the sides.”

To make sure he was using the format to its full advantage, Favreau took tremendous care in curating the onscreen image. “We built some software for the Apple Vision Pro, whereby which we could look at the image we were filming looks like in an Imax theater and look at it as we’re making framing decisions.” He goes on to say, “I don’t think this is something people have to understand going in. They should just go in saying, ‘I want to watch a ‘Star Wars’ movie.’ They should be able to follow the action.”