Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Visual Effects Artist Addresses Cut Palpatine Scenes

With Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker having been in theaters for a few weeks now more and more details about the film and how it was made have come out offering fans a more detailed look at how the conclusion of the Skywalker Saga came together. Among those details has been information about scenes that didn’t make it to the theatrical version, including the suggestion that there may have been more scenes featuring Emperor Palpatine. As it turns out, though, that may not have been the case.

Creature and special make-up effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan explained to Yahoo Entertainment that for the most part, the Palpatine fans see in The Rise of Skywalker is what you get. Any additional material was, largely, just variations of the same scenes.

“I don’t think there’s anything you haven’t really seen,” Scanlan said. “J.J. would always shoot variations on scenes — that’s the natural moviemaking process. But to my knowledge there’s no alternative version [of Palpatine’s story]. We change camera angles, we change lighting, maybe there’s a dialogue variation. It’s just naturally what we do.”

He did go on to explain that Palpatine actor Ian McDiarmid was open to anything, however.

“He was totally game for everything,” Scanlan said. “We did some digital augmentation for some shots, but for the most part we hung onto his performance. He’s fantastic.”

Scanlan’s assertion that there wasn’t much different in terms of Palpatine’s story somewhat counters that of the film’s editor, Maryann Brandon. Brandon previously said that some of the Palpatine story was changed significantly.

“It was kind of a delicate balance and went back and forth a lot about how much we wanted to reveal,” Brandon said earlier this year. “Some scenes changed quite a bit, the way that we wanted to present it to the audience. In the end, we ended up showing a lot less of it than we started with.”

With the film having to conclude the 40-year journey of the narrative, there were a number of threads it had to weave together that prevented the finished project from detailing this journey.

“There was so much information in the film and so many characters that we wanted to have an audience concentrate on,” Brandon explained. “I think we felt we didn’t want to clutter the film up with things you didn’t need to know.”

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is in theaters now.

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