Star Wars: The Acolyte Cinematographer Explains Challenges of Filming Outer Space and Coruscant

Cinematographer Chris Teague’s latest project is Star Wars: The Acolyte, which is currently four episodes deep on Disney+. Teague worked on “Lost/Found,” “Revenge/Justice,” “Day,” and the upcoming fifth episode. ComicBook recently had the chance to speak with Teague about his time working on The Acolyte, which marked his first Star Wars project. Teague explained how he worked alongside the VFX team and how he went about filming lightsaber scenes. He also opened up about some of the show’s most difficult locations: space and Coruscant, the city-covered planet where much of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy took place. 

“That was honestly one of the more challenging environments I feel like, because what do you want to make it look like? Space,” Teague explained. “I looked at a lot of references. I looked at movies, I looked at real images from space, and we did a lot of testing in our lighting. And I initially thought I would go with something that was a bit of a harder light and it didn’t quite play the way we wanted it to.”

“And we realized, I mean, you need a lot of room to create a sense of space because space is infinite and you’re actually in reality working inside this box of a stage,” he continued. “So there’s a lot of trickery that goes into creating the right quality of light to make it feel like it’s coming from infinitely far away and make the audience not think too much about it. So yeah, it took a lot of testing, a lot of staring at the screen and squinting your eyes and being like, ‘Does that feel real? Do we believe that or what?’” 

Chris Teague Talks the Challenges of Coruscant:

For The Acolyte‘s director of photography, space wasn’t the only challenge he faced. While speaking to ComicBook, Teague explained why Coruscant was a difficult location to recreate. 

“I found it to be that one was challenging for me because again, I love the originals and I wanted Coruscant to have a little bit of texture to it,” Teague explained. “And typically when you see it, it’s just sort of perfectly shiny and pristine and clean. And obviously … it should be, it is that kind of place. But we also wanted to make sure it fit into our show.”

“So there was a lot of work and working with the art department just to figure out how to get the right amount of texture and tonality there so that everything felt like it was tactile.,” he added. “You could reach out and touch those sets, that they weren’t just all fabrication or a digital creation or something like that.”

The Acolyte‘s first four episodes are now streaming on Disney+. Stay tuned for more from our interview with Chris Teague.