Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive is a beautiful tome, celebrating the legacy of the closing chapter of the original trilogy. The book has been out since late April and it comes with a very strong recommendation that you pick it up if you want to learn more about the behind-the-scenes making, see a litany of beautiful concept art, and add to your collection mementos that you can only really find inside these pages.
Our Nate Manning recently had a chat with the three authors of the book, Kelly Knox, Clayton Sandell, and S. T. Bende. They discussed their connection to the film, how the book came to be, their favorite discoveries throughout the process, and more. The following is an abridged version. If you want the full chaotic experience, it will be linked after this written portion.
Q: What significance does Return of the Jedi have for you?
Clayton Sandell: Being an original trilogy fan from age four, the anticipation for this movie was huge when I was a little kid. I thought when Return of the Jedi was out of the theaters that was pretty much all the Star Wars we were ever going to see. Little did we know we were going to be drinking from the Star Wars fire hose in the 2020s. For me, it just kind of represented the end of this epic trilogy, and I think, as you’ll see in the book, it sort of also represents this sort of fountain of source material, designs, ideas, and concepts that not only debuted in Jedi but have just continued to be a thing in pretty much every Star Wars project that has come out.
Kelly Knox: You mentioned it was a massive book, and it’s actually textbook-sized, which was a really nice surprise when we all got our hands on it for the first time. One thing that sets this book apart I think is that it’s not just behind the scenes, it’s the connections like Clayton was saying that it makes to the wider Star Wars galaxy. I was excited to work on it because I am also an original trilogy kid. My first memory is seeing Return of the Jedi in theaters, and I recently checked with my dad that, and yes I do actually remember it’s not something that I made up. Because I was six, I believe, at the time. So yeah, it was a real treat to work on this, as with such a fond memory of seeing the movie with him.
S. T. Bende: I have confessed this before, but I am a convert, so I didn’t come to Star Wars until I was an adult and I saw all six, at the time, films in one weekend. I think I saw them in release order and I loved it. I love the Ewoks, I love the speeder bikes, I loved everything about it, but my appreciation has really grown over the years as I’ve gone to more events, being presented with a lot of the creators that have made things and explained ‘Well, this is how we did the models, and this is how we did the costumes’, and obviously getting to work on this book was really exciting because I love Kelly and I love Clayton and I just got to really dive into research and learning so many really cool things about such an epic film.
Sandell: And it is textbook size but it’s like the best kind of homework, right?
Q:Looking through your guys’ previous work and all that you have done, Clayton with Star Wars Timelines and all kinds of other stuff. Kelly, you’ve done some character encyclopedias for Marvel and some other stuff. S.T., your work as well, what draws you to these types of off-the-cuff encyclopedic type of books?
Knox: I got my start in writing as a technical writer which was straight out of college. I was writing about very boring things like databases and help manuals, so as time went on, I got to write about more fun things through other jobs, and then as freelancing. I think the simplest answer is anytime I do get the opportunity to work on a book like this, I jump at the chance as long as it’s not a database or something, I am pretty much all in.
Bende: I really love research. That’s one of my favorite parts of any project. I do a lot of fiction, but even in the fictional worlds, I will research and research, and then tease stories out of as much truth as I can, and then try to insert those little Easter eggs. That makes it fun for me and hopefully fun for the readers too. This was really neat because it was a ton of research, but then that was it. I mean there was obviously putting the words in afterwards, but it was doing the research and then pulling out what we thought were the most interesting facts and then getting to share them and tell a story. Really just kind of stopping at that stage instead of making something up in addition to it. We could just be like ‘No, these are all the really amazing things we learned and how cool are they!’ So that was a really fun part of getting to do this with the team.
Sandell: Timelines was fun. Timelines was interesting in that it was a fiction/non-fiction book if that makes any sense, because we were taking all in-universe stuff and putting it together, which is great and I loved it. It was a lot of work, but I had a lot of fun doing it too. This book was right in my wheelhouse because it was sort of my love of Star Wars: behind-the-scenes stuff. From a young age, I read every behind-the-scenes book they ever put out, and the magazines, and the features, and all of that. We were able to kind of combine that with all of the connections stuff and then just a look at the costumes, and the artwork, and all of the stuff, so it’s kind of this neat hybrid of all those things.
Q: How exactly do you go about divvying up the work for a book like this?
Bende: We each had sections of this book to write. Then within each section, we had kind of headers or topic points. Then we were given access to this drive that had PDFs of every research material we could ever need. So, we had books, we had [Star Wars: Insider] articles, we had interviews… It was just this extremely thorough drive our editors had put together for us.
I shouldn’t speak for Kelly and Clayton, but what I do is I will plug them all into a Word doc, my section, my headers, and then I will parse through each piece of research material and then plug in any relevant facts that I see to each section. At the end of it all, I have this like 40 pages of a single-spaced Word document and just would pull, ‘Okay, these are the top three or four facts or quotes or whatever.’ It was that we were putting into each section that I thought would be the most interesting to readers, and then obviously creating some alternates in case those weren’t the most interesting to the editor, and then we would just kind of go from there.
Sandell: I just used AI for the whole thing! No, I am kidding…
Knox: Lucky for us, a lot of the images and sections were already determined by the time we were brought on board, otherwise I think all three of us would have gotten lost just looking at the pictures for months. Everything’s so pretty.
Q: I suppose it had to be kind of challenging to repurpose [old interviews, documentaries, news articles, etc.] into this book. Can you talk to that at all?
Sandell: It is and it isn’t. Like it’s cool in that if you’re talking about, say, the folding wing shuttle, which I just had a blast writing about. Once you start pulling from all these different sources, you end up with a lot of material, and a lot of times, I found myself having to chop things out versus put things in.
You get a bunch of things going, and it’s kind of fun to fit them all together and see what you can include. If you looked at the footnotes for all the sources that we used, there’s hundreds and hundreds of them, so we’ve done the hard work for you. We have gone through all of these hundreds of things and combined them into one thing. Hopefully people, that haven’t read a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff or don’t know a lot about the concept art, things like that… hopefully they will get something new out of this.
Knox: Yeah, have you ever watched The Mandalorian or something with a person who’s pointed at the screen and gone like very excited because they know that guy or they’ve seen that before? This is that, but in book form. Even things from the sequels and anything that you may have recognized later through the Star Wars stories that you saw some time in Return of the Jedi without even knowing that you saw it, that kind of Easter eggs and things like that are all found in this book.
Bende: And you kind of get a hint for all the things that we individually love too. Because we can all find the ties to our favorite Star Wars films or series, or animated features, or whatever they are. And we for sure make reference where we can to things that we have loved. There’s definitely a Rebels shout-out in some connections that I wrote. I can’t remember where, but it’s there.
Q: As you were writing the book, was there anything that surprised you as you were going through? Because I’ve seen a lot, but when I see the concept of Jabba the Hutt and I see images of Azmorigan from Rebels, who’s obviously straight inspired by that… Was there anything like that that surprised you as you were going through?
Bende: I was actually surprised at the number of speeder bike references I had to choose from. You see them all the time but you don’t realize how many times you actually see them until you have to kind of pick two or three to reference and then you’re just stuck with well which two do I like the best. So for sure Rebels made that cut for me, but that one actually shows up a lot which was kind of fun to see.
Sandell: Yeah, same with the folding wing shuttles. You can’t name an animated series or a movie, or a live-action show that doesn’t have something where the wings fold. And it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s direct lineage back to Return of the Jedi!’ I mean, that’s where it all came from. I think out of all the original trilogy movies, probably more sort of designs like that and ideas like that have been adopted from Jedi than probably any of the others.
Knox: My favorite one was more behind the scenes, and that was the story of Nien Nunb. First, how he came into being how he got his name, that’s all in there. But the most interesting thing that surprised me was that his voice that we all know, with that really great laugh, actually came from an exchange student who was interning with Ben Burtt. He was from Kenya, he spoke a Kenyan dialect. He actually spoke it in the movie as Nien Nunb. They translated the lines, and then The Force Awakens came around. They wanted to get back in touch with him to do Nien Nunb again, because it was important to J.J. Abrams, and they had no idea how to find him. They didn’t know where he had gone back to, and so there was this whole search to find him, and it came down to the wire, and they actually did find his voice to get him to come back as Nien Nunb, and I had no idea on any of that until I started working on this book and I think that was my favorite surprise that came out of it.
Q: How important was it to link this book to the rest of the saga?
Bende: I think that’s what sets it apart from a behind-the-scenes book. We all have seen, J.W. Rinzler’s amazing The Making of Return of the Jedi, but we use what he discussed from concept art and story meetings and we expand on that, and how through the years it’s grown in the Star Wars galaxy.
Sandell: Yeah, and characters too. I had to write about Mon Mothma, which was great, but I was talking to somebody about her, and we were discussing how the impact of that character has carried on. I was curious to see how long her monologue was in the film, because it’s such an important moment. She lays out the stakes and what the rebels are up against. We learn about Bothans and she gives a speech. I thought it was like two or three minutes this scene, but if you go back, it’s like 38 seconds that she actually speaks.
She’s in the scene which lasts longer, but her entire monologue is only 38 seconds, and I just thought that was so cool that that character had such relatively little screen time, but made such an impression and was just now part of this Jedi legacy where that character you can now find in animated series, movies, a central figure in Andor... I think that’s one of the things that again kind of makes Jedi unique in the stratum of Star Wars stories for being something that producers, directors and writers have all continued to draw from over the years right up until this day. One of the other cool connections in here, which blew me away, was the Imperial station from The Bad Batch. That’s right from Ralph McQuarrie concept art, when they were talking about Jedi having two Death Stars. I just thought that was awesome.
Bende: For me, what makes Star Wars so special is the concept of found family and how beautifully they have woven all of these different found families into a singular tapestry of a found family that is fighting for the Rebel cause over the years and its iterations. This book is really neat because it shows you all the different ways even the ships, the planets, all the ways that everything comes together to create that family. And I just think that makes it really fun.
Q: What was your favorite part of working on this book? What’s one thing you’ll look back on through this experience?
Sandell: Working with S.T. and Kelly!
Bende: Yes, I love Clayton and Kelly. They are kind and smart and the exact kind of fan, writer, creative, and human being that you want to interact with professionally and as friends. I am just really glad that we connected.
Knox: Me too. Also, I really like that the old cliché of you’ll never watch the movie the same way again. I feel like that totally applies both as a writer and as a reader of this book. You learn so much that there’s probably something new you will discover the next time you watch Return of the Jedi.
Sandell: Yeah, I really dug writing about the models and even stuff like I never would have picked up on as a kid. There’s a section in there… I had to write about Luke’s costume and as a kid I never would have considered that Luke would have ever gone to the dark side, but George Lucas wanted the costume that way to suggest that Luke might turn to the dark side. I did not know that.
Bende: I learned so much doing this. There’s a section I thought the picture had made it, and I kept flipping through trying to find the picture, but it didn’t. It talks about the shield generator and the bunker and those little sparking things, they were red Dixie cups. It was not what you thought it was. It was very simple, you can find it anywhere.
Knox: And again, the next time you watch Return of the Jedi and you see those in the background, you’re going to be like…
Bende: Oh, those are cups!
Q: Star Wars has put out these books for as long as any of us can remember, there will be more of these. When Lucasfilm green lights the next visual archive with your name attached to it, which film or TV show would you want it to be?
Knox: As we are in the middle of the 25th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, I adore that movie, it’s in my top three. Recently I got to rewatch the making of documentary, because I was putting together some facts for StarWars.com and I just think there’s so many interesting stories there to be told, not just the making of, but also how those connections go out. There’s so much there, that I think would be fun to explore.
Bende: I am going to vote for Empire. I am a big fan of Hoth, I have been to Hoth, I love to ski. I am the uninvited, unofficial captain of the Hoth ski team and I would just love to explore as much as I could and learn everything that I got to learn about what I wrote on in here about that planet in particular.
Sandell: I totally agree. Rinzler did a great job on the Empire book as well. In fact, I think that was the first one I ever read. It’s my favorite movie, and when we were in London last year for Celebration, I broke off one day and took the train up to Elstree Studios. I would love to dig into the archives and try and find some images that maybe haven’t been seen before, because I know there are some. But it’s funny because that Elstree nowadays, half of it was sold off, and so where the Star Wars stage was, where the Hoth base was built, that stage is now a supermarket and a parking lot, sadly. So I would love to dive into that. There’s so much variation in the visuals. You have Hoth, Dagobah, Cloud City, really neat different places. As a visual archive, even though a lot’s been written about it, I think you could still do it justice.
For more works from the trio, check out Star Wars: Dad Jokes from Knox. We never featured it here on the site, but we had fun with it on social media. You can’t go wrong picking it up this Father’s Day. She will also be involved in this fall’s Star Wars encyclopedia. Bende has a few Disney/Marvel “Mini” books and cookbooks coming this fall as well. Her other Star Wars works can be found here. Sandell can be followed across socials and pick up Star Wars Timelines if you haven’t already.
If you’re interested in the whole conversation, you can find that below:
Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive is available now. Thank you to the authors for taking the time to chat with us!
Val Trichkov (Viral Hide)
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Founder of SWNN, MNN and The Cantina forums.
Born on April 24, 1980.
Nate Manning
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Nate uses his love for Star Wars and movies in general as a way to cope with the pain of being a Minnesota sports fan. When he's not at the theater, you can usually find Nate reading a comic, listening to an audiobook, or playing a Mario video game for the 1,000th time.
