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Ian McDiarmid's performance in the PT (also the OT) is memorable and absolutely enthralling — Page 2

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Even if you compare shots of ROTS to shots from ROTJ, they actually don't look that much alike. They do, but they don't. In ROTJ it is very easy to believe that he is just a very old man, nearly a walking corpse. In ROTS it just looks like rubber and makeup, and he has more of a monster or alien look to him than the ancient withered look of ROTJ. He was already a fairly old man, 25 years turning him inot the walking corpse from ROTJ would have been reasonable. The way it goes down in ROTS just feels forced.

So yeah, I would have to say it was just another balls up by George.

"Every time Warb sighs, an angel falls into a vat of mapel syrup." - Gaffer Tape

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Originally posted by: vote_for_palpatine
I refuse to believe all the pulled faces and over-the-top antics were IMD's fault. McDiarmid will give a director exactly what he asks for - but George Lucas was his director. Therefore, Lord Silliness was the fault of Lucas, not IMD.


I tend to agree with you, though I've never seen McDiarmid in anything but a Star Wars movie. Awesome signature, BTW! HC,J: She - Great album.

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Originally posted by: HotRod

I always took it as he was losing the power to conceal himself and just let go. So the Face we saw - the Emporers face - was his true identity. He was just masking it from the others. I mean, are you going to trust the fucked up looking evil dude or the kind faced old man to run the senate? In the fight he did keep going on about not being able to hold it any longer...weak, I'm so weak an' all that jazz.
For me he didn't get burned...Luke never got burned...Anakin never got burned, so why did Palps? If he was burning so bad, why is his hair still ok. That's the first thing to go. Also, after Mace flew out of the window, Palps got up brushed himself off, put his cloak on and went about his business. Not bad for someone who just had their whole face burnt to a crisp by lightning.
Like I said, I think it was all a mask to hide his true appearance.

Or it could just be another balls up by George.

The idea that his hideous face was his true face all along which he kept hidden, I don't know through the force I guess, and was only revealed through a weak moment I like even less.

Did he get burnt? It's been a while since of seen it, but yeah what ever happened to him didn't happen to Luke that's for sure.

Originally posted by: C3PX Even if you compare shots of ROTS to shots from ROTJ, they actually don't look that much alike. They do, but they don't......


Yeah they don't look that alike but the intention was there for them to look the same. They just didn't get the make-up right.

The way he looks in ROTS and then 20 something years later in TESB is the same and then only a short time later in ROTJ he looks different from his established look. This mind you, is all from Lucas' perspective of 1-6, SE's and all. Your average viewer doesn't know that the Emperor's scene in TESB was filmed the same time as ROTS and edited into a 25 year old movie.

Thanks to chefelf for the pic

http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/8865/palpsoo6.jpg

edit: the last three are my fav's

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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I just watched episode III with its Rifftrax yesterday. Hilarious stuff. Good Lord, is it a terrible movie. No story WHATSOEVER! Just one big long series of arbitrarily connected events and a ridiculous clown show at the end. The only performance that was perhaps sillier than the Emperor's was Yoda's. I don't give a shit if it finally showed a bunch of stuff that Star Wars fan-boys had been waiting years to see. I'd rather not have seen any of it. Why couldn't George have shown us new characters and stories instead ruining the old? Oh well.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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So, why was the make-up job so bad? The original prosthetic pieces for the Emperor's make-up in ROTJ were up for sale on eBay a while back- maybe GL should have bought them!

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I guess the same reason the Yoda puppet in Phantom Menace looks as weird as it does--trying to "improve" the same design with new technology. The results are just weird-looking.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Originally posted by: Mielr
So, why was the make-up job so bad? The original prosthetic pieces for the Emperor's make-up in ROTJ were up for sale on eBay a while back- maybe GL should have bought them!


I think those were the ESB ones. That was my favourite Emperor of them all! It just looked so unnerving, so creepy, but not in the obvious "evil sorceror" way of ROTJ, and the voice--my god the voice, it was soothing and ageless and yet something was not right about it, it didn't fit the face (since it was, literally, re-dubbed). The original ESB Emperor scene gave me chills. Kershner really knew how to tap in to the sort of dark side of the unconscious because the film is just filled with these sort of dark, unsettling dream-like elements.
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Originally posted by: zombie84
The original ESB Emperor scene gave me chills. Kershner really knew how to tap in to the sort of dark side of the unconscious because the film is just filled with these sort of dark, unsettling dream-like elements.


I agree completely. That Emperor was soft spoken in a creepy way. The later version of the Emperor became the real Emperor, but I do believe the character would have been better retaining its ESB qualities.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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Originally posted by: zombie84
Originally posted by: Mielr
So, why was the make-up job so bad? The original prosthetic pieces for the Emperor's make-up in ROTJ were up for sale on eBay a while back- maybe GL should have bought them!

I think those were the ESB ones.
That's right, I remember now. My mistake.
Originally posted by: Gaffer Tape
I guess the same reason the Yoda puppet in Phantom Menace looks as weird as it does--trying to "improve" the same design with new technology. The results are just weird-looking.

Yeah, I kept thinking, are they trying to make Yoda look younger? There's about 30 years between TPM and ESB, right? In a life span of 900 years, 30 years is about the equivalent of several months (or a few years?) in a human life span, so theoretically Yoda should have looked EXACTLY the same in TPM as he did in ESB.

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Yeah, that's what I always thought too. And it's the same for Chewbacca. I kept hearing all these comments from George in ROTS documentaries about how Chewbacca is in the "junior league" on Kashyyk at that point. And that didn't make any sense to me, either, since it had always been stated that he was 200 years old, so 19 years really wouldn't seem like that much of an age gap to him, would it?

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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I don't believe there was a problem with the make-up, we saw him ONLY hooded in ROTJ, in ROTS we saw him unhooded and also in many various lighting conditions, in ROTJ he was pretty much in only ONE lighting condition. I assure you if that hood was flipped down in ROTJ and in several different lighting conditions people would be saying the same thing about the ROTJ make-up.

A rare unhooded Ian in ROTJ

http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/7900/458lukehanbenimpzj2.jpg
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Well with all due respect, the makeup is visually different first of all. In ROTJ his skin was sagging so as to make him look like a 200 year old sorceror; there were those weird deformations on his forehead but that was I think just to show that he was also somewhat deformed by his power. But more or less he fit into the traditional look of the "evil ancient sorceror." In ROTS its very different--similarities too, as one would expect considering its the same character and visual consistency is a given, but here he is given a look that is more monstrous, more horror-oriented, more resemblant of a Lon Chaney character or something. Also, perhaps because his appearance was now ambiguously linked to being deformed through an assault, the deformities were more exageratted.

Secondly, the aesthetic quality of the appliances are very different. In ROTJ it really just looked like flesh that had withered away, whereas in ROTS it has a plastic, sculpted look which highlights the depiction of the face not as an "ancient sorceror" whose appearance was due to the ravages of time and power but as a deliberate construction so as to appear monstrous.

I think the way McDiarmid played the role also contributed; in ROTJ he is quieter and somewhat labored, whereas in ROTS he is very expressive and energetic, especially in the end battle where the appearance really looks the most distant from ROTJ. The expressions of the artist under the makeup adds to the way the makeup looks. Thats why the scenes where he played things small and simple resembled the OT character more (ie some of the knighting scene, the scene where he reconstructs Darth Vader).
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Originally posted by: Sevb32
I don't believe there was a problem with the make-up, we saw him ONLY hooded in ROTJ, in ROTS we saw him unhooded and also in many various lighting conditions, in ROTJ he was pretty much in only ONE lighting condition. I assure you if that hood was flipped down in ROTJ and in several different lighting conditions people would be saying the same thing about the ROTJ make-up.


You are forgetting that we see him with the hood on in ROTS and he looks VERY different. You are also forgetting that we see him in the 2004 version of ESB and he looks very different. You are also not taking into account how very different the coloring and everything else about the two different masks. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with hoods or lighting. Not even in the slightest. That would be like saying the reason the Yoda puppet in TPM looks different from the one in ESB and ROTJ is not because of sculpting, but because we have only ever seen him in the dim fire light of his hut and in TPM we are seeing him for the first time under real lights. Utter nonsense.

"Every time Warb sighs, an angel falls into a vat of mapel syrup." - Gaffer Tape

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Just from watching RotS, it always looked to me that the Emperor's makeup was heavily modified by CGI. I could be wrong, but that's what I always attributed its odd look to. Heck, even when looking at the stills of evil Palpatine in this thread, I think those look like CGI-enhanced expressions.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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I think that CGish effect is from the bright, colored soap left in the shower, overly shiney and vivid color scheme of the PT, and not actally CG.

"Every time Warb sighs, an angel falls into a vat of mapel syrup." - Gaffer Tape

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Also being that Ian McDiarmid had age 20 years, I don't think his face was a quite as thin as it was in 1982 when filming ROTJ.
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Originally posted by: Tiptup
Just from watching RotS, it always looked to me that the Emperor's makeup was heavily modified by CGI. I could be wrong, but that's what I always attributed its odd look to. Heck, even when looking at the stills of evil Palpatine in this thread, I think those look like CGI-enhanced expressions.


This is mostly true. Ian's stunt double did most of the dueling with Sam Jackson for the wide shots with Ian doing the work for close ups. ILM then added Ian's head and face over the stunt double's head. So there will unavoidably be CG phoney-ness in there.
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Originally posted by: Sevb32
Also being that Ian McDiarmid had age 20 years, I don't think his face was a quite as thin as it was in 1982 when filming ROTJ.


???

I don't think thickness of face really has much to do with it. And I am not so sure everyones face actually gets thicker as they age.

"Every time Warb sighs, an angel falls into a vat of mapel syrup." - Gaffer Tape

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Originally posted by: C3PX
Originally posted by: Sevb32
Also being that Ian McDiarmid had age 20 years, I don't think his face was a quite as thin as it was in 1982 when filming ROTJ.


???

I don't think thickness of face really has much to do with it. And I am not so sure everyones face actually gets thicker as they age.
I understand what he means- just look at John Travolta. I think his head is about twice the size it was as when he did Saturday Night Fever. People tend to gain weight as they age, which adds to the chubbiness of the face too. But, in the case of McDiarmid, I think the main problem was poor makeup and CGI.

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"People tend to gain weight as they age, which adds to the chubbiness of the face too"

That isn't really true. Some people may gain weight as they age, but plenty of people loose weight as they age too. I know a lot more boney old people than I know chubby old people. This still has absolutely nothing to do with the different masks. And while it may be the case with Travolta, it is obviously NOT the case with McDiarmid. The evidence is in the fact that we have pictures of him from 82, and we have pictures of him now. He doesn't have a very chubby face by any stretch of the imagination. And it isn't the wideness or the chubbiness of the mask in ROTS that is different. If that was the only difference then it wouldn't even be worth mentioning.

"Every time Warb sighs, an angel falls into a vat of mapel syrup." - Gaffer Tape