The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Jon Favreau (0:10)

This is Jon Favreau doing the director's commentary for The Mandalorian, Grogu. Here we don't have the traditional Star Wars crawl, which is traditionally saved for the Skywalker saga films. But we still have the opportunity to bring the audience up on the context for where the story sits in the Star Wars continuity.

It follows the first three seasons of The Mandalorian, and all of these events take place after the events of Return of the Jedi and before The Force Awakens. So these are the Imperial Remnants. Here we have some Snow Troopers.

This set was actually chilled so that we could see the breath of the actors. And that's Hemke Madera, who appeared as part of the Shadow Council. Also, I was in the Spider-Man films as Happy Hogan alongside him. We never had any scenes together, but we both appear in those films. And yeah, we chilled the set, and you humidify the set. What you do is you chill it overnight. We use this effect in the cape when Tony Stark wakes up in Iron Man. And he wakes up, and you see his breath. This is a really cool technique. It's tricky because you got to bring in a lot of chillers, and you got to humidify, but it gives a certain volume to the air.

SPEAKER_2 (1:30)

You can kind of feel the cold.

Jon Favreau (1:38)

And he's got a lot of He's using his power to be a crime lord. Historically, after the fall of empires, there were often generals and warlords that...

that continued to wield power long after the empire.

SPEAKER_2 (1:56)

Focus on solutions, not excuses. Does that sound reasonable?

Jon Favreau (2:06)

And here we see a snowtrooper breather mask, and we're saying that this is what's actually underneath the veil of the other snowtroopers.

SPEAKER_2 (2:15)

I've lost contact.

Jon Favreau (2:17)

Go check it.

SPEAKER_2 (2:21)

There's nothing to worry about. I'll send for reinforcements.

Jon Favreau (2:26)

Here's a new design on the Maus Droid, an all-terrain snow version. And here we go. These all were filmed on practical sets that we built in Los Angeles at Manhattan Beach Studios. It was one of the first things we filmed, this sequence, and here we're viewing the combat through the camera of the Maus Droid. You can see the armor is a little bit worn down. Here are the local leaders who are under the thumb, between a rock and a hard place under the thumb of the Imperial Warlord, who's making an escape and he's leaving them behind to help defend him as he leaves.

And introducing the Mandalorian first in silhouette. Here we have his first piece of combat. That's Latif Crowder in the suit at this point. We actually do a handoff. The walk down the hallway was Brendan Wayne, and then on the burst of fire, we switched to Latif. Latif and Brendan have been with us since the beginning. Those are two of the suit performers.

Latif is a Capoeira martial artist, so anytime he's doing hand-to-hand combat, it's usually Latif.

And there's our Grogu. Rod Puppet at Grogu. Here he is demonstrating that he has some forcibility now that he has developed. Josh Roth put together that mouse droid that could come apart. Some of it was done, practically some of it was done with CG. Now we go to outside. And this is the ATR-T, first appeared in Revenge of the Sith, but was further explored in the Clone Wars in the animated series. This exterior was on a back lot. This shot of the exterior is on the back lot in Los Angeles, though you'll see the environment was actually filmed up above Vancouver, actually, not far from where we filmed Elf, the mountains from Elf.

We actually had a rig that would go up and down that The Mandalorian could ride.

And now he has to hop on. So all of those are real plates that we photographed in the background that are integrated using CG by ILM. And here's the big view down. Some of this is practical, some of this is built by our artists. And now we are catching the Mandalorian in the middle of the last mission, in the tradition of James Bond or even Indiana Jones. And these elements of them riding on the back of it, I think that's literally the first thing we filmed on the back lot in the sunlight. You always want to be in real practical sunlight when you can to film an exterior. The backgrounds are Mount Waddington up just north of Vancouver. We filmed plates there using drones and we actually did scans also of the environment. This was one of our IMAX sequences. We filmed it in the 4-3 aspect ratio and really tried to take full advantage of what IMAX had to offer. We wanted to differentiate ourselves visually from what we did on television, which was primarily a 2-3-5 show, 2-3-5 letter box aspect ratio, which is the traditional widescreen Star Wars aspect ratio. It was one episode in The Mandalorian, the first episode, episode one of season two, with the Krayt Dragon. It's called The Marshall. That was the only episode I actually directed of that show. And I went from 2-3-5 to the full 16-9 aspect ratio to emulate like an IMAX aspect ratio shift, which I thought was really effective for the size of that creature. And here we have these AT-ATs that are quite tall and take full advantage of the opportunity that this aspect ratio presents.