The Phantom Menace's podrace grew out of George Lucas’ neverending need for speed

The propulsion that gives many of the Star Wars films their power comes from its filmmaker’s healthy fear of speed.

Consider the perilousness of the cosmic dogfights in 1977's Star Wars, the way the Rebellion’s X-wings and Empire’s TIE fighters exploded in halos of sparks and flame, sometimes done in by their pilot’s miscalculations as much as an enemy’s laser blasts. Take a hard look at the Millennium Falcon, which looked like it was kitbashed from junk snatched from scrap heaps; how its power drives always seemed to be stalling out just before some handy mid-chase tinkering had it blasting off once more. These are the sci-fi fantasies of a racer, a profession that George Lucas not only pursued once upon a time, but also infused into his filmmaking style, forever changing sci-fi.

Decisions made in filmmaking require a level of precision that, considering the financial stakes involved, can often feel as dramatic as those made in racing. That level of precision is an essential aspect of what has become one of the most tactile and thrilling sequences in Lucas’ filmography: the podrace from Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace. It’s a mid-film event that sets young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) on his path to becoming a Jedi Knight and showcases his ability to see things before they happen—”a Jedi trait,” according to Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson). What follows is a display of talent and skill that speaks to the tragedy of Darth Vader and Lucas’ history with the deadly sport of racing. When you pair this part of Anakin’s backstory with that of his creator, illuminating parallels of yearning and determination begin to form. But when you look at the films Lucas made when he was younger, a bigger picture of the podrace’s origins—not to mention its director’s cinematic philosophies—emerges.

One of the more famous biographical tidbits from Lucas’ early life is that as a student in Modesto, California, he’d developed a fascination with race cars. He was also something of a gearhead, futzing with engines to understand their function and what made them go. When his father bought him his first car, a yellow two-cylinder Autobianchi Bianchina, George’s first instinct was to pop the hood and soup it up. He’d spend his nights tooling around the streets of Modesto, looking for girls and street races, a seminal period in his life that would fuel much of his second feature film, American Graffiti. It’s a film he might have never made, were it not for a near-fatal crash on June 12, 1962, when Lucas’ hot rod was broadsided by a Chevy Impala, putting the young racing aspirant in the hospital.

This experience left a lasting impact on the Star Wars creator (“I realized more than anything else what a thin thread we hang on in life,” he said in 1999), and while it changed his chosen vocation, it also augmented his preoccupation with speed and its mechanics. Pursuit is a recurring theme in his films—THX 1138 features a motorcycle chase, American Graffiti ends with a hot rod race, and, of course, Luke Skywalker destroys the Death Star after a successful trench run, a Force-specific moment that presages Anakin’s podrace—but the specificity of the vehicles Lucas uses is also notable. He’s souping up his dream cars again, only this time using a full suite of resources and collaborators instead of the tools in his dad’s garage.

That puts an interesting spin on the podracers themselves, which are, in essence, a technological impossibility of twin (or quad) engines with a small pod strapped to them. If such engines did exist, defying gravity, propelling at improbable speeds, capable of hairpin turns and all the other terrifying feats one can and often does pull off in Episode I, nobody in their right mind would fund their construction—and no sane person would race them. The pod design is the ultimate form of racing as it can only exist in fantasy, a fusion of the chariot race in Ben-Hur, Formula 1, and Lucas’ ridiculous Star Wars magic, culminating in The Phantom Menace’s most purely transcendent sequence.

But what most clearly tethers the podrace to Lucas is its similarities to a short film the director made in University of Southern California’s film school. 1:42.08 is a seven-minute “tone poem” about a racecar looking to hit a specific lap time to qualify for an unspecified race. It’s a significant example of Lucas as a visualist, and watching it illuminates the techniques and editing tricks that he would later employ in American Graffiti, THX-1138, and Star Wars. But what’s most striking about the piece is how many of its shots are seemingly replicated during the podrace of The Phantom Menace; watching the two side by side gives the impression that with his first major directorial role since 1977, Lucas was drawing from the same well of inspiration that originally made him such an impactful filmmaker.

It might be purely speculative, but Lucas’ short seems to have a visual nod to his past as a hot rodder. The car he selected for the film, a Lotus 23, is yellow, just as Anakin’s pod engines featured prominent yellow air scoops. This choice of color could be either an intentional nod to his ill-fated Bianchina or a purely coincidental one. When looking for more concrete parallels between 1:42.08 and The Phantom Menace’s podrace, the shots in this short are fairly cut-and-dried. Lucas hyperactively cuts from the driver’s gritted-teeth expressions to the speedometer—hardly a novel approach in movies about racing, but the conscious repetition of the edits is significant in how they’re reflected during the podrace. There’s also a moment when the driver spins out of control and has to fiddle with the controls as the car’s engine cools down, a moment that is replicated—with more smoke, speed, and danger—during the tail-end of Anakin’s race. (The shot composition as the car spins out in 1:42.08 is also vaguely similar to how the iniquitous Sebulba crashes in The Phantom Menace.)

1:42.08's use of a first-person perspective is also worth considering. In Episode I, the camera often cuts to this view as Anakin weaves his pod through the stone monuments of Arch Canyon, and it’s seen again during the Laguna Caves leg of the race, a dangerous stretch of stalactites and stalagmites for any pod, as the racer Ratts Tyerell discovers milliseconds before he’s smashed to atoms. This perspective is perhaps the most effective tool to convey speed on screen; the computer-generated sands of Tatooine rush under the horizon line as tremendous mountain structures push into our view—in 1:42.08, it’s the pavement of a course we see, and Lucas cognizantly shifts into this view whenever his driver negotiates its tight turns.

Both films also use sound similarly. While composer John Williams inserts a few heart-thundering grace notes into the podrace now and again, the only sound we hear for a good stretch of it is the warring scream of the many engines on the track. Each podracer was given unique “personalities” by sound designer and editor Ben Burtt, who maximized the thrum of their drives to create the sequence’s thrilling sense of acceleration. In 1:42.08, the only sounds we hear are the wind, a roaring engine, and the click of a stopwatch. It’s not insignificant that the lack of music during these races is a deliberate creative choice that gives both films immediacy.

Whether he was making films in 1966 or 1997 (when much of The Phantom Menace was shot), Lucas used his former need for speed to tell a story about skill and precision. The depiction of his two characters—the unnamed driver of 1:42.08 and Anakin Skywalker—are similar in determination, even if they’re lightyears apart in age, experience, and ability. In both films, Lucas wanted to depict the feeling of speed as he felt it, as we see in both corkscrew tracks and the way the pod and the race car are shot weaving through them. With one road being entirely digitized and the other real, Lucas’ technological challenges conveying speed differed dramatically, but the way in which he pulled it off highlights his mechanical, formal acumen.

There is a revealing anecdote about Lucas’ process during the supplemental documentary from the DVD release of Episode I, in which concept model maker John Goodson recounts the first time he watched the director review concept art—in this case, Goodson’s model of Anakin’s pod. “He would talk [about] how this thing would work,” Goodson says. “The feeling I got was this guy was at the podrace yesterday, and he’s telling us a story—’this thing opens up, and this electrical thing comes out’—all these details about it. I was mesmerized by the fact that he could just do that […] come up with all these mechanical explanations for things.”

George Lucas, former and current gearhead, was tinkering again with The Phantom Menace. Watching the film 25 years later, it’s clear he was still engrossed in playing with the vehicles he loved from an early age. But another aspect of the podrace speaks to his appreciation for speed and the consequences of pushing its boundaries: the sense of tangible danger that kept him in the director’s chair instead of the driver’s seat. Racing’s loss was cinema’s gain.