New Details Surface on Darth Vader's Castle in 'Rogue One'
In Rogue One, a scene takes place in a castle in which Darth Vader seems to take up residence, and while the film didn't delve into any of this, details have come about confirming that the castle can be found on Mustafar, the volcanic planet that Anakin Skywalker and Obi Wan Kenobi had their fateful duel in Revenge of the Sith.
Moreover, the castle also sits on top of a Sith cave. Co-production designer Doug Chiang sat down with StarWars.com to discuss his work, and went into more detail on the castle itself. He explains that there's real motivation for Vader's taking up residence there.
“The initial idea was, ‘Why would Vader live here?’ In our minds, we started to come up with a little bit of a backstory. That perhaps this place had special meaning for him, and that this is where he comes to meditate and to heal himself. We started with the idea that maybe it should be built around his bacta tank chamber, and he comes back here to rejuvenate himself and also to meditate. So from there, the structure itself grew out from the bacta tank, and there were certain ideas that we tried.
“We were trying to go for a very iconic shape, and we always love tall towers. Ralph McQuarrie actually drew quite a few small thumbnail sketches [of Vader’s castle] that were very intriguing. They were kind of angular versions of a tower, and I saw the potential of where he was going, and I just exaggerated that quite a bit. One of things we landed on early was this idea of a tuning fork — a twin tower kind of look. And it was really interesting, because then that started to give Gareth a lot of ideas like, ‘Well, maybe the structure is built this way because it is like a tuning fork. It’s tuning the dark side in terms of the energy.'
On unused concept images showing Luke Skywalker sitting Vader down in an underground lava cave, he said "I always thought that was such a compelling image, because you have this lava lake inside this cave and there was Vader’s throne. So we took that idea and thought, “Okay, well, maybe on the lower levels of Vader’s castle, there’s a more ancient part. That he actually built this castle on a foundation of an ancient structure.
"If you look at the finished design, it has this very strong element of a structure that was there for a purpose, and that purpose was to draw energy from the lava lake. If you look at the design of the base, it feels very much like a dam, and how the lava flows through it, possibly getting energy. And so we thought, “Okay, well, that’s the foundation. Maybe even deeper, or underneath that, is an even more ancient part, which is a natural cave where Vader goes to meditate.” Visually, we’re trying to create a sort of history for the tower. The bottom is the most ancient, the lava lake dam part was perhaps what Vader built his foundation on, and then the tower was Vader’s addition.”
Source: Slashfilm
