How Star Wars Led Me to Troy — The Film That Started Everything
By Robert Stannage
It started in a cinema.
I was a boy watching Star Wars: A New Hope for the first time, and somewhere in the dark between the Millennium Falcon jumping to hyperspace and the Cantina Bar filling with creatures I had never seen before, something clicked into place. I didn’t just want to watch films. I wanted to make them.
That decision — made silently in a cinema seat — set the course for everything that followed.
The Apprenticeship
Some years after finishing design college, through a series of fortunate encounters, I found myself in the garden studio of Roger Pearl—one of the original Star Wars model makers, a man who had worked on the Dewback sculpt and numerous other creatures and props for George Lucas’s A New Hope. On his studio wall hung the Dewback cast. I studied it every day.
Roger taught me animatronics, rubber skins over armature frames, creature fabrication, and model making. He had also sculpted and fabricated the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in London. My education in this craft came from one of the finest hands in the business.
But getting from that garden studio to a professional film set — that was another matter entirely.
One Year of Closed Doors
For a full year after my apprenticeship I knocked on doors. Art department doors. Production company doors. Studio doors. The film industry in the late 1990s was not easy to penetrate, and nobody was rolling out the welcome mat for an ambitious young artist from Maidenhead with big ideas and a burning desire to work on major productions.
The rejections were relentless. The frustration was real. Most people would have quietly found something else to do.
I didn’t.
The Clandestine Meeting
Then came the moment that changed everything.
I had somehow—and I use that word deliberately, because looking back it required a particular kind of audacious determination—penetrated the security of an art department building. Not to cause trouble. To find someone who would listen.
Inside, I encountered a graphic designer named Jim Staines. Jim was part of the industry I was trying to break into. Rather than turning me away, he listened. He took my message. And crucially, he passed it on to the right person.
That person was Oliver Hodge. A legendary prop head. A man whose name carried real weight in the industry.
Jim Staines was the unexpected ally. The person who held the door open just long enough for the message to get through. I have never forgotten that.
The Phone Call
Fast forward some months. I was in the middle of a commission—painting an elaborate set of safari-themed framed murals on the walls of a multimillionaire’s living room in Maidenhead. Brushes in hand, mid-stroke, the kind of focused work that demands your full attention.
The phone rang.
It was Oliver Hodge.
He asked me a series of sharp, specific questions. Technical questions. How would you achieve this finish? What process would you use to get that effect on that surface? The kind of questions only someone who knows exactly what they’re looking for would ask.
I must have answered well.
“You start Monday morning.”
It was Saturday.
I put down the phone, looked at the half-finished safari murals on the millionaire’s wall, and understood that everything was about to change.
Shepperton Studios — Troy
The production was Troy. Wolfgang Petersen directing. One of the biggest films of its era—Brad Pitt as Achilles, an enormous international cast, and a scale of production that had to be seen to be believed.
My role was prop painter—responsible for achieving the art finishes on props, set pieces, and materials that would appear on screen in front of millions of cinema-goers worldwide.
I was one of approximately twenty-plus crew members working in our department at the legendary Shepperton Studios. The scale of what we were creating was extraordinary.
I remember one moment with particular clarity. A producer walked into the workspace. The room went immediately, instinctively quiet—that particular hush that film sets develop when someone important enters. Tools were put down. Eyes forward.
The moment she left, cameras were out. Every single person in that room, myself included, was photographing their work. Twenty-plus artists simultaneously documented what they had made, knowing that once the production wrapped, these pieces would disappear into the film forever.
I still have those photographs.
As for Brad Pitt — yes, he was around. Always surrounded by bodyguards. I shook hands with the director. I watched one of the biggest productions of its time take shape around me, and I was part of making it.
The boy in the cinema had kept his promise to himself.
What Those Pyro Burners Meant
Among the works our department produced were the Trojan Pyro Burners — the bronze and stone faux-finished set pieces that appeared in the film. Standing in that workspace at Shepperton, applying those finishes, I was doing exactly what Roger Pearl had shown me was possible. Taking raw materials and transforming them into something that would exist on screen, seen by audiences worldwide, forever.
That’s what prop painting is. It’s not decoration. It’s world-building.
Every brush stroke contributes to the reality of a world that doesn’t exist—until it does, on screen, in the dark, in a cinema where some other boy might be sitting and deciding what he wants to do with his life. I have been perfectly capable as a sculptor but never wished to be rushed or stressed, so I steered away from this department in the industry and made it a lifelong passion instead that had no boundaries. Paint effects and artwork are very diverse too, and I loved bringing props to life via that medium in particular. That’s the artist’s way.
A Curious Postscript
Years later, planning a new chapter of my life, I found myself drawn to a certain small town in Europe.
Its name is co-incidentally related to my first film experience.
The first four letters of my first film. In the mountains where the next episode of my life will unfold.
Some things, it seems, come full circle.
Robert Stannage is a Hollywood production artist with over twenty years of experience across multiple major studio productions. His work has appeared on screen in films including Troy, Blade Runner 2049, Beauty and the Beast, and many others. He is a published contributor to Make: Magazine and the creator of the All Original Art Studio.
View Robert’s sculpture in the Sculpture section of this site. Read about his Blade Runner 2049 heat exchanger in Make: Magazine.
