At the Heritage Auctions Illustrations Art sale on October 16, a piece of Star Wars history is on sale – a beautiful painting of Han Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon. Originally intended as part of a set of such art for Lucasfilm, it was not released back in 1993, but now is available to a fan with deep pockets! Paul Simpson caught up with artist Brian Sauriol to discuss the genesis of the piece…

Let’s go back to before you did the painting of the Millennium Falcon. Did you watch the Star Wars films, were you a Star Wars fan? Or was it just something you knew about?

I knew the whole storyline, I had read a ton of the books over the years. I actually grew up being a Star Trek fan and Star Wars was just a natural migration. I’ve done stuff for Paramount Pictures – several illustrations over the years. People aligned me with that.

I just loved Star Wars, I loved Star Trek. I’m a sci-fi guy. Ray Bradbury was my hero, Gene Roddenberry was everything. I actually wanted to be a writer too, of sci-fi stuff. Then the Lucasfilm offer came up.

I had really been excited to paint all four cutaways. I was going to do the Death Star, the X-Wing, the Star Destroyer and the Millennium Falcon. We started with the Falcon but then things happened that were none of my fault so just never got around to doing the other three.

So the commission was one of four but what did Lucasfilm want as the end result?

They wanted a poster with cut-outs and callouts pointing to every part of the ship. But they were very specific: they wanted the ship after the [first] Star Wars movie and before The Empire Strikes Back. Apparently there were modifications made.

I worked with Lucasfilm and the studio for over six months. There’s about 600 hours of painting in it and we kept on sending things back and forth.

There were a lot of blueprints and along with the Millennium Falcon [at the auction] there’s a binder of all the contracts, all the blueprints that I got, the pictures from them. At the time they sent me two or three models and the actual large blueprints that they built the sets off of.

They wanted several modifications. They were going to point out where Leia and Han kissed right near that elevator shaft, where they all hid in the floor. It was really fun to work back and forth with them and I was very disappointed when it didn’t happen. That painting was done and the poster was getting ready to be merchandised and then the issue happened.

In the 25th anniversary of Star Wars I made it into the final round of the poster selections and they chose somebody else so that’s OK. That was fun.

To an extent presumably there was a degree of reverse engineering involved?

Yes.

Can you remember, were there things that you had to say ‘where do you want this to be?’

Oh many many many times. One of the things that’s on my site and that’s in the binder is the conversations between them and some of the changes that were involved. There were two points of view on where the doors to the cargo hold should be.

The access by the upper missiles, the access to where Luke had his arm cut off and Leia was taking care of him on that bed: if you look at the movie there’s a back wall but they wanted the access to be from both sides. They had designed an aisleway on the other side just to the ship’s side of where the missiles were. That was a big controversy that took almost a month to figure out what they wanted to do there. The elevator… people were arguing should it be on the port side of the ship or the starboard side of the ship and it was supposed to be just under the transmission dish.

With things like that, it’s like with any sort of continuity issue, at the time people make a decision on set and they don’t actually care as long as it tells the story.

I know. Well, there were going to be things in The Empire Strikes Back with the Falcon that were different than in Star Wars and they wanted to make sure that the timing was right and that the ship had the right modifications.

Did you go back to the VHS and rewatch the movies?

A hundred times. I had the movie playing constantly, I had stop motion on everything. They sent me a lot of stop motion on the ship too. Part of that is in that binder. Their reference included Polaroids of different sections of the ship along with schematic line art.

When they brought the Falcon back for The Force Awakens, did you go see the movie? Did you look at it and go ‘That shouldn’t be there’!

(Laughs) Yes and how many times did I see the movie! I wasn’t 100% happy with The Force Awakens but it was OK. I could hardly enjoy the movie because of what you just said: I was constantly looking at the modifications and imagining repainting, so sometimes I would lose where I was in the movie.

Was this painting it that became a turning point in any way? Or was it, even though it was Star Wars, just a job?

I was already an established artist, I had a rep in New York that I was doing a lot of work for. I had worked in the Detroit area studios which were some of the best art studios in the world.

I had been with a rep in New York called Mendola Limited for about four or five years and this came along. It wasn’t through them but as far as a turning point in my career goes, only in the excitement.

I was already getting work from almost any Fortune 500 corporation. To tell you the truth, I would work on commercial illustrations all day, go home at night and paint on the Falcon.

I had about four or five months to get the Falcon done and like I said 600 hours – I barely got any sleep over that time.

I had worked so hard because it was traditional painting on this massive, massive piece, I actually formed a cyst in my back that I had to get out because of this piece. It was all gouache and airbrush, there were no computers at the time that would let this kind of high res stuff go.

Now I teach multimedia, I teach the Adobe Creative Suite, and especially Photoshop and Illustrator and have done so for a long time because I had a simultaneous career of being a professor and a Program Coordinator of a major art program. We have had nearly a thousand students in our Program and we taught everything. So this was just an amazing journey.

Did it help my career? I think if the four paintings had gotten out I might have actually changed my direction to do more science fiction stuff all the time. I got tired of painting common household products from cars to toy box covers, but that’s what a product artist does. Anything that comes their way, you paint, OK? So, if an art director wants you to paint a Coors beer bottle in a background, you do.

The glamour of being a worldwide represented commercial artist? It’s a blue collar hard working position. You have to work twelve hours a day or more as you’re growing up in the business, to stay busy. It’s very difficult work. Although it gave me a lot of prestige in my being a professor of a major art college and it was really nice to have a respected portfolio, it still was hard work.

So, if I could have changed it and become a sci-fi artist, that would have been great!

Millennium Falcon Cut Away, 1993
Gouache and acrylic on board
21 x 34 inches (53.3 x 86.4 cm)
Signed lower right

is part of the Heritage Auction on October 16. Click here for more details on the piece, and how to bid.

Thanks to Eric Bradley for his assistance in arranging this interview.