Designer of 'Star Wars' Death Star dies at home in Colorado 5/23/22 Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:00) He had a fascination with outer space and an interest in architecture. Colin Cantwell combined the two, and ended up in Hollywood, designing the X-wing, the Death Star the movie Star Wars. Cantwell passed away over the weekend at the age of 90. Photojournalist, Byron Reed sat down with his longtime partner to talk about an extraordinary life. Sierra Dall: (00:21) Well, he was deeply into space most of his life. I am Sierra Dall and Colin Cantwell and I have been together for 24 years. Sierra Dall: (00:29) Colin is probably one of the more unusual people in this world and not just from my perspective, but from the perspective of everybody that knew him. But his passion has always been the space ships and outer space in some fashion and that's where he ended up with a lot of the films that he was working on. Well, he was invited to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and he worked with Kubrick at nighttime, designing the space scenes. Speaker 3: (00:58) And we're getting a picture on the TV. Sierra Dall: (00:58) He had a lot of projects with NASA, including sitting behind Walter Cronkite on the first moon landing, where he was telling Walter what was going on. He had a comm line between the astronauts and NASA. But that is Colin and George Lucas. After Walter Cronkite, he was working with George Lucas on Star Wars. Sierra Dall: (01:18) These are pill bottles on the back of the X-wing. Sierra Dall: (01:23) So he built the very first models for the movie. Speaker 4: (01:25) Look out. Sierra Dall: (01:26) And the Death Star fight scene. Sierra Dall: (01:27) He worked on the movie War Games. Speaker 5: (01:30) 19 degrees past [inaudible 00:01:32] Sierra Dall: (01:31) He was invited into NORAD to see what it was and then he created the whole set for War Games and programmed all the screens, the war screens in the war room. He ended up with a job at Hewlett Packard up in Fort Collins, and that's one of the reasons he came here. Sierra Dall: (01:45) He passed away two days ago, on Saturday, and he had dementia and he had it for eight years and he had a peaceful ending. Funny, a wonderful, personable, sweet, creative genius, and people loved him. Everybody loved Colin.