Dave Filoni

Filoni came out of television animation, with directing work on Avatar: The Last Airbender, and was then hired by George Lucas to run Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which opened with a 2008 theatrical feature he directed. What followed was close to a decade of being mentored by Lucas personally, and that is the fact that explains his current position: he is now president and chief creative officer of Lucasfilm, hired into the job because he is the person Lucas trained to hold the original vision after the sale to Disney.

What he is good at is serialised character work inside a property built for spectacle. Animation gave him the one thing the films never had, which is time. The Clone Wars ran long enough to behave like a novel, and the habit carried into everything after it. He created Ahsoka, which moved his material into live action, and he is the creator behind Tales of the Jedi, Tales of the Empire and Tales of the Underworld, short anthologies where the animation is free to be strange. Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord is next.

He also performs in his own productions, which is either charming or telling depending on your mood. He is the voice of the astromech droid Chopper across Star Wars Rebels, The Bad Batch and Forces of Destiny, he voices the bounty hunter Embo in The Clone Wars, and he appears on camera as the pilot Trapper Wolf in The Mandalorian, a part he is reprising in The Mandalorian and Grogu. The man running Lucasfilm still books himself as a droid.