Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 spy thriller North by Northwest added all sorts of suspenseful sequences to the cinema canon. Its most iconic and imaginatively staged scene of all has a nervous Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) going off to meet a mysterious man at an isolated roadside bus stop, only to be chased down and shot at by a speeding crop duster. As Hitchcock himself explained, the scene had it all—escalating danger, misdirection, subverted clichés. But you know what it didn’t have? Droids. Or a TIE fighter. Or the Millennium Falcon.
Thankfully, a new short film—appropriately titled Darth by Darthwest—fixes all of that. Through some skillful editing and compositing, Fabrice Mathieu’s mashup updates Hitchcock’s classic for … well, not so much the modern era as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Star Wars mainstay C-3PO and relative newcomer BB-8 each make an appearance, as do the dusty vistas of Tatooine. (They meld surprisingly well into the American Midwestern landscape.) Watch the video in full to witness the first stages of Hollywood icon Cary Grant’s rigorous Jedi training.
