Why J.J. Abrams chose Arabian desert to shoot Star Wars battle scenes

Just 2½ hours outside the ultra-modern city of Abu Dhabi, the terrain is so alien you might as well be on another planet. Martian-red sand dunes as tall as skyscrapers roll out as far as the eye can see and a fine copper-coloured dust hangs in the air like low-lying fog.

The Arabian peninsula’s Rub’ al-Khali desert is the stuff of fantasy, which is precisely why Star Wars: The Force Awakens was shot there. In early 2014, director J.J. Abrams and nearly 800 cast and crew trekked into the largely uninhabited region known as the Empty Quarter to build things, film them – and blow them up.

They had plenty of room to stage intergalactic battles. Rub’ al-Khali is the world’s largest contiguous desert, a sea of sand stretching from Oman to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is the capital) and Yemen.

Presumably lured by the planet Jakku-like landscape – and the 30 per cent cashback rebate the Abu Dhabi government offers to those who shoot in the emirate – the Star Wars crew spent six months filming key scenes on a secret closed set that was said to resemble a small city.

From Abu Dhabi, the Star Wars crew would have been shuttled past the city’s modern high-rises, its suburbs’ pristine Mediterranean mansions, the outskirts’ shabby workers quarters, then desolate salt flats, an occasional goat herder taking refuge under a makeshift tent, and grazing camel herds.

In the company of a guide from the Abu Dhabi film authority, this reporter made a similar three-hour journey by car to the Empty Quarter. A dead, shrivelled camel lying on the side of a sand dune is just one reminder that even the hardiest of creatures is not always a match for the Rub’ al-Khali.

The guide finally stops our vehicle in an area of the desert known as Liwa, adjusting his headscarf before stepping out of the air conditioning and into the heat.