I don’t understand why it’s so hard to believe that maybe if they drastically retooled a movie after it was almost finished that maybe that movie wasn’t turning out to be very good. Occam’s Razor and all that.
It’s not that I find it hard to believe, I just wish they’d be more transparent about how things went down. With there seeming to be a gag order on the subject, I don’t fully trust anything that makes it past the guard so to speak.
I wish that they were more open about the process too, but it seems like LFL (or maybe Disney) is trying to make it seem like these are trouble-less productions.
What makes Gilroy seem credible is the fact that it sounds like he’s telling tales out of school (he holds back only when it comes to directly stating things it sounds like legally can’t be said), and what he’s saying doesn’t really reflect well on the studio.
It does reflect well on himself, and a common criticism of Rogue One (whether you agree with the criticism or not) is that it was heavily reshot and the implication is that it was reshot for the worse. Cynically, it would make sense for him to say something like this. I’m not calling him a liar, I just don’t feel comfortable with taking it for granted that Edwards’s version was bad just because the man who was hired to reshoot it says so.
To be fair, we don’t know what the issues were. For all we know, Edwards’ vision may have been great, but Disney had demands for the final act which Edwards couldn’t easily reconcile with his own vision of the original script. And that may be the ‘trouble’ Gilroy was talking about.
At the end of the day, I don’t think we should take Gilroys comments as a knock towards Edwards or his original version. They certainly could be, but could just as easily be knocks at the producers/Disney, or just the production as a whole.