Humby said:
moviefreakedmind said:
DominicCobb said:
ray_afraid said:
DominicCobb said:
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.
That theory doesn’t really make sense with what we know. For instance, what sort of demands for the final act would they have had? From what we know, Edwards and co. originally had some of the crew surviving because they thought Disney wouldn’t like that, but it turns out they didn’t mind. From the trailers, we can see that the climax was a bit more complicated (two different towers with more stuff on the beach in between). Those changes don’t seem studio mandated as much as trying to improve the pacing and hone the focus. The only other confirmed change to the finale we’re aware of is the Vader hallway scene, which Edwards has said he came up with and directed himself. So I’m not sure how that would fit your theory that Edwards “couldn’t reconcile it with his vision.”
The truth is, movies are constantly evolving. A director’s “vision” for a movie doesn’t mean that they have a rigid idea of exactly how everything with go from start to end, things change the whole way through. In this case it just seems like another filmmaker came in to help Edwards make the movie the best it could be with the time they had. Doesn’t mean they needed to usurp Edwards’s “vision” or whatever.
Gilroy said (paraphrasing) “at that point anything would be an improvement.” Hyperbole aside, that doesn’t sound like he’s describing some secret masterpiece that Disney wanted to ruin or whatever.
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.
I agree they’re not necessarily a knock towards Edwards and they could easily be taken as a knock towards the production. But he’s very explicitly knocking the “original version.”