Great new interview with Gareth about the making of -
‘Making “Star Wars” is a team sport’: ‘Rogue One’ director Gareth Edwards on reshoots, inspiration and trepidation
Here are some highlights:
“Rogue One” has a grittier, more naturalistic feel than any previous “Star Wars” movie. Did you know from the start you wanted that tone?
If I was going to do it, I felt like I just didn’t want it to be a glossy, disposable popcorn kind of blockbuster. I take my “Star Wars” quite seriously. There’s humor in the movie, but as a fan I just wanted it to feel real. That involved being a bit more subjective and hand-held and like a documentary crew to some extent.
Stylistically we knew to some extent it was going to be a war movie, so we looked at footage from Vietnam, the Gulf War and World War II. In the edit, we did a rough version of the movie using pieces of war footage and photography just to see what the rhythm and feel of that would be like.
It felt so strong when you took real footage from a real conflict and instead of a Huey you put in an X-wing and you put Rebel helmets on the guys who are in a trench scared for their lives. You just look at that image and go, “Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to see that.”
This summer, the Internet went crazy over reports that the studio was nervous about “Rogue One” and the movie was undergoing major changes. What was it like for you to be in the middle of that — and how much truth was there to the rumors?
It’s really hard to read things online sometimes because you want to say something but it’s pointless. It’s futile to get involved.
What happened was that I’d say a third of the movie or more has this embedded documentary style to it, and as a result we shot hours and hours and days and days of material. Normally when you put a film together it goes together like A-B-C-D-E and you move on. Whereas we had so many permutations, so many different ways it could be constructed, it took longer in the edit to find the exact version.
We’d always planned to do a pickup shoot but we needed a lot of time to figure out all this material and get the best out of it. So that pushed the entire schedule in a big way. Then Disney saw the film and reacted really well and they said, “Whatever you need, we’re going to support you.” Our visual-effects shot count went from 600 to nearly 1,700, so suddenly we could do absolutely anything we wanted. To design 1,000 visual effects shots should take a year, so it was all hands to the pump and we never came up for air really until about a week ago.