Emphasis mine:
Yahoo Movies: How did the reshoots change the film?
John Gilroy: They gave you the film that you see today. I think they were incredibly helpful. The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out. We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian’s character [Cassian Andor, the Rebel spy played by Diego Luna], and Bodhi’s character [Bodhi Rook, the defected Imperial pilot played by Riz Ahmed].
The scene with Cassian’s introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added. Also Jyn [Jyn Erso, the reluctant leader of the film, played by Felicity Jones], how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.
Of course, things like that have a ripple effect all through the movie so there was a lot of work to do, and as Colin said, there were three of us, we rolled up our sleeves and we got to work and made the movie you see.
Colin Goudie: It was like life imitating art. Let’s get a band of people and put them together on this secret mission and that’s what’s happening in the film but that’s also what was happening editorially.
We were all jumping in and taking part in the mission and pulling that master switch. It was a bit like that really.
John Gilroy: I don’t know who’s Jyn or who’s Cassian, but it’s a good analogy, I like that analogy.
Colin Goudie: All we need is the blind monk and I think we’re good to go. A blind editor doesn’t sound so good though.
The point with the opening scenes that John was just describing was that the introductions in the opening scene, in the prologue, was always the same. Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting. That’s not a nice introduction.
So having her in prison and then a prison break out, with Cassian on a mission… everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting.
They got there eventually in the film, but this way we came in on the ground running, which was better.
John Gilroy: It became very important to plant the seeds the right way, you’ve got to set up the movie the right way, and then things pay off in the second and third acts.
Yahoo Movies: How much of the film’s final third changed?
John Gilroy: It changed quite a bit. The third act has a lot going on. You have like seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different.
We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived.
Because you needed to figure that out, and everything else changes. Everything was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change all the other venues, so really we had to… we were working on that until the last minute, because we working closely with ILM, they were giving us temporary shots and we’d put them in, we’d work them, we’d reconceive again.
It was really like a very tight puzzle and we had to keep honing that and honing that, and I’m very proud of what we did there.
Yahoo Movies: Did you face any continuity issues blending the new stuff with the old stuff?
John Gilroy: That’s mostly a production issue. The whole thing on a ‘Star Wars’ movie you have such professionalism at every level. Everybody that’s working on the movie is just at the top of their game so that wasn’t so hard for us.