This past summer Lucasfilm announced that it was embarking on major reshoots for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, sending some fans into a panic as rumours circulated that up to 40% of the movie could be reworked, and that director Gareth Edwards was being pushed aside in favour of Tony Gilroy, who was brought in to provide script rewrites, as well as assisting Edwards.
While it’s likely we’ll never get to learn the full extent of the reshoots and what they involved, we do know that they’ve changed the ending of the movie, and seriously inflated Gilroy’s bank account. Now, speaking to the L.A. Times, Edwards has offered some insight as to why it all came about, stating that the main focus from Disney was to ensure they made the very best movie possible, and that the reshoots actually resulted in the scale of the movie being increased.
“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.
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“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.
“Things kept improving constantly and the film was getting better and better – and if you’re improving it, you don’t stop. I think any other movie you would say, ‘That’ll do. We’re going to get a hit.’ But Star Wars is going to live forever if you do it properly. We just can’t let it go. You’ve got keep going until they [snatch] it out of your hands.”
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From Lucasfilm comes the first of the Star Wars standalone films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an all-new epic adventure. In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set for release on December 15th in the UK and December 16th in the States, with a cast that includes Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Alan Tudyk (Con Man), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler), Genevieve O’Reilly (Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith), Jimmy Smits (Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), James Earl Jones (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), Valene Kane (The Fall), Alistair Petrie (The Night Manager), Warwick Davis (Star Wars: Episode IV – Return of the Jedi) and Jonathan Aris (Sherlock).
Originally published December 9, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
