[Many thanks to my buddies over at The Playlist]
Production problems for Disney's“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” directed by Gareth Edwards, are now the stuff of legend. Chaotic is too tame a word to use for what happened during its production. We do know that a major character was added, the entire ending was re-shot, The hiring of a “fixer”in writer-director Tony Gilroy ended up with him actually showing up on-set for rewrites and, rumor had it, taking over as director in place of Edwards.
That's why Gilroy's recent appearance on The Moment podcastpromoting his upcoming, very watchable, film “Beirut” which he wrote, but the far more interesting part of the interview was the conversation about ‘Rogue One.’ As I do quite frequently on this website, the quotes truly speak for themselves:
“If you look at ‘Rogue [One],’ all the difficulty with ‘Rogue’ and all the confusion of it, all the smart people [working on it], all the mess and in the end when you get in there, it’s actually very simple to solve, because you go, ‘oh, this is a movie where…everyone’s going to die.’ So, it’s a movie about sacrifice,” he explained.
“So, it’s all a question about why are these [characters], why are all these people going to sacrifice themselves? And you need to motivate them with a purity throughout the [story] and every scene has to be about the movie. And so, is that a theme, that everyone’s going to die, sacrifice? In that sense, in that film, yeah, I thought about it.”
On being hired for the rewrites, and reshoots:
“Here was a call to go do something—and I knew exactly when I saw what I saw [the rough footage], it was instantly clear the first thing that had to happen which was immediately attractive.”
Which he doesn't reveal.
“I have to be careful because I don’t know what the statute of limitations… I’ve never really told… I’ve never done an interview about ‘Rogue,’” he said. “You know what the easiest thing to say is? You’ll understand this better than anything else, I came in after the director’s cut [and] I have a screenplay credit in the arbitration that was easily won.”
“I saw the purity that was missing and I saw, at least in terms of one or two of the characters—cause who knew how big the fix was going to be, who knew what people would do— I saw something very… if you do nothing else, do this.”
It's not like Gilroy was a 'Star Wars" fan either. In fact, he actually admits he doesn't like the movies:
“That was my superpower. A) I don’t like ‘Star Wars’—not that I don’t like it, but I’ve never been interested in ‘Star Wars’ ever, so I had no reverence for it whatsoever, I was unafraid about that and they were in such a swamp… they were in so much, terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position.”
“What else can I say that’s safe and germane, the gumption, the balls of Disney and Bob Iger and the people there to gamble on what they gambled on is astonishing - There were no assholes involved in the process at all, on all the upper level, there were no assholes, it was just a mess [and there was] fear, and they had just gotten themselves…and because it wasn’t really my movie… for a while, I slept every night. For my own movie, I wouldn’t sleep, but because it was somebody else’s movie…”
How about the director's credit he received? So, it's his movie?
“Right, well… at a certain point, it kinda tipped, at a certain point everybody’s looking at you like ... but through a lot of it I was pretty calm, I was pretty chill.”
“I was in London, I was having a great time every day, I was throwing strikes every day, I was so happy to be engaged, my endorphins were firing, I was happy with what I was doing in front of me, I had… my god, [the production resources], it’s a Ferrari, man, oh my god. I had a great time.”
Would he consider doing another movie in the franchise?
“No, no, there’s nothing… I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t appeal to me. But I don’t think ‘Rogue’ is a ‘Star Wars’ movie in many ways, to me it’s a battle of Britain movie.”
What about Gareth Edwards’ version? Poor guy, this doesn’t look positive on his front...