Who would’ve thought a year ago that the most fascinating interview to come out of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (besides every interview with bro-mantic buds Mads Mikkelsen and Ben Mendelsohn) would be with the team of editors who cut the movie? But given the massive overhaul the film underwent during its extensive reshoots this summer, Yahoo‘s conversation with two of the film’s three editors, John Gilroy (given the final Editor credit on ‘Rogue One,’ and brother of Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter and director who led the reshoots) and Colin Goudie (director Gareth Edwards‘ cutter on “Monsters“), is tremendously illuminating. The whole thing is worth a read, but here are some noteworthy highlights:
An early story reel cut with scenes from other movies helped establish the tempo of ‘Rogue One.’
Colin Goudie: For example the sequence of them breaking into the vault I was ripping the big door closing in ‘Wargames’ to work out how long does a vault door take to close.
So that’s what I did and that was three months work to do that and that had captions at the bottom which explained the action that was going to be taking place, and two thirds of the screen was filled with the concept art that had already been done and one quarter, the bottom corner, was the little movie clip to give you how long that scene would actually take.
Then I used dialogue from other movies to give you a sense of how long it would take in other films for someone to be interrogated. So for instance, when Jyn gets interrogated at the beginning of the film by the Rebel council, I used the scene where Ripley gets interrogated in ‘Aliens.’
So you get an idea of what movies usually do.
There’s no extended cut of ‘Rogue One.’
Colin Goudie: [The assembly] was not much longer than the finished film. I think the first assembly was not far off actual release length. Maybe 10 minutes longer? I genuinely can’t remember because that was nearly a year ago now. There’s no mythical four hour cut, it doesn’t exist.
Jyn’s introduction was one of the big changes to ‘Rogue One.’
John Gilroy: 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.
Colin Goudie: 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.
The third act was also massively overhauled.
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.
Yes, there are deleted scenes.
Colin Goudie: There’s a handful that if people see them they’ll be like ‘oh that’s interesting’, but I don’t think there’s anything whereby you’d be like ‘why did they cut that out?’
The editors played with using transition wipes in ‘Rogue One’ to match the original ‘Star Wars.’
Colin Goudie: I think we used all those original wipes and we temped [a temporary soundtrack] it with John Williams as well, and it would feel right. Like when we did the original story reels, I was using footage from other movies, so having those wipes and having the John Williams score helped with making the hodgepodge of shots I’d put together feel like what we were aiming for.
Once we actually got in everything we’d shot, we no longer needed those things and I was initially sad to see the transitions go, but then when I watch the final film, I don’t miss them, because it feels like a different beast.
It feels familiar but at the same time fresh.
It’ll be interesting to see how much of the editing process and what, if any, of the pre-reshoot scenes of ‘Rogue One’ pop up on the home video release. For now, ‘Rogue One’ is playing everywhere, and be sure to read the full Yahoo piece.