**Spoilers ahead, obviously**
Over the the past few days, both online and IRL, there’s been an ongoing conversation about whether or not “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is appropriate for kids. It seems like an odd discussion since the series was a childhood favorite for many longtime fans, and continues to spawn a huge array of toys, video games, and more. However, given the gritty, realistic tone of the spinoff, and the high death toll (pretty much every lead character dies), some parents might have a legitimate cause for concern about taking their grade-school child to see various characters meet tragic fates.
All that being said, it’s somewhat surprising to learn that the the kill-’em-all third act was fully endorsed by the studio, with director Gareth Edwards revealing in a since-removed interview on Empire (via io9), that in his original version of the screenplay, he held back on major character deaths, figuring the studio wouldn’t go for it.
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“The very first version, they didn’t [die]. In the screenplay. And it was just assumed by us that we couldn’t do that. ‘They’re not going to let us do that.’ So I was trying to figure out how this ends where that doesn’t happen. And then everyone read that and there was this feeling of like, ‘They’ve got to die, right?’ And everyone was like, ‘Yeah, can we?’ We thought we weren’t going to be allowed to but Kathy [Kennedy, President of Lucasfilm] and everyone at Disney were like ‘Yeah it makes sense/ I guess they have to because they’re not in A New Hope.’ And so from that point on we had the license,” Edwards said.
“I kept waiting for someone to go, ‘You know what? Could we just film an extra scene where we see Jyn and Cassian, they’re okay and they’re on another planet?’ And it never came. No one ever gave us that note, so we got to do it,” he added.
That’s pretty remarkable, especially in an era that sees multiple properties fearful of firmly closing any opportunities to revive characters down the road. But that kind of full creative cooperation Edwards got from Lucasfilm didn’t end there, as he revealed to Radio Times that during his research for ‘Rogue One,’ he found used footage from the original “Star Wars” that he was able to add to his movie. The material came from deleted scenes of the Death Star assault, which Edward put into the X-Wing battle in his film.
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“We got the neg documents and found the clips from A New Hope that hadn’t been used. And there’s pilot photography and lines that were never featured in ‘A New Hope,’ ” he explained. “Through the magic of ILM [special effect studio Industrial Light and Magic] they cut round them and manipulated them and stuck them into our cockpits.”
And if you’re wondering if anybody even noticed, Edwards says that at the L.A. premiere, fans cheered during the sequence of the cockpit callsign exchange where the scenes were subtly added in. Pretty neat.
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” is now playing everywhere.
