‘Rogue One‘ wasn’t the “Star Wars” movie you grew up with. Gritty, mature, and with real deal stakes and loss of life, Lucasfilm made good on their promise that they would take a few risks with the franchise in the spinoff movies. And one of the biggest changes was stripping the film of the traditional opening crawl, which has set the stage for the story in the seven saga films to date. But it turns out that early on, there was a crawl in a draft of the script.
Chatting with Empire, Gareth Edwards revealed what happened to the crawl, and his reluctance to let go the iconic part of the sci-fi series.
“The first screenplay that Gary Whitta wrote had a crawl in it — and you learn doing that that ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ has four dots in it, not three. You get extra marks for that. And then at some point, probably like six months before we were filming, we were in a meeting, and they talked about not having an opening crawl, because these are standalone films, not part of the sagas,” the director said. “And if I’m honest, there was an initial kind of like, ‘Whaaaa? I want the crawl!’ The opening sequence is kind of the crawl of our movie. It’s like the setup. And our film is also born out of a crawl — the reason we exist is because of a previous crawl, so it feels like this infinite loop that will never end. It’s a small thing to give up to get to do ‘Star Wars.’ ”
Ooh, looks like fans have a new holy grail of “Star Wars” trivia to search out — that ‘Rogue One’ crawl. Meanwhile, Edwards also explained how he tried to capture another side of Darth Vader with bacta tank scene, showing the villain in a more exposed position.
“I’m jealous of moments like in ‘Empire Strikes Back’ where you see the back of [Vader’s] head and you just go, ‘Oh my God, that is so cool,’ and wanted to try and find something like that in our film. [The bacta tank scene] was actually a Chris Cunningham-inspired thing of the idea of being in milk [like in the Bjork music video] ‘All Is Full Of Love.’ He’s really a burns victim, and it’s not going to be fun for him when he’s not in the suit – he’s going to be uncomfortable,” Edwards shared. “I love the idea of showing that he’s vulnerable as well. Vader’s very, very bad, and so you try and just glimpse something of him that gives him some humanity, or it makes you empathize with him. Just seeing those scars and realizing that he’s, you know, an amputee, and just reminding you of that before he does all his stuff, it makes you torn, I think. He’s just such a rich character, in so many ways.”
There’s much more to come from Edwards talk, which will be posted later this week. For now, check out the video for “All Is Full Of Love” below (and it also feels like the creators of the opening sequence of “Westworld” owe a debt to it as well).