So, filmmaker Gareth Edwards is doing the interview round for his latest sci-fi extravaganza, “The Creator,” starring John David Washington. It’s a movie heavily indebted to “Blade Runner,” “Apocalypse Now,” and even “Star Wars” (read our review here). And the question on many people’s minds might be: will he talk about what actually happened during the making of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”?
The context of “what happened” is this: some of it is rumors, and some are reported facts. Let’s start with facts. For one, Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) was hired to rewrite the screenplay; he was one of many that included passes by Scott Z. Burns and Christopher McQuarrie. Eventually, Gilroy was—presumably based on the strength of his rewrite work—hired to take over the direction of the extensive ‘Rogue One’ reshoots. He was also then hired to direct and or oversee the post-production and editing process of ‘Rogue One’ (here’s some of my own original reporting at the time).
READ MORE: Tony Gilroy Finally Talks The “Terrible Troubled Mess” Of Star Wars’ ‘Rogue One’
Gilroy was then hired to do the ‘Rogue One’ prequel series, “Andor,” starring Diego Luna, which also speaks to his importance on ‘Rogue,’ he was hired, not Gareth Edwards. Regardless, depending on who you believe, the rumor was—and maybe it’s not so much rumor based on all the aforementioned facts—that Gilroy essentially took over the ‘Rogue One’ filmmaking process, and while Edwards was still there, it was Gilroy who was in charge calling the shots. Perhaps the more charitable version is that they worked together side by side (Gilroy is now back in the Lucasfilm family with ‘Andor’ so he now tends to deflect comments on ‘Rogue One,’ but at one point, he did candidly say that ‘Rogue One,’ when he got to the production was in a “terrible troubled mess”).
So, in short, does Edwards get into any of that or what happened on ‘Rogue One’? He was on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week and, sadly, no, and what do you expect, really?
However, the filmmaker did talk about first getting the gig and revealed that he was offered two ‘Star Wars’ films initially and asked whether any of them sparked interest in him. The short(er) version of the story is this. Edwards was finishing “Godzilla” when Lucasfilm reached out and asked if he was interested in having a meeting. He actually had to turn down the meeting until he was finished shooting and, months later, was about to reconnect with them. After a few meetings, one with Kathleen Kennedy—and at this point, Edwards assumed they were still talking to many different directors and not just him—he was sent an email with two ‘Star Wars’ film ideas.
“I read one [of the ideas], and in my head, I thought, ‘I can see why they want to do that; I’m not the guy for that; I’m really curious about what this other idea is,” he said about their first pitch.
The second pitch was obviously what became ‘Rogue One,’ and what Edwards obviously made, but he wasn’t initially convinced either. “I started reading this, and I thought, ‘where is this going?’ and that was the pitch that [Industrial Light & Magic VFX supervisor and CCO] John Knoll did,” he explained. “It was two pages or so, and I read it, and the whole time, I was still thinking, ‘Where is this going?’ What is this?’ and right at the end, it was, spoiler alert, Princess Leia, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the connected prequel to ‘A New Hope,’ which is the whole reason I am doing anything.”
As an aside, that dispels one of the significant beliefs about ‘Rogue One’: that the Princess Leia scene was tacked on at the end in Gilroy’s reshoots to please fans; it was obviously right there in Knoll’s initial pitch.
Edwards continued about his initial skepticism. “I spent the first ten or twenty minutes going, ‘You can’t make this film; this is like sacrilegious. This shouldn’t happen,’ and then I realized, ‘Are they offering this to me?’”
Edwards still wasn’t sure. “I went back in [to meet with Lucasfilm], and honestly, I thought they were still talking to ten, twenty people about that movie and that I was [just] one of them,” he said. The filmmaker said he came in to talk to Lucasfilm about the pitch and what one “should and shouldn’t do,” but at one point, he decided to ask: how many other filmmakers are you talking to about this project? “And they went, ‘Oh none, just you,’ and I was like, ‘when would you do this?’ and they were like, ‘It would be our next film,’ Edwards described, explaining how he then had to like play it cool and not have his mind blown about what was being offered to him.
Okay, now you’re thinking, what was that first ‘Star Wars’ film pitch that he wasn’t interested in? Edwards wouldn’t say and says Lucasfilm may still want to make it, so he was nervous about talking about it. Was it ‘Boba Fett’? Happy, Sad Confused asked.
“I can’t talk about it because I assume they’re going to make that film at some point, and it’ll be a great movie; I just, it wasn’t…,” he said. Asked about whether it was something reported on publicly before, Edwards said, “No comment.”
So that’s that, I guess. Speculate on about what the ‘Star Wars’ film idea could be? And yes, if you’re wondering, the authorship of ‘Rogue One’ definitely comes up, and Edwards is asked whether it’s his movie or not, but the filmmaker side-stepped the details and instead called it George Lucas’ movie and said all of it came from him which is a nice answer, but obviously highly diplomatic. Regardless, check out the conversation below.