If there was an elephant in the room over the weekend when journalists were flown in to Lucasfilm HQ from around the world to preview 30 minutes of footage from “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” it was the reshoots. It has been established for some time that Tony Gilroy was brought in to extensively rewrite and even direct portions of the film, and that standard blockbuster pickups were turned into weeks of new filming. Rumors swirled that Disney brass wasn’t pleased with what Gareth Edwards had delivered and were eager to find a different tone from his gritty take. It was even said that the ending had to be fixed. Now, Edwards has finally addressed the subject, and according to the filmmaker, it was nothing more than Disney trying to make the best movie possible —even if meant that the scale of the movie increased quite massively.
“… I’d say a third of the movie or more has this embedded documentary style to it, and as a result, we shot hours and hours and days and days of material. Normally, when you put a film together it goes together like A-B-C-D-E and you move on. Whereas we had so many permutations, so many different ways it could be constructed, it took longer in the edit to find the exact version,” the director explained to The L.A. Times.
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“We’d always planned to do a pickup shoot, but we needed a lot of time to figure out all this material and get the best out of it. So that pushed the entire schedule in a big way. Then Disney saw the film and reacted really well and they said, ‘Whatever you need, we’re going to support you.’ Our visual-effects shot count went from 600 to nearly 1,700, so suddenly we could do absolutely anything we wanted. To design 1,000 visual effects shots should take a year, so it was all hands to the pump and we never came up for air really until about a week ago,” he added.
And while he sidestepped the question of Gilroy’s involvement, Edwards says everything was done in the name of making the movie more than just another box office smash for the “Star Wars” brand.
“Things kept improving constantly and the film was getting better and better —and if you’re improving it, you don’t stop. I think any other movie you would say, ‘That’ll do. We’re going to get a hit.’ But ‘Star Wars’ is going to live forever if you do it properly. We just can’t let it go. You’ve got keep going until they [snatch] it out of your hands,” Edwards said.
Actor Riz Ahmed backs up his director’s claims, reiterating that everything was done to make the best movie possible.
“There were a ton of reshoots,” the actor admitted. “But if people want to read anything into that, I’d encourage them to read into it the guts it takes to unpick stitching rather than just try to embroider over it, to make it right. I admire [Lucasfilm President] Kathleen [Kennedy] and Gareth and the whole team for having the guts to go, ‘Let’s reopen this. Let’s do some of this again.’ I think it’s because they really care —and hopefully that’s something that shows when people see the film.”
The proof will be in the final result, and we’ll see how it plays out when “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” opens on December 16th. Check out that latest TV spots and tie-in ads.