Many movies go through dramatic story changes during production. “Star Wars” went through several major changes before it became the movie we know and love today (though it is still going through changes all the time), including Darth Vader originally being a bounty hunter, Skywalker being a title, and Han Solo being an alien. This tradition was apparently kept through the years, as we know “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” originally had a much different third act. Now, the film’s writers reveal the biggest ways the story changed during production.
During IGN’s Watch From Home Theater commentary series, screenwriters Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz offered new insight into some key plot points in the film and its production. One of the biggest ways the film was differentiated from the rest of the “Skywalker Saga” was the lack of an opening crawl, but Whitta revealed that one was actually written. “You’ll never see it but I did. I wrote more than one,” Whitta explained. “Back when we were still experimenting with the idea of maybe doing one. But one of the things that we arrived at fairly early on in the process is that it was OK to liberate ourselves from the traditional storytelling language of Star Wars.”
The main characters also went through different phases before ending up as we meet them on screen. When it came to the main character of Jyn Erso, Whitta reveals she originally had a role more akin to Jessica Chastain‘s character in “Zero Dark Thirty, uncovering the existence of the Death Star. “At one point Jyn was already a Rebel soldier,” Whitta said. “We toyed with various other possibilities — that she was a deserter, that she was a Rey-like scavenger, but obviously you can’t do that once you learn what the other hand of the Star Wars universe is doing.” Likewise, Jyn’s mother Lyra was originally written to be a Jedi. “In the original version — and the kyber crystal was like the last tiny piece that was left — she was a Jedi in hiding,” the writer explained. “It was one of the first things that got killed, and rightly so.”
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What about Diego Luna‘s Cassian Andor, who will get his own spin-off show soon on Disney+? Whitta said the character was originally written as a double agent working for the Empire (which would make for a much different series). “In a very, very early version of this, he was a Rebel soldier who was secretly working for Krennic,” Whitta revealed. “He has a change of heart and flips to the Rebel side, but that’s after he’s exposed as a spy. And at that point in the third act, he kind of has to win Jyn’s trust back.”