ROGUE ONE Screenwriter Opens Up For The First Time About Those Reshoots: "They Were In So Much Trouble"
2 years after the film hit theatres, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story writer Tony Gilroy has finally shared his experience on being called in to salvage what was apparently something of a mess for Lucasfilm...
Though the finished product was ultimately embraced by (most) fans and enjoyed commercial and critical success, it's no secret that Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a very troubled production.
Worried about how the prequel story was shaping up, Lucasfilm hired Academy Award-winning writer/director Tony Gilroy to rework the script, and rumor had it that there was a lot of reworking to be done.
Now, Gilroy has spoken about his experiences coming in to "salvage" the film for the first time, and according to him, Lucasfilm really did have a mess on their hands. Ben Mendelsohn, who played Director Krennic, has previously said "an enormously different" version of the movie existed at one point, and Gilroy's comments would seem to back that up.
"If you look at Rogue, all the difficulty with Rogue, all the confusion of it … and all the mess, and in the end when you get in there, it's actually very, very simple to solve. Because you sort of go, this is a movie where, 'folks, just look. Everyone is going to die.' So it's a movie about sacrifice."
Indeed, the decision to wipe out all of the principal characters was one of the riskier elements of the story that paid off. We do know that in one earlier draft of the script, Jyn and Cassian, at least, survived.
Gilroy continues with an admission that he's not actually a Star Wars fan, and suggests that this separation meant he could approach Rogue One from a different angle.
"I've never been interested in Star Wars, ever. So I had no reverence for it whatsoever. I was unafraid about that. And they were in such a swamp … they were in so much terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position."
Yikes! We may get a detailed account of what that early version of the film would have been, but let's just hope Lucasfilm's simlarly late change-ups on Solo: A Star Wars Story also work out for the best.
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