The Editors Of ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY Reveal Which Scenes Were Reshoots

It's safe to say that audiences didn't feel misled about Rogue One: A Star Wars Story upon its release, despite several big scenes not making it into the finished film. Aside from some of the very obvious action setpieces from the trailers that are missing in the final cut, it's not immediately clear which scenes were a part of the film's oft-discussed reshoots, and editors John Gilroy and Colin Goudie sat down with Yahoo UK to explain that most of the reshoots were actually done just to provide their characters with a bit more introductory substance. 

"The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out," said Gilroy. "We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian [Andor]'s character, and Bodhi [Rook]’s character. The scene with Cassian’s introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added. Also Jyn [Erso], how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.

Jyn's story was originally set to begin at the Rebel Base on Yavin IV after her introduction as a child in the film's prologue. Her story was later reworked to have the adult Jyn begin the film in prison for a more "exciting" escape sequence before meeting the Rebels. "The point with the opening scenes...in the prologue, was always the same. Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting. That’s not a nice introduction. So having her in prison and then a prison break out, with Cassian on a mission… everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting. They got there eventually in the film, but this way we came in on the ground running, which was better."

Of course, it's now well-known that a majority of the film's changes were in the third act; Gilroy's brother, Tony Gilroy, reportedly made $5 million dollars for his work in rewriting it. According to the editor, there were significant changes to the film's conclusion, though he suspiciously remained quiet about the original ending. "It changed quite a bit. The third act has a lot going on. You have like seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different."

"We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived. Because you needed to figure that out, and everything else changes. Everything was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change all the other venues, so really we had to… we were working on that until the last minute, because we working closely with ILM, they were giving us temporary shots and we’d put them in, we’d work them, we’d reconceive again."

As for the length of the "original" cut of the film, Goudie says that fans shouldn't expect hours of bonus material. "It was not much longer than the finished film," he said. "I think the first assembly was not far off actual release length. Maybe 10 minutes longer? I genuinely can’t remember because that was nearly a year ago now. There’s no mythical four hour cut, it doesn’t exist."