Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's Gareth Edwards: 'The whole thing was one big love letter to Carrie Fisher'

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story's Gareth Edwards: 'The whole thing was one big love letter to Carrie Fisher'

ByTim Robey, FILM CRITIC31 March 2017 • 7:00am

www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/rogue-one-star-wars-storys-gareth-edwards-whole-thing-one-big/

The original Star Wars was the film that made a young, impressionable Gareth Edwards want to make his own, growing up in Warwickshire before getting his start in the industry.

His debut Monsters (2010), made on a production budget of “way under” $500,000, catapulted him to attention, not least because he handled all 250 visual effects shots in his own bedroom. The Godzilla (2014) reboot then proved he could handle a budget several hundred times larger, and still fill a film with soul, excitement and melancholy.

That was a stepping stone to his current fame, as the director of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first standalone “anthology” film to spring from a galaxy far, far away – it’s the film that joins the dots for fans between Episodes III and IV, while bringing a whole new cadre of heroes into the universe. On the eve of its home-entertainment release, we sat down with Edwards, laid-back and well-rested by now, to talk about his early inspiration, the technical challenges of the story, and the substantial reshoots needed to get it right.

On growing up as a Star Wars fan

I didn’t have the very most Star Wars figures out of my friends – I was probably in the middle, or towards the high end. I had the Millennium Falcon and an AT-AT, things like that, and an X-Wing. But this friend of mine that lived down the road had everything. So I’d always go down the road to his house, and play Star Wars with him. The ideal thing was to do Return of the Jedi, because it would really work as Endor in your parents’ back garden. But then, as soon as you’d set them up, it was like, now what? Because they don’t really move, they can’t fire at each other.

I remember drawing a lot. From the comics I would try and copy, like, Admiral Ackbar. For years it felt like you were wasting your life. If you look at my textbooks as a kid, and go anywhere near the back, you’ll see X-Wings, a Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, R2D2, everywhere. And you’d get shouted out by the teacher if they caught you. And then, about 30 years later, you’re at Lucasfilm trying to draw X-Wings and the Death Star and getting paid for it.

The geekiest fact about me is that when I was 30, for my 30th birthday, I went to Tunisia, and stayed the night in Luke Skywalker’s house, which is in the middle of the desert, in this, like, troglodyte hotel. And I took some blue dye with me, so I could have some blue milk, at the very table where Luke drank blue milk, and then I watched the sunset on the salt flats. That’s something I would never tell anybody, because I would be embarrassed about it. Now that I’ve got to do Star Wars, it’s a really nice story. But for a long time it was like, ‘Don’t bring up the Tunisia thing!’ People will think I’m really geeky and sad.

On nailing down the ideas for Rogue One

When you’re stuck with this infinite playground, where do you begin? You try to do anything to put some pins in the map. One thing I like to do is just collect imagery that sort of feels, in your peripheral version, like it’s the movie you’re going to go and make. So I went through all my photography books and design books, and created a pdf that had thousands of images in it. Every time you saw something and went, ‘I think that should be in the movie’, you would share it with people and then you’d start trying to do paintings and concept art based on those ideas.

There was a lot of imagery in there from Vietnam, Nepal, and monasteries and monks and Buddhism. It felt very spiritual, from exotic parts of the world. We were trying to find locations that George Lucas hadn’t shot in, or overused, that were part of our world. The Thin Red Line was a big reference. I had a piece of software that could print, every three seconds, a frame from The Thin Red Line. And Blade Runner, and Alien and the original Star Wars. It goes from there, and starts to excite people, and then it excites the writers, and conversations begin. If anything, you’re trying to give it boundaries. Because it’s too infinite at the beginning, so you’re trying to create limitations for yourself. Limitations are really good for filmmakers. You can pretend sometimes that they’re annoying, but if you can literally do anything you want, it gets paralysing.

On tracing the steps of the story back

So we had the opposite problem to normal films. Normal films, someone’s got a really good premise or setup for a movie, and the problem is, How do you end it? Which is very typical of a lot of films – a really good idea for a story, but no one knows how to tie it in a bow at the end. We had the ending – we knew exactly how it was going to have to end. How the hell do you start it? So you’re trying to reverse-engineer. There was a lot – a lot – of experimenting, and trial and error. It felt like we explored nearly every option you could, so then when you end up down a certain path, you know it’s the best choice.

On the fates of the main characters

The main thing we all knew is that every character you invent isn’t in A New Hope. So something has to happen to them. Anything other than them sacrificing themselves in the attempt to achieve this goal felt wrong. In the very first draft, we thought we wouldn’t be allowed to kill everybody. And so we let Jyn and Cassian survive, and as soon as people read it, especially Kathy Kennedy, she said, ‘Well, surely they must die, right?’. And we were like, ‘We would love to, but we didn’t think we were allowed to do that!’ She said ‘You can do anything you want!’ So then we were like, let’s do it. And from that day on, we never looked back.

On rooting through the Star Wars archives for B-roll footage

I would pay good money to sit and watch all the out-takes of the original trilogy. They’re just sat in the archives of Lucasfilm. It’s a fan-boy’s wet dream. You see the actual Millennium Falcon, you see Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, you can put on Darth Vader’s helmet, Han Solo’s jacket, everything. Han Solo in carbonite’s there, all the original artwork’s there. As we were leaving, there were all these cans of film everywhere. The actual footage. Could we get copies of it? They said, yeah, just tell us what you want. I would have wanted everything, but it cost a lot of money to get it all transferred. So we went for just the things that applied to our film, so that was any Death Star scene, X-Wing pilot, Y-wing pilot footage.

It felt like the biggest privilege in the world, sitting and watching out-takes. No one’s seen this in 30-odd years. You could hear the crew. There are little bits of dialogue that didn’t make it into A New Hope. I can see why everyone’s interested in why something did or didn’t make it into Rogue One, because I’ve got the same fascination with A New Hope.

We put footage from X-Wing pilot out-takes into our movie. In one particular shot, the negative was not good enough. It had been darkened and lost a lot of information. So ILM had to completely rebuild it, taking from other shots, rebuild the cockpit, and put the cheek of the character back in, from another take… Loads of little crazy details that you just wouldn’t know.

On deciding to resurrect the character of Tarkin, played by the late Peter Cushing

We talked about every option. Maybe casting an actor and making them feel like Tarkin a little bit, and just embracing that. Maybe you could do that with other characters in Star Wars, but I would feel cheated, and a bit weirded out, watching that, as a fan. Then there was not including him, and hiding him, in some way, like the way they talk about the Emperor in A New Hope – they don’t ever show him. And there’s that option. But we need an antagonist for our rebels. If we made it Tarkin or Vader, you knew that nothing bad could ever happen to them. So whenever there’s a confrontation, or a threat, you knew they wouldn’t die or get hurt. So we wanted someone where you wouldn’t know the outcome. And that led to Krennic.

And I fell in love with Krennic, and I’m really happy with what Ben (Mendelsohn) did in the film – he’s an amazing actor. But then, for him to have some meat, Ben needs someone that he’s got problems with, and is conflicting with. Every character in the movie usually has someone, even on their own side, that they’re butting up against. It’s through that conflict you hear their problems and frustrations and what they want. It’s very typical storytelling. So we then either had to invent a third-tier character, or, go with the obvious: Tarkin. It just wanted to be Tarkin.

On recreating Cushing’s performance with Industrial Light and Magic

It was a case of giving ILM all the time they could possibly have to try and get it right, so the first shots we ever gave as VFX shots to be done were Tarkin and Leia. You’d be this really annoying person, because, more than anything else in the world, we are designed to recognise the human face. Even just looking at you now, I can tell if you’re slightly embarrassed, or happy, or awkward. All these subtleties. But I couldn’t tell you why I know that. I couldn’t write it down, or explain to someone else what’s happening with your eyes or mouth.

So you can be really good at criticising this sort of stuff, but no good at helping. And there are some really talented people at ILM that have spent their careers analysing faces. I remember one review [of the edit] we did, a few weeks away from finishing. A whole bunch of us were at Skywalker Ranch, watching Tarkin on this big screen. [People were criticising the Cushing “close-ups”] and at the end of it, Kathy Kennedy’s assistant, who had never been involved in any of these meetings, said to someone, ‘Why were they so hard on that actor?’ And [the Disney top brass] said, ‘It wasn’t an actor, it was CGI.’ The fact that she said that, we all looked at each other, and we like, ‘Oh, maybe we’re closer than we think.’ We kept working on it until they prised it out of my hands and the film came out.

On processing Carrie Fisher’s death soon after the film came out

I’ve not really sat and watched the film since the opening weekend, when Carrie was still with us. I just feel the whole thing was, to be honest, one big love letter to Carrie. What we’re doing with the entire movie is all building to that one moment [of the Death Star plans being handed to Princess Leia] where we hand the baton to her, to go off and make that film that inspired us all as kids. So it couldn’t have ended better from that point of view. It’s just sad – I was always thinking that I would get to meet her and talk to her at some point about it, and I never really met her properly. I walked past her once on the set of Episode VII, I was meeting some of the crew, and she walked past me, and I had a little fanboy freakout.

When it came to our film, it went so late with that shot, trying to get it right, that Kathy took it down personally, on a laptop, and showed her. And initially Carrie apparently didn’t realise it was CGI, and wondered if it was footage which we had taken from somewhere else. Which was really reassuring for us. I thought, one day, either at the premiere, or one of these conventions, I’d get a chance to talk to her. And it’s really sad that it’s not going to get to happen.

On the reshoots necessary for the final act

We had a baseline, which is what you have. And what we had was really good. But Star Wars can’t be really good, it has to be excellent. And so we were just trying everything to keep trying to push it up there. On a normal film you wouldn’t get the chance, you would cut it together, and you maybe would be lucky to do a couple of things in post. Because it’s Star Wars, and they had all these resources, they were like, just do whatever you need to do. Keep trying stuff. And so we did. So a screenwriter would write something, and delete it, and then rewrite it, and delete it. And then an actor would do something in a take, and try something completely different. There are a million branches that we went down. But ultimately the film that’s come out is the movie. And that’s canon. That’s what happened in a galaxy far, far away.

On having to jettison ideas as not ‘Star Wars-y’ enough

That’s the most common conversation: Is it Star Wars? There’s this fine line where, you go slightly to the left, and it feels like another sci-fi film, it’s not Star Wars. It’s good, maybe, but it’s some other science fiction franchise. And if you go slightly to the right, you’re just copying George Lucas. So to navigate this path constantly, where it feels like Star Wars, but it feels, as much as it can, like something you’ve not seen in Star Wars before, was the constant adjustment. That’s why there are so many anecdotes about everything we tried out.

On micromanaging his shoots

Everyone, my age especially, who’s got to wherever they are in the industry now, is there because they got inspired by Star Wars, and they all gravitate to wanting to work on a Star Wars film. You end up working with the best of the best, so it’s quite easy to relinquish tasks to everyone. But you feel like a bad parent to the film if you’re not giving every second you can to it. You know you’re going to live with this for the rest of your life, you know you’re going to be meeting people and talking about it, whatever happens for the rest of your career. So you just feel like in that window of two and half years, no matter what’s happening, you have to just keep getting up and keep trying, to do the best you can until the release date.

Thank god there’s a release date, because I think I’d be working on it for another 30 years! If they were saying, ‘Just give it us when it’s perfect’, you would never give it away.