Page 64 - Star Wars Insider (Special Edition 2019)

ON MAKING A GRITTIER STAR “YOU’VE GOT TO DO ABOUT A THOUSAND

WARS MOVIE DIFFERENT THINGS TOGETHER AND MIX THEM

Gareth Edwards: When we started the whole TOGETHER JUST RIGHT.”—GARETH EDWARDS
process of making Rogue One, Kathy asked,
“How is this going to be different? We need to
differentiate ourselves from the saga.” We started
playing around and experimenting. We took real
war photography, like photographs from Vietnam,
World War II, and the Gulf, and used Photoshop
to put rebel helmets on the soldiers, and give them
rebel guns. We also added some X-wings in the
background instead of fi ghter jets.
People saw these images and said, “Wow. I really
want to see that film.” The studio loved it. They said,

“Just go make that.” That’s kind of what we did.
It was also like being in a war. The fi lm crew
became like the characters, in a way. It’s sort of a
cliché that the process of making a fi lm becomes
like the story you’re telling. In this case, we were
all in the trenches together, like the characters
were trying to steal the Death Star plans, trying
to achieve this impossible task. As a group, we
were trying to make a great Star Wars movie.

ON THE MOST IMPORTANT
INGREDIENT IN A

STAR WARS MOVIE

GE: There’s not an individual thing. It’s not
a case of “As long as you do this, it’s Star Wars
and you’re golden.” It’s more like, “You’ve got to
do about a thousand different things and mix them
all together, and get the balance just right!” It’s
a really tricky thing to emulate what we love about
the original movie, but to tell a different story that
feels fresh. We could have done a very specifi c

genre film and stuck the name Star Wars on it and
said, “That’s our movie.” George Lucas was always
really good at mixing the genres together and
creating this very emotional, mythological story
that just happened to have robots and spaceships
in it. It took us a long time to try and crack that code

and find all those different ingredients that we felt
it needed to have.
ON THE TONE OF ROGUE ONE

GE: We essentially got license to be different on this
movie and take a risk. The great thing about being
a standalone film is we don’t really have to exist for

other movies to continue the story. We could be
brave, and that’s what we did. We were aiming for
something like The Empire Strikes Back. We take
our movie quite seriously, but there’s still a lot of
fun and humor in it.
The story is really about all these different
people from all these different backgrounds that
have very little in common, but they all believe in Director Gareth Edwards
a good future for the galaxy. We are all are better calls the shots on the set
off when we work together than on our own. of Rogue One .

64 INSIDER

30/10/2018 12:00
SWI2019_062_067_Kennedy_Edwards.indd 64 30/10/2018 12:00
SWI2019_062_067_Kennedy_Edwards.indd 64