Gareth Edwards is hang-dog exhausted. Not only has he been working non-stop on “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” for the last two years; there’s no rest for the wicked even just days before it’s due to be released. During the junket for the “Star Wars” spinoff film in San Francisco last weekend, where press were shown 30 minutes of the movie, the filmmaker, who also helmed “Godzilla,” has been subject to unrelenting interviews all day without much break. There’s a Christmas-themed Starbucks cup next to him with his name written on it. The coffee looks cold. The cup looks like it’s been refilled often. When I get to him at the end of the day, I am dead last and Edwards looks bleary-eyed. “Best for last?” I joke nervously, realizing he’s talked to dozens and dozens of journalists before me and wants to go home. “Yes,” he indulges me valiantly. “The rest were just a warm-up; this is going to be the best one,” he says with a tired smile.
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It’s certainly not the best Gareth Edwards ‘Rogue One’ interview, but it’s mine and I make do with the allotted 10 minutes I have with an anxious Lucasfilm staff member hovering around, tired, hungry and waiting to just end this unrelentingly long day already. And it starts rather unceremoniously. I begin, perhaps foolishly, by asking about the title. ‘Rogue One’ is a spin-off movie or a ‘Star Wars Story,’ as the subtitle reads. But originally, when first officially revealed to fans, the title was “Rogue One: Star Wars Anthology.” Why the minor tweak? It appears Edwards was kept in the dark on that decision from the always secretive Lucasfilm braintrust.
“That’s a Kathy question,” he says, talking about Kathleen Kennedy, the president of the company who assumed power after George Lucas sold the company and hightailed it out of Lucasfilm in 2012, $4 billion richer than he already was. You weren’t even involved with that decision at all, I ask? “Nope. I have no idea.” The rest of the interview went more smoothly….
So ILM Creative Chief John Knoll came up with the original ‘Rogue One’ pitch. How did the process evolve with your involvement?
From what I heard, John pitched it to Kathy, the basic idea, and wrote up — I received by email a two-page, little treatment document of this concept, and it obviously evolved a lot more since then, but it was the idea of this woman named Jyn in the Rebellion, and stealing the Death Star plans. And that’s what got me excited about the film when I came on, and from that point on, it was a case of sitting with the writer [ed. Gary Whitta at the time, but several people wrote on the film] and the story group and trying to figure out what that actually means. And where do we even begin? And there was a lot of work to do. We had to flesh and figure it all out. It wasn’t… the original treatment was a travel brochure rather than a map, you know what I mean? It was like a hint of “if you go to this place, it’ll be amazing,” and then we had to sit down and figure out the cartography of what that actually is.
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Was it in the DNA that it was a heist film or war film?
Everyone was trying to figure out what genre it was, trying to label it as that thing, and I’ve always believed myself that “Star Wars” is not one thing. It’s a mixture of things combined, and if you have it as just one thing, it’s not going to work and so it’s part mission movie, part war film, part fairy tale, part samurai, part Western, part all those things. And something that’s missing from a typical mission movie is an emotional center, and so we tried to [answer the question], “What is the connective tissue?” We have all these different ideas: the ensemble mission thing, you’ve got a central heroine, you’ve got the Empire and it’s like, “How does this all connect?”
A connection that really worked, and it probably came out of — I did this documentary for the BBC about Hiroshima, and the parallel to the Death Star is the nuclear bomb and the race to get the weapon during WWII. And the guy who designed it, Robert Oppenheimer, he ended up having a lot of regret and openly spoke about against it. And I really thought that was interesting: someone who was trying to do good, like trying to end a war, but creates something that can be catastrophic, and it’s not black and white. And we felt like we should have a character like this in our movie, and then it became clear at one point that it should be Jyn’s father and then, really, the launch pad of the movie is we’ve got to go find this guy. And once we had that element, that turn key? It was like the Rubik’s cube “click” moment where we’re like, “OK.” Now we still have loads to do and loads to solve and figure out, but that feels like the right setting, and the story all branched out from that one key nugget.
I suppose you then have a theme of conflicted characters. Riz Ahmed’s Bodhi, for example, is a defector from the Empire.
Everyone has that a little bit of that, yeah. I think what’s really nice about all the characters is that they all have their own little journey in the movie and they’re not all in agreement and it’s not conflict for conflict’s sake. You understand everyone’s point of view and agree with them and so it’s hard for everyone to be ok, but the reality is they’re not all going to come out of this well. I think the ensemble interaction — we kept working on each character and making them stronger until they were one of our favorites. Then you take a close look at another character that needs a bit more help and then you try and turn them into your favorite character. And now genuinely, in terms of the core team, I can’t pick a favorite; I really like all of them in their own ways, and they all go through a difficult journey.