With the sci-fi feature “The Creator” hitting cinemas, the film’s director Gareth Edwards has been out promoting the film where he’s often asked about the behind-the-scenes truth of what went down on the set of his prior film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”.
Edwards was hired to direct the film and had gotten most of the movie done when “Andor” creator Tony Gilroy came onboard to re-write some of the script – in the process taking over as director for several weeks of extensive reshoots.
Many have wondered how much of what’s left was Edwards’ work and how much was Gilroy’s. Edwards has deflected the questions thus far, and did so again on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week.
However, as part of that interview, he did speak a bit about how he was first hired for the job. It turns out whilst finishing his “Godzilla” film he was offered not one, but two potential ideas for “Star Wars” films and he went with what became “Rogue One”:
“I read one [of the ideas], and in my head, I thought, ‘I can see why they want to do that; I’m not the guy for that; I’m really curious about what this other idea is. I started reading this [Rogue One], and I thought, ‘where is this going?’ and that was the pitch that [Industrial Light & Magic VFX supervisor and CCO] John Knoll did.
It was two pages or so, and I read it, and the whole time, I was still thinking, ‘Where is this going?’ What is this?’ and right at the end, it was, spoiler alert, Princess Leia, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is the connected prequel to ‘A New Hope,’ which is the whole reason I am doing anything.
I spent the first ten or twenty minutes going, ‘You can’t make this film; this is like sacrilegious. This shouldn’t happen,’ and then I realized, ‘Are they offering this to me?'”
The comments confirm Leia’s inclusion was not one of Gilroy’s ideas in the same way the film’s writer earlier this year cleared up the talk about the Vader scene and how Edwards was the one who directed that and not Gilroy.
The obvious question from this talk is what was the first “Star Wars” film pitch that he turned down? Edwards wouldn’t say and indicates Lucasfilm may still want to make it. Asked if it was the now scrapped Boba Fett movie, he responded: “I can’t talk about it because I assume they’re going to make that film at some point, and it’ll be a great movie; I just, it wasn’t.”
He was also asked if it was something reported on publicly before, to which he said: “No comment.” Edwards’ “The Creator” is now in cinemas.
