Brace yourselves: the relentless Rogue One: A Star Wars Story media onslaught is fast approaching. Gareth Edwards and the cast of Disney and Lucasfilm’s upcoming spinoff anthology flick have already started promoting Rogue One and, during an appearance on French television, the director had some interesting things to say about the movie.
Edwards first confirmed that Luke Skywalker will not appear in the film (not that anyone suspected he would pop up anyway). However, when he was asked about Princess Leia and R2-D2, he merely responded with a suspicious swerve: “I cannot answer.”
Edwards felt liberated to delve deeper into a response when asked about the opening scene of the film. As we already know, there is no opening crawl, but many have speculated as to how the narrative will begin. Here’s what Edwards said: “There is no opening crawl. But there is a prologue at the beginning of the film that takes place 15 years before the action of the film and that is how the action is exposed,” he said via Star Wars News Net.
Our film comes from the text of Episode IV if we give the text, it would be pointless. We really had to differentiate Rogue One from the rest of the saga.
When Edwards was asked if such a set-up was frustrating, he responded: “At the beginning, yes. But the more I thought about it the more it was normal not to have this text. The temptation as a director is to take the most character from other Star Wars films. If that happened, the film would be 10 hours long. We have to make choices. We must cut, because it is a rich universe.”
Edwards was also quizzed on whether there was any major creative clashes with Disney emanating from his initial vision of making a gritty war film set in the Star Wars universe.
“They remembered that idea. We took a real war picture and added elements of Star Wars. It was hard-hitting and I said to Disney that’s what we want to do. They said OK. Disney put a lot of pressure on me to make the film different from the saga instalments.”
Some pretty interesting tidbits from Edwards already and with several weeks of the media tour left, we can expect plenty more insight into the process of
making a Star Wars film that is, by definition, different from the seven we have received since 1977.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be released in UK cinemas on Thursday, 16 December and the US a day later.
Irwin Fletcher
I'm an LA journalist who really lives for his profession. I have also published work as Jane Doe in various mags and newspapers across the globe. I normally write articles that can cause trouble but now I write for FTN because Nerds are never angry, so I feel safe.
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