Via Telegraph.co.uk:
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.
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