Via Ew.com:
Which paths through the galaxy weren’t taken? That’s a question Star Wars fans still have about Rogue One, and EW will be providing answers this week leading up to the movie’s digital debut on Friday. (It’s out on Blu-ray April 4.) Next up in our Rogue One Revelations series:
Jyn’s mother was once a Jedi, and her death would have happened in the prequel trilogy era.
By now we all know Rogue One touches right up against the start of 1977’s original Star Wars, but one early story idea was to have it clearly serve as a bridge to George Lucas’ prequel trilogy and the Clone Wars.
“The prologue, at one point a long time ago, was going to be the Empire coming to kill the Jedi,” says director Gareth Edwards. “And Jyn’s mom was going to be a Jedi.”
The math holds up. If Jyn is in her early to mid-20s for most of the movie, and 19 years have passed between the events of Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, then she would have been about 4 to 6 years old when the Emperor unleashed Order 66 to exterminate the Jedi.
Edwards says the initial prologue concept for Rogue One was, “We were witnessing one of those kills and Krennic would be the person sent to do it.”
Star Wars is full of lost children, striving to survive on their own, relying on the care of others: Luke, Leia and, in a darker sense, Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader himself. In The Force Awakens and the animated Rebels series, Rey, Finn, and Ezra Bridger also fit this archetype of the abandoned innocent who finds a new family in a fight against the forces that stole their loved ones. Chris Weitz, one of the movie’s screenwriters, previously hinted at Jyn’s mother’s mystical origin in an interview with Yahoo Movies, but this is the first time filmmakers have revealed details of that alternate storyline.
The fatal flaw in the concept was that Jyn was never going to become a Force-wielder, so the filmmakers feared her Jedi mother would become a distraction. A tease without a payoff.
“Our instinct told us that we wanted a scene where Jyn is orphaned because of what Krennic does, which sets her on her path of being a child of war,” says Edwards. “The problem was that the second you make her mom a Jedi you spend the entire movie questioning whether Jyn is a Jedi or not. Eventually, we came up with the idea that her father should have designed the Death Star. That became a stronger way into the stealing of the Death Star plans. We let go of the mother being a Jedi, and she became just a rebellious mom.”
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