Via Empireonline.com:
Rogue One has officially landed. For the Empire Podcast Spoiler Special – available later this week – we spoke to director Gareth Edwards in forensic detail, and gleaned some heretofore hidden secrets from the first Star Wars standalone.
WARNING: Spoilers for Rogue One from the start.
1. Directing Rogue One was like going back to childhood
I was two when Star Wars came out. You grow up with Star Wars figures and AT-ATs and X-Wings, and that’s kind of what you’re promised the world is like. And then suddenly you realise actually it’s a massive lie, you realise life’s actually very boring. Everyone [asks] “wasn’t it crazy doing Star Wars?” And you go, “no actually, it was normal, it was what they advertised in the brochure when we were kids and it was life that was terribly worse”. And so getting to do Star Wars for two years was like going back to normal life, in a weird way. It’s like what you thought it was going to be when you were little.
2. Rogue One is the only Star Wars film Edwards wanted to direct
Honestly, I don’t know what they’re planning for the rest of the films, but I feel like if [I was] offered anything else, even the sagas, I would have been like, “no, I want to do Rogue One,” because that’s connected to the film that started me off wanting to do filmmaking, wanting to do everything.
3. There was a crawl in the script’s first draft
The first screenplay that Gary Whitta wrote had a crawl in it – and you learn doing that that ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’ has four dots in it, not three. You get extra marks for that. And then at some point, probably like six months before we were filming, we were in a meeting, and they talked about not having an opening crawl, because these are standalone films, not part of the sagas. And if I’m honest, there was an initial kind of like, “whaaaa? I want the crawl!” The opening sequence is kind of the crawl of our movie. It’s like the setup. And our film is also born out of a crawl – the reason we exist is because of a previous crawl, so it feels like this infinite loop that will never end. It’s a small thing to give up to get to do Star Wars.
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