Going Rogue II: The Script

Writing didn't come naturally, and in the 1974 interview, Lucas said, "I bleed onto the page. It's just awful."

“If we're following his metaphor, his scripting process for Star Wars was changing veins”

as often as possible. Lucas's script went through a few wildly different drafts before it started to resemble the Star Wars we know. There was a two-page idea about the story of Mace Windy, a Jedi Bendo, chronicled by his Patawan Learner's C2th thought.

Then there was a 10-page treatment that borrowed heavily from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, following an outlaw princess and her protector, the grizzled old general Luke Skywalker, with Skywalker training a bunch of orphaned boys to fight and fly and take down the Empire home planet in one man fighter spacecraft. In the first complete draft of the script, an 18-year-old Anakin Star Killer was trained as

a Jedi by General Luke Skywalker after his brother-deak was killed by his Sith Knight, Anakin and Luke even had a laser sword fight over the fact that Anakin was just too goddamn horny. By draft 2, Luke was the lead. The abandoned son of a man known as the Star Killer, the last Jedi. Han Solo went from a green skin daily into a cabin boy to a pirate, layer went from

an unnamed goddess like Princess to Luke's cousin to Rebel Commander. A2D2 had dialogue in some drafts.

“You have to remember when talking about early drafts of Star Wars, that at the time George”

Lucas wasn't Mr. Star Wars, he was Mr. American graffiti.

His 1973 nostalgia-fueled film about the early 60s was made for less than a million dollars,

and it was seriously doubted by Han's studio universal, who only funded the film because Lucas's friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola had signed on as a producer. The exact set universal didn't get the film. They cut scenes, delayed the film's release, and basically left American graffiti in limbo for almost a year.

When it was finally released, it was a hit. It made $55 million in 1973 alone, and today it has made about $200 million when you add in video and re-releases, making it one of the most financially successful films of all time compared to budget. So when George Lucas was writing Star Wars, the stunning success of American graffiti in

spite of studio skepticism gave him a lot of regal room when the script looked rough.

“When it came time to find directors for its much-hyped new Star Wars films, Lucas' film”

and Disney went looking for the next George Lucas. JJ Abrams was an obvious easy choice for episode 7. His 2009 reboot of Star Trek not only proved that he could make a big budget wider peel version of a nerd classic franchise, but as a film, it has a lot more in common with a new hope than it does with really any Star Trek show or movie.

With the start of the new trilogy in safe hands, Lucas' film could take some risks with their directors for the standalone anthology films. Phil Lord and Chris Miller were proven animation and live-action comedy directors who had turned 21 Jump Street from a forgotten TV show into a massive box-offer's success with their distinctive high-energy comic style that just doesn't leave time between jokes.

Josh Trank was a buzzy 20-something whose first film Chronicle and indie-found footage superhero

movie had already gotten him the job of rebooting the Fantastic Four for Fox. Gary Thadwoods was a British director who, like Josh Trank, had made a big impression with his low-budget sci-fi debut monsters and had already been hand-picked to reboot Godzilla for Warner Bros. Both Trank and Edwards would be making a Star Wars movie as their third film.

And Lord and Miller, while more experience, would only be doing their third live-action film. They were all bright young men coming off surprise successes and all of them loved Star Wars. They fit them old of fanboy authors who would treat the established Star Wars canon with respect, but still want to break new ground.

Gary Thadwoods was the only one to finish his film. This is going rogue, the story of Rogue One. I'm your host, Tancy Garden, and in this episode, Rogue One funds its director and writers. While Lucasfilm tries to work out what exactly a Star Wars anthology film is. Until 2016, every Star Wars film centered on Skywalker Family drama, but the galaxy had

always felt larger than that.

Part of the charm of the original trilogy was that the universe of Star Wars felt lived in. It had history and culture and weird little alien dudes who had their own things going on. With these new standalone stories, now officially titled Star Wars anthology movies, Lucasfilm

finally had a chance to explore the rest of that universe. The stories they chose for their first 3 anthology films, Rogue One, Solo, and an ill-fated

Reflect a larger Disney strategy of basically putting out a few options and letting the

market decide what direction the rest of their films would take. Would the audiences rather see a film filling in the backstory of a central character

“like Han, or a film fleshing out one of the most famous events in the Star Wars history?”

Or would they pick a combination of both and go for a bounty hunter film with a fan favourite lead that filled in some of that gap between prequel and original trilogy? One really notable absence from any of these anthology films, though, is the Force. In steering clear of the prequels and leaving room for the sequels, Lucasfilm didn't have a lot of options for Jedi characters in the anthology films.

But the choice not to include any is, well, it's a choice. If you ask anyone what makes a Star Wars movie, they'd probably say, "Light Sabers, the Force, Jedi, Luke Skywalker," avoiding the most famous elements of the Star Wars universe in those first three films, meant deliberately expanding the definition of what a Star Wars movie is.

It laid the groundwork for future films and shows to move even further from the original trilogy. It's an homestay that all of the first anthology films were tied to big, memorable parts

“of the universe, the spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.”

One of the big part of the anthology films, at least early in development, was that they were also going to be lower budget. Lucasfilm were pitching them as the District Nines of the Star Wars universe. Still sci-fi adventure, but more grounded and gritty, and also only costing about $30 million if District 9 was genuinely the framework they were using.

Almost everyone who worked on Rogue One, from John Null to the costume designers to the cinematographers, came in with the understanding that this was going to be a lower budget film than episode 7.

George Lucas had always tried and failed to get Star Wars films done on time and under

budget, especially on a new hope. A big part of the lived-in universe aesthetic that came to define Star Wars was cheapness as much as a conscious choice. Luke Skywalker's pants are bleached Levi's. The stormtrooper armor was made with a repurposed plastic smolder that mostly made fish

ponds and paddling pools. The original light sabers were made from old camera flash bulb handles. But in the time since a new hope, the Star Wars aesthetic and universe had solidified and grown. A lot of it in the Empire strikes back under the eyes of Urban Kirchner, and the franchise

now had a very specific look and feel to keep. Here's Chris Miller in conversation with Gareth Edwards, kind of summing the whole problem up. In District 9, it takes place on Planet Earth, where people hold pencils that are just regular earth pencils and stuff, and in Star Wars, there's not one thing, and one prop, not one

set, not one, anything that you don't create completely new, right? I mean, that's the crazy thing about doing these movies. Beyond just props and set dressing, people expect spectacle in a Star Wars movie. Fast-paced shootouts, big special effects, massive set pieces. They're all as much of how to Star Wars as lightsabers and Jedi.

Despite this, John Noel was certain that destroyer of worlds could be low budget. According to Ryan Church, one of the concept artists who worked on the initial visual development of the film, quote, John had a number in his head that he wanted to be able to make it for, and it was a low, low number, a really low budget.

“So that's why he pitched this neat, lean thing with limited characters.”

Coming off the Force Awakens, we were all blown away because it was the complete opposite of that. He even pitched reusing the sets from TFA just to prove that it could be done. Nulls vibe for destroyer of worlds feels a lot like a B-movie, the original low-budget franchise film.

B-movie's would cut corners by reusing the costumes and sets of bigger, high-budget A-films, and because of that, B-movie's could be a little Schluckier a bit rougher and a bit more adult because they cost less to make, and therefore didn't have to make as much money to break even. And destroyer of worlds probably wasn't going to bring in the wide family-friendly

audience of the Force Awakens. It was a militaristic self-contained heist with shades of zero-dark 30, mission-impossible,

and the guns have never owned.

But to pull it off, they need a director with experience making both lean indie films and big studio franchises. As a kid, Garth Edwoods knew the entire script of a new hope, by heart. For his 30th birthday, he went to Tunisia to see what remains of the Lars home step. He got into filmmaking because it was kind of the closest thing you could do to joining

the Rebel Alliance. If John Null has Uncle Energy, Garth Edwoods vibes like that older cousin at your childhood

and Decepticons.

“You know, an adult with a job, but still a bit of an nerd.”

When directing gigs were thin on the ground after film school, Edwoods taught himself Adobe after effects, and started working as a one-man VFX company. Working for about 15 years in the British TV industry, before directing his first film Monsters in 2010.

Monsters is a post daily in invasion road movie, made for about half a million dollars

and shot in a documentary style across Central America. With Edwoods acting as the film's writer, director, and cinematographer, as well as doing all the visual effects himself. It's the story of a jaded news photographer, Colta, played by Scoot McNary, and his boss's daughter Sam, played by Whitney Abel, who were trying to get out of Central America before

the annual migration of extraterrestrial monsters shut off air and sea travel for the next six months. The alien creatures aren't trying to destroy humanity.

“They've become part of nature, and sometimes nature will wipe out an entire city without”

prejudice. Edwoods was really interested in how society would normalize an alien invasion, and there's some really precient imagery when you watch Monsters now, like a kids cartoon about wearing your gas mask or a giant wall built between America and Mexico, which achieves nothing but the illusion of safety.

The depressing thing about watching Monsters in a post-COVID world is that the death count feels optimistically low. Monsters also has a really well executed tragic ending that I won't spoil, but it threads a needle between a satisfying ending to Colta and Sam's story without feeling saccharine or like a cop-out.

Actors scoot McNary and Whitney Abel improvise most of their dialogue to a rough scene plan, often working with local non-actors, and the result is a really personal, ground-level indie film that happens to be about an alien invasion.

“In an interview with the sci-fi talks podcast at New York Comic-Con in 2011, Edwoods talked”

about making a Monster Movie feel personal. A lot of modern science fiction, not all of that, but a lot of modern stuff that Hollywood produces, the biggest criticism you have when you leave the cinema, or I have is, as

yeah, it was an amazing spectacle, it was a great-looking film, but I really didn't care

about the characters, and I wasn't impatient to story it. The success of Monsters got Edwoods his second film, the 2014 reboot of Godzilla for Warner Brothers. The budget of about $160 million and put the weight of a potential franchise on Edwood's shoulders.

Godzilla is fine. It tries to do something really different, and focus on the human characters rather than monster destruction, but those human characters kind of suck. Despite a really strong opening, the story is restless and doesn't really know where it's going, and while it only runs for two hours, it feels a lot longer.

It's also deathly serious for a movie about a big lizard fighting two big bugs, and while the movie made a profit and launched the Warner Brothers Monsterverse, basically none of the characters from it appear in any of the other films. Godzilla is nowhere near as interesting as Monsters, and at least part of that is because it had the resources and slick professionalism that Monsters didn't.

On Monsters, Edwoods and his crew could fit in a single van, and find the story and its moments in the real world before refining it, and adding in those sci-fi elements in post.

Monsters is grounded in a way that Godzilla could never be, because, at the end of the day,

Godzilla is a Godzilla movie. Also, going to throw it out there, Shin Godzilla, way better. Edwoods was finishing up post-production on Godzilla, when he met with Lucasfilm story group leader Kiri Hart, to discuss doing as Star Wars anthology film. Disney's offices were in the attend minute walk from the Warner Brothers lot, so Edwoods took

a lunch break and pretended he was just going to get some food. Edwoods was really worn down from doing Godzilla, and when Kiri Hart sent him John Null's pitch for destroyer of worlds that weekend, Edwoods hoped that it had suck, so that he could pass on the film without feeling like he'd missed out. John Null was also a bit of a personal hero for Garret Edwards, when he'd started out

working in visual effects, Edwoods had devoured the making of featureettes for the Phantom Menace, which Null was the VFX supervisor on. They'd met once at a screening of Pacific Rim, where Edwoods said he sounded like a geeky fanboy, and was a bit embarrassed about it. Edwoods assumed that Lucasfilm were talking to 20 other directors about destroyer of worlds,

but they weren't. And whilst Star Wars veteran Lawrence Kasden was already locked in to write an anthology film, he'd been pulled on to episode 7, delaying the Han Solo Film's development.

to Fox to write and produce X-Men Days of Future Past, and Josh Trank was also locked in

“at Fox on Fantastic Four until mid-2015.”

But Disney's studio head Alan Horn had promised one Star Wars film every year, and the release date for the first anthology film had to be December 2016. Destroyer of worlds, which had only been pitched in May 2013, was now in prime position to be the first stand-alone Star Wars film. The timeline is a little weekly, but Edwoods was probably speaking to Lucasfilm in late 2013,

giving him three years to turn a six-page pitch and some initial visual development into an entire film. A film that had to come out by December 2016. Edwoods was actually already attached to Direct Godzilla 2 and 3, but Godzilla 2 didn't have a script yet, and legendary entertainment CEO Thomas Tull would later say that it

had always been the plan for Edwoods to direct a different film between Godzilla's, although

at time of recording, Edwoods has not returned to the franchise and has no announced intention of doing so. So, Garith Edwoods committed to Rogue One.

“He still had to finish Godzilla, which had a few months of post-left.”

But by Christmas 2013, Garith Edwoods was on board to spend the next three years of his life in a galaxy far, far away. Not that he could tell anyone, his NDA was so tight that he couldn't tell his family what he had signed on for, even when they gave him Star Wars merch for Christmas. Garry Witter also grew up with the original Star Wars trilogy.

His favourite was Return of the Jedi, and when the new films were announced, he rang his agent as he was sure every writer in town was doing, and said he wanted to be a part of it. When Witter was sent Null's treatment, he was surprised to realise it was a feature film. While Witter had written the screenplays for after Earth and Book of Eli, he was best known

for his writing on games, like the Walking Dead and Pray.

He had a meeting with John Null and Kerry Hard and the general story group, and basically

pitch the ideas and influences that he wanted to bring to Null's pitch, which he explained on the Rule of Two podcast. I basically pitched him like my whole idea, was like basically this is a World War II men on a mission mood. Like I love those movies when I was a kid, I love guns and have their own, I love

the dirty dozen, all that kind of stuff, Kelly's heroes, where he equals dare. It was drawing on all of those classic World War II influences, and then I also meant the other thing I mentioned was 0.30, I thought this movie could have like a 0.30 kind of vibe, and I imagined genders is kind of character as much like Jessica Chastains character in the one person going, you know, she's saying, you know, a summer been London's in

this house, you got to listen to me and take the seriously, I imagined genders the one person

“in the rebellion saying the rebels that the Empire's building this thing, and you have to”

take me seriously. I've got all this evidence that the Empire's building this thing that would come to me known as Deathstar, I need to take me seriously, that was going to make my way in, and they found subsequently after I got the job, George showed me the book that he used to pitch Kathy Kennedy on making the movie in the first place, and it had all these references

in it, and I was flipping through it, it was dirty dozen and Kelly's heroes and 0.30, and it was just all the same, we were just on the same page in terms of what we thought like the cinematic reference points for the movie were. Gareth Edwards and Gary Witter were announced as the director and writer of an untitled Star Wars anthology film in May 2014, a few weeks later, Josh Trank was also announced

as the director of an upcoming film. No details were given, just the fact that they were going to be making standalone films in the Star Wars universe. But by the time that they were announced, Witter and Edwards had already gotten stuck into making changes to Null's original treatment.

The alien, center, and Lunak were cut. K2SO was changed from a rebel tactician droid to a reprogrammed imperial droid, with Witter giving him an "Servic Sense of Humor" as a byproduct of the reprogramming. Sorgarera was added when Edwards and Witter wanted a Colonel Kurt's style rebel character, and Kerry Hart suggested saw, since he was a character George Lucas had created, who didn't

have the same baggage as other legacy characters. Other characters from John Null's pitch were streamlined. The male lead became a combination of drain overs, Jaros Kestel and Krenic, who was probably named Willick's Cree, although for clarity's sake, I am still going to be referring to that character as Cassian.

But the biggest change that Edwards and Witter made was shifting the focus of the film to Gen. According to Lucasfilm creative executive Rain Robert's, quote, "John's pitch was really an ensemble piece. The emotional components were spread out among more of the characters.

But when Gareth came in, he became interested in telling a much more personal story about a singular protagonist.

The hero was always a girl named Gin, but Gareth wanted to explore her origins as the

Gin was aged down from her 40s to her 20s, and her spotted family from Null's pitch were

“replaced by an imperial engineer father, a younger brother she had to protect, and a Jedi”

in hiding mother.

Although Jedi Mum was one of the first ideas next, so she was turned into a regular

murdered mum. Despite its title, John Null's pitch didn't seem to have an open-hymer analog, so Galyn also was given that role, designing the Death Star and becoming a reluctant destroyer of worlds. It was wanted to approach Gin as an anti-lux guy walker. Luke was a farm kid who leaves home to go to war, but Gin was a child of war finally finding

her home. When Luke's family was a mystery he had to uncover, Gin knew exactly what had happened to her, and wanted to get as far away as she could from their legacy. And while Luke was male and Gin was female, Edwood's deliberately avoided emphasizing Gin's gender during story development.

“He told Daily Beast, quote, "We were really keen not to view this character as a woman”

and have heard two things because she's a woman, and just view her as a really cool character

that we like, and we just happened to cast a female." We tried to do that trick, they did on Alien, where Ripley was written as a man's role, and at the last minute they cast a female. So at the start, we tried to write Gin as a guy, just to get it off the ground, and then tried not to do anything to pander to the fact that she's female.

I personally don't agree with this approach to writing female characters, because it hinges on the assumption that there are two types of people, women, and people, and the only way to write a woman who is people is to pretend she's not a woman. To be fair to Edwood's, Gin is a capable, intelligent, and complicated character, and she doesn't ever face the same implicit risk of gendered violence that characters like

Laya and even more recently, Rey.

“Laya might've killed the heart who put her in a gold bikini, but she's still ended”

up in the bikini. And while Rey is often an active review of sexist stereotypes, she still gets carried off unconscious and bridal style by Kylo Ren in the Force Awakens. But kind of undercutting the idea that Gin was being written without a gender is the fact that in Witter's draft, she and Cassian had a much more prominent romantic subplot, which

is hard to imagine them genuinely doing if Gin was being written as a dude. Not unless everyone got real cool about a lot of stuff very quickly. Another issue with writing characters, quote without gender, is that it makes male characters the default, and it's hard to ignore the fact that at some point after John Null's pitch, the one other female character in Rogue One disappeared.

And this is an entirely backed up, but I'm pretty sure Rey Tala was cut by Witter, since

in all my research on his drafts, she has never been mentioned.

There's a few genuinely good reasons to cut Rey, at this point Gin had become her own pilot with her own ship, and with Gin now aged down, the old versus young, jaded versus idealist dynamic between Gin and Rey are probably just wouldn't have worked. The name Rey Tala would later be recycled, as an alias used by Sabine Ren in an episode of Star Wars Rebels, written by Gary Witter.

Gary Witter's script opened with an opening crawl, before going to Gin's idyllic childhood on a lush green family homestead with her loving mother and father. This was immediately ruined by Crennic, who showed up killed Gin's mother and kidnapped her father for his project. Gin was chased down by stormtroopers across the cornfields, but rescued at the last second

by Sorgarera, who then raised Gin and taught her terrace carcy, a Jedi fighting hand-to-hand combat technique from a long forgotten PS1 game. But to 15 years later, and to rebel sergeant Gin Erso, in the midst of a covert assault on an Imperial weapons development facility on the planet Edo. With her were reprogrammed in Piro enjoyed K2SO and rebel soldier Cassian, not his name.

During their covert mission, they found the laser array from the Death Star being constructed, but they didn't really know it's purpose. And in a stroke of bad luck, Crennic was also there to conduct a final inspection on the weapon. I'm not sure if in this draft Gin knew that her dad was on Edo, but he also was.

But before the rebels could get any good evidence of what ever was going on, the Imperial facility was bombed by Sorgarera and his splinter group of rebels. Galen Erso was mortally wounded in the attack, and Gin managed to get her father back to a rebel base, but he died shortly after they got there. But not before telling Gin that he put a floor in the Death Star, she just had to find

the plans to be able to exploit it. Gin then travelled to Ordmentele, a planet mentioned briefly in Empire Strikes Back,

And she brought Cassian along to, not knowing that he was a double agent who was feeding

information to Crennic in the Empire.

“Crennic meanwhile went to chat to Vader, at some point, in all this other action.”

I'm not really sure chronologically where, and also Taken was there, but they didn't have that annoying boss Credit stealing dynamic. And learned from the arms dealer that Sorgarera was on a nearby moon. She went to speak with her estranged foster father. Unfortunately, Cassian also now knew Sorgarera's location, so it was only a matter of time

until Crennic did, and Crennic decided to show off his shiny new weapon by destroying Sorgarera's moon. Sorgarera died facing off with the Death Star, while Gin narrowly escaped. Gin figured that this was just a few too many shitty coincidences and exposed Cassian as spy, but after seeing the whole genocidal weapon that the Empire had developed, Cassian had

a change of heart and stuck with the rebellion. Also because my dude was down bad. Rebel Command, who up until now were divided by fictional infighting, united in the face

“of an existential threat and planned an attack on Scarif to steal the Death Star plans.”

The attack was led by Gin and had two distinct phases. Gin, Cassian and K2 dressed as Imperials, and infiltrated the dart of Alt to steal the plans, while the rebels staged an attack as a distraction, to cover for our heroes who were already inside. It was a clockwork World War II capable of kind of planned with a bit of paranoid zero-dark

30 flavor, since Gin was on the inside working with a known traitor, who was desperately trying to win back her trust and maybe had a thing for her. In another case of Ups or Bad luck, Crennic was also on Scarif at the same time as the rebels. Gin and Cassian got the plans, but K2SO was killed on the beach in battle, and

only seeing one way out, the Empire chose to fire the Death Star at Scarif, but Gin and Cassian managed to get picked up by Admiral Radis' Rebelship just in time and taken off planet. Crennic also managed to survive the blast, and got rescued by Darth Vader, who promptly killed him for his failure.

Meanwhile, Gin and Cassian transmitted the Death Star plans shipped to ship over to Princess Leia on the 10-2-5, before Vader caught up with them. This is Leia booked it out of there, but Radis' ship was destroyed, leaving nothing but debris floating in the in-key blackness of space. And an escape port, which Gin and Cassian were squirreled away in hiding among the trash.

Then, and this is less substantiated than anything else I've just said, but apparently, this dropped in and out in a wedding. Playing aside, Gin and Cassian's survival came from an assumption by Weta and Edwards that, even though none of these characters are seen again in the Star Wars universe, Disney would insist that at least some of them survived.

Even though Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith, both have kind of downer endings, everyone just took it as red that there was no way that Disney would sign off on a popcorn film that ended with the on-screen deaths of basically every character, especially in the first of the new series of films. Here's Gary Witter on IGNs Watch from Home Theater in 2020.

Gary Witter and I talked about it, it was one of the very first conversations we had.

“I think it was Gary at the port office, I think this is a movie.”

I think they all have to die, that this is a movie about sacrifice. And so this is really, really important Star Wars history that was seeing here, the character's recognized that it's perhaps fitting that they died, but we thought I'm

gonna go Disney or Never Let us do it, though we will fall in love with this idea of killing

off all the characters, Disney won't let us do it, and when we'll have our hearts broken. So we didn't follow through on our initial creative instincts, and I wish we had. Witter's draft had a lot of different influences on it, mostly trying to reconcile two different tones, the paranoid modern thriller and a World War II adventure film. There's a lot of really direct parallels to 1961's The Guns of Never Own, like a sheer

cliff climbing sequence on Edo, and the mole in the team who explains the run of bad luck that the heroes have had. Jin's mission for the true, while the audience knows what she's gonna find is very zero-dark 30. The opening scene when Crenic comes for Galena, so was directly influenced by the opening

of Ingloryous Bastards. You can also see a lot of shades of Witter's favorite Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi.

Particularly in the third act battle that tracks one group of characters on the ground on

one mission, while others were staging a different attack in the sky. Gary Witter also came up with a film's title, Rogue One, which is kind of weird considering that in his draft, Jin's mission isn't a rogue mission, it's sanctioned by the Rebel Alliance. The title came from her call sign, which was Rogue Leader, the same call sign that Luke Skywalker has in the Empire Strikes Back.

Rogue Leader was the other potential name that Witter put forward for a vote, but everyone chose Rogue One instead.

There was always an appearance from Darth Vader, and once John Nolan showed everyone that

“Iolem was up to the challenge, Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Taken was resurrected for the film,”

as well as the young Princess Lair. Rogue One also had the difficult task of tying up a heap of narrative loose ends and contradictions from a new hope. Some of these are obvious, like Galen, Erso's deliberate sabotage of the Death Star, to explain why a major battle station would have such an obvious weakness in several decades

of very tired Star Wars jokes here. This idea was all Gary Witter, because John Nolan maintained that a station is because the Death Star was bound to have more than one flaw, which is the most VFX supervisor answer I've ever heard.

Some of the fixes are smaller, like the original Red 5 Xwing Pilot, who gets an on-screen

death to explain why that call sign is available when Luke joins the rebellion a few days later.

“Some of the other retroactive fixes are niche bordering on pedantic, like there's inconsistent”

references in a new hope to the Death Star plans being sent as a transmission, or transmissions, which is solved in the film by gin beaming the plans up as multiple chunks of one file, like a bit torrent. While Gary Witter worked on the script, Garth Edwards was working intensively with content duct artists on the style and look of Rogue One.

In very early development, the team took real-life war photography and photoshopped rebel helmets and stormtroopers into them, trying to capture the look of a more grounded real-world war aesthetic that Edwards wanted to bring to the film. Later, Garth Edwards and Concept artist Maddlesop and John McCoy gathered in Edwards' flat to work on a blend of storyboards and concept art, where they tried to create iconic

images and then link them together into a scene. One of the images were riffs on Ralph Macquarie's concept art from the original Star Wars and someone who takes entirely. One of them was based on an area 51 alien encounter that Garth Edwards and Maddlesop had while they were working on Godzilla.

The broader Rogue One development team worked from a mantra of not how it was, but how you remember it. Designs didn't have to be slavishly accurate to the original Star Wars films, but they needed to capture the feeling of watching those films as a kid. The deserts are more orange, the ad arts, a taller and slimmer, the facial hair is better

kept. A rough ratio of 80% new material to 20% alt was encouraged. Back in the 70s, the original models for the Star Wars spacecraft had been made by kit-bashing the parts of multiple model weapons kits and vehicles together. So John Nolan, the ILM team, developed a digital library of parts that could be used

to build ships and fixtures for Rogue One, taking that original hand-built design aesthetic and applying it to an entirely CG world. The team went through over 500 ship designs before settling on the U-wing, with the brief that you had to feel like you wanted to pick it up and play with it if you were a kid. As part of his commitment to a lower budget film for Rogue One, Garth Edwards agreed with

ILM that regardless of his mostly unplanned shooting style, he'd hand in a film with less than 600 visual effects shots. But not nothing, but for comparison, the Force Awakens has 2100 VFX shots. Monsters had 250, all of which Garth Edwards had done himself, and Garth Zilla had about 960, which is half as many as your average monster movie, but on average, these were

also twice as long as most VFX shots. There were very distinct storytelling pushes behind a lot of the design decisions at this stage. The Art of Rogue One, co-production designer Doug Chang explains how, quote, "In designing the overall look of the movie, we knew that it was going to begin with our heroine story

arc from a perfect memory of home, and that a trauma would shift the tone of the movie, taking her to a dark place that parallels what's going on in her mind at the time. As she progresses and her purpose becomes clearer, the setting some cells become brighter, until the very end is staged in another idyllic environment, because her mind is clear."

“There's another key creative who joined the Rogue One team in September 2014, during”

development, editor Colin Gaudy. He'd worked with Garth Edwards on Monsters, and some of his earlier TV stuff, and Gaudy would end up working on Rogue One for the next 27 months.

He originally came on for just 3 months, and actually missed the first call from Lucasfilm

to talk about the film, because he dropped his phone in the bath. Here's Gaudy explaining his original job on Rogue One to the film you mentioned, podcast. So I came on it really for like 3 months, as kind of a trial thing, to do the story real for Darith, which was a presentation thing we did to Lucasfilm, where we basically, we

had the story points, each scene was described roughly as the what each scene was, so young

“dinner, so as this girl growing up sees her parents, the time her parents get shot, and”

goes into hiding is rescue by Sorgere, you know that kind of, and so I would cut that together with the art concept work, the concept artwork done by the art department Lucasfilm, which were huge paint, you know, paint digital paintings, and they would occupy the full frame, and then down this corner here, one quarter of the screen, would be the movie clip to represent that.

So for instance, I would take once upon a time in the west, Henry Fonda walking through the cornfield to the house, killing everybody, that's clinic turning up on, you know, but it wasn't, I didn't just lift that scene entirely, it was shot by shot, so Vader's shuttle comes down from Return of the Jedi lands on the planet, to, you know, the homestead from the searches, John Ford's searches, whereby they realise they're under, they're

going to rush and get out to the Indians, coming, cut back to Henry Fonda walking through

“the cornfield, cut back to the little girl going through the tunnel from Leon, you know,”

Natalie Portner, cut to Henry Fonda walking through the court, and it was all shot by shot basis, and it was, the whole movie was ran to ours, and, and it just kept, so we had a dialogue from the original scenes, and then captions to explain what was, so Jen runs across the, through the cornfields, she'd by stormtroopers, and it was all a proof of concept. Gareth Edwards watched it and described it as the most surreal movie he'd ever seen, and

sent it around the office, so everyone would be on the same page about the film's pacing, tone, and general influences. According to Colin Gaudy in another interview with Yahoo's Tom Butler, the story real was also used to, quote, "work out how much dialogue they actually needed in the film."

Gareth Edwards was still working on the first draft of Rogue One at this point, and while

it's common for the wider team to work from a story breakdown before the screenplay is finished, the idea of handing a writer a ghost version of a film before they finished their script and saying this is what they now have to match is either genius or making a film backwards. When I first read about the story real years ago, it was with a lot less context, and I thought it actually explained why Rogue One felt so uneven and disjointed.

The script wasn't written, it was assembled according to a list of references, and once you know that you can't help trying to work out which scenes are made out of what parts. Jen's interrogation by the rebel council is Ripley's debrief from Aliens. The escape from Jeddah is the sandstorm from Mad Max Fury Road. Jen trying to get to her father around the Alliance bombs is forward trying to get to his

father around the muto's in Godzilla, and Jen and Cassian's final moments are cold during Sam's last moments in monsters. But it turns out, I was very wrong to think that the story real explained how Rogue One ended up the way it did. The story real was made so early in Rogue One's development that to really say it had

any effect on the final version, is giving it a lot of credit, if anything, it was made about a completely different version of the script and a different version of the movie. But the story real still sticks in my mind, because it's such a deliberate kind of planned way to make a film, and it's also the opposite of the way that Garith Edwards works. We'll talk a lot more about Edward's directorial style next episode, but the story real

hints at a bigger recurring issue on Rogue One, spending months building a very deliberate, well set out plan, and then abandoning it on the day in the name of spontaneity. You're also going to be hearing a lot more from Colin Gaudy throughout these episodes,

“honestly because he's delightful, every interview I've heard from him, I'm like, "I want”

to know more about this dude." He's also been really honest about the editing process on Rogue One, probably more honest than he should have been, and while he doesn't sugarcoat it, he also has such an infectious joy and love for the project that you can't help kind of getting sucked into it. Also, important note for your mind's eye, he looks like Arthur Weasley just coming back

from a fishing trip. 2014 was an okay year for Disney, but not a great one. They released four of the top 10 films at the U.S. box office, but three of those were Marvel movies, Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America, The Winter Soldier, and Big Hero 6.

Maleficent made around $750 million, but it also cost somewhere between $180 and $260 million,

so the return on investment wasn't great considering the size of investment. Also, 2014 was the first year since Disney bought Pixar that the animation studio didn't

good dinosaur.

“Overall, the entire vibe of Disney in 2014 was one of waiting for 2015 when the studio would”

be releasing an Avengers film, two Pixar's and a Star Wars. Towards the end of 2014, Gary Widow was finishing his draft of Rogue One, and in another part of the Lucasfilm building, another writer was finishing their draft of the Star Wars movie. Ryan Johnson, who handed in the script for the last Jedi 15 months before he began production.

It's hard to nail down exact dates, but it is entirely possible that the shooting script

for the last Jedi was basically locked before the first draft of Rogue One.

In January 2015, Gary Widow finished up on Rogue One after completing the first draft of the screenplay. He shares a story credit with John Null on the final film. A story credit versus a screenplay credit is kind of a complicated question, but a good rule of thumb is that story credits usually apply to those who've laid the groundwork

for the film in terms of character plot and structure, while screenplay credits go to later

“writers who can usually point at specific lines of dialogue or actions or decisions that”

end up in the final film. Also while we're here, fun fact, you can tell by the credits to a film whether the writers worked together or separately. If they worked separately, the word 'and' will appear between their names, but if they worked together, there's an 'amper' sound.

So for example, the Force Awakens was written by Michael Hunt and JJ Abrams, Ampersander Lawrence Causton. Within a few weeks of Gary Widow leaving Rogue One, he was replaced by Chris Whites, another lifelong Star Wars fan who'd been seven when a new hope came out and saw it 19 times in cinema.

Whites career kind of refuses categorisation. He wrote Dreamworks Ants, then co-directed American Pie, then wrote and directed about a boy, then wrote and directed the Golden Compass before directing Twilight New Moon. When asked if there was a common theme in his work, Whites said it was centering secondary characters and exploring the emotional relationships between people.

Whites was hired as a writer, but he is also a director and an Oscar nominee, which is two things he'd share with every subsequent writer on Rogue One. In 2015, Whites had just done the script for Cinderella, so he was in Disney's Good Books

when he finally got a meeting at Lucasfilm.

And as he laid to tell the cult pop-sharp podcast, he spent that meeting consumed by one fear. So I didn't know until I was in the room what which one it was going to be. So this is a hot take, but I really don't like Boba Fett, and I was worried it's going to be Boba Fett because I was going to be like, "This is my life" right?

I was like, "I feel like I'm pretty, I feel like I'm pretty bitter, like I get to work on Star Wars when it's fucking Boba Fett.

“I feel by accident, that's how bad I am."”

When Chris Whites read Gary Witter's draft of Rogue One, his first call was that they just really needed everyone to die, and in spite of what everyone had thought, Kathleen Kennedy agreed. Edwoods would spend the next two years worrying that Disney were about to ask him to make sure at least one character survived, but from this point on, the ending was set.

The Times places and orders of those deaths would change multiple times, but from this point of development on, everyone died. Chris Whites did a lot of structural streamlining to Gary Witter's script. Edud was moved from the beginning of the film to the middle, an odd man-tell in Sorgarera's

moonbase were collapsed into one planet, Jeddo, which saved around $20 million at the

budget. Characters of Bodhirook, turret in way, and Bayes Malbus were all added under Whites' watch. And Bayes Malbus is actually named after one of Whites's D&D characters. While Jen was still a rebel commander, Chris Whites toured with the idea of making her

a deserter, or a scavenger, which had to be scrapped when the Rogue One team were finally allowed to see some details from episode 7. Cassian was still a compromised imperial spy in the rebellion, with the added rationale that Sorgarera had killed some of his comrades, so Cassian was working with the Empire on the condition that he'd be able to kill Sor.

Which pretty significantly shifts his relationship with Jen as Sor's kind of fostered daughter, and they did still have a relationship at this point. In fact, Whites had said he wouldn't be surprised if some of those relationships scenes were shot. Whites hasn't said much about Bodhi, but I assume he was added mostly as a plot necessity.

With Edo moved to the middle of the film, they needed an imperial defector to get the information out to kick off the entire plot, so an imperial defector who also happened to

Whites also added in the subplot about Tarkin's stealing credit for Cranix's work on the Death Star.

“The third act mission to scare if became a rogue, unsanctioned mission, where Jen Cassian and”

K2 still infiltrated an imperial data vault to steal the plans, but then had to cross

the battlefield to a second tower to transmit them to the rebel fleet.

Chris White's draft also dealt head on with the absence of the Jedi. According to White's, Garithead was wanted to build a world where there was no direct evidence of the force, in a time before Luke Skywalker, and before Hope. Chirith was developed with Garithead was as a force priest, and Baze was a murderer and a criminal who had a weird symbiotic, possibly co-dependent relationship with Chirith.

Baze did the murdering, and Chirith would forgive him. Later on, they were both made guardians of the wills, part of an older order of non-Jedi, who still worshiped and followed the force. Their name comes from a framing device in one of the very early drafts of Star Wars, where George Lucas wanted each film in the series to be an entry in the journal of the wills,

“an ancient document that set down the adventures of the Jedi Bendo.”

Later, George Lucas shifted the journal of the wills into a prophecy that Fatul did chosen one, called The Sun of Suns, who wielded the force of others to protect the innocent and fight the dark side of the force, which was known as the Bogen. Darth Vader was strong with the Bogen. Luke, at one point, told Han Solo to drive the Bogen from your mind.

If you've never warned your thongs and trackies down to the servo for a Packadari's or

a Zupert duper, Bogen is the Australian equivalent of both Redneck and Chaff. It's a very versatile word. One of the really fascinating things from Chris White's script that actually ended up in the final film, albeit in a very different shape, is the Borgullet. Soars weird octopus tentacle creature, who appears briefly to white Bodies mind.

In White's script, the Borgullet had a much more prominent speaking role.

“It fed off emotions and acted as a memory trader, which meant there was a space-hannable”

actor scene between Jen and the Borgullet, where Jen traded her traumatic childhood memories for information. Narratively, the Borgullet was a way to get inside Jen's head.

A closed off rebel commander who has been hiding her childhood trauma isn't really

going to talk about it with anyone, so creating the Borgullet gave away for White's to directly get to the heart of the issue and really tell Jen's story in a way that Jen wouldn't be willing to herself. In early 2015, when Chris White had just started work on his draft, casting began. There were two frontrunners for the role of Jen herself, Tatiana Maslenay and Runei Mara.

Felicity Jones, who was winning a lot of awards for the theory of everything, was on a nice to have list, but she was kept on the back burner because she was locked into Ron Howard's inferno, which would be shooting until July 2015. But Kathleen Kennedy loved Jones in her breakout film like crazy, and the start date for Rogue One was pushed back multiple times.

Whether that was to accommodate Jones, or because the script wasn't ready, or for any of a number of other reasons, it's hard to tell. For a lot of the team, pushing the start date back gave them more time to prep, like director of photography Greg Frazier, who got more time to work on the LED volume screens with John Null.

With shooting pushed back to August, in February 2015, Felicity Jones was announced as the lead of the still untied old Star Wars standalone film. Concept art that must have been done after the casting, since it features Jones' faces the model for Jen, shows Jen piloting the u-wing in a rebel helmet covered in tally marks, which in universe is a way of counting your kills.

In April 2015, Garrethead was fronted up to Star Wars Celebration and a Hime, the Lucas film approved fan convention. He went partly as a fan and mostly as a director, taking the stage with Kathleen Kennedy and Kirihart to debut a quote unquote trailer that announced the film's title as Star Wars Rogue One.

The trailer was entirely previous, because the film hadn't actually started shooting yet, and we'll talk much more in depth about this and the other trailers in an upcoming episode. But the vibes were good, Edwards was meant to be chatting alongside Josh Trank, the other director who'd been confirmed to be making an anthology film, but Trank dropped out at the last minute, tweeting that he had the worst flu of his life.

Trank really was sick, but he'd also been told to stay home by Lucasfilm, who were reviewing whether or not to fire in. Trank's fan testing for reboot at Fox was in chaos, due to be released at a few months

instead of Trank.

“The way Trank tells it, he was set up to fail.”

Surrounded by more experience crew who weren't interested in hearing the opinions of a guy who'd made one pretty good film, but even after reading Trank's perspective in a very sympathetic profile piece written by Matt Patches, it's hard not to feel like Trank kind of set himself up to fail in a lot of ways too. He spent six months working with writer Jeremy Slater on the story, and just didn't

really like anything. He didn't like the fantastic four and he didn't want to be making a movie about them.

Even after Fox brought in other writers, the film didn't have a third act.

Trank's cut of the film was Maros and made people uncomfortable, which Trank says was his goal, after he delivered that cut. Studio 20th Century Fox brought in a much more experienced editor, Stephen Rivkin, who had cut Avatar and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films.

“According to Trank, Rivkin chose different takes to him in every single scene of the film,”

and effectively became fantastic fours de facto director, even though his cut of the film required millions of dollars of reshoots to work. Studio director's guild rules, Trank had to be on set for those reshoots, even though they were being run by the film's producers, Kinburg and Parker, which Trank says felt a lot like being castrated.

When it was released, fantastic four was savage by critics, audiences, and Trank, who blamed the studios interference for the film's failure. All this fan four stick drama was happening over at Fox, which at the time was a separate studio to Disney, and it could have all been swept under the rug. If Simon Kinburg, producer of fantastic four, wasn't also one of the writers who'd initially

been brought in to work on the standalone films.

He'd spoken really highly of Josh Trank when Lucasfilm was first interested in him as a director,

and Kinburg was probably attached to produce Trank's film. Kinburg reportedly went to Kathleen Kennedy and, quote, "communicated his displeasure with Trank." Several weeks later, on the same weekend that Avengers Age of Ultron was released, Josh Trank and Lucasfilm quietly released a joint statement about Trank's decision to leave

the untitled star wars film. According to Trank, he quit before they could fire him. Garth Edwoods is, by all reports, a very different guy to Josh Trank. He's older, softly spoken, and came up through television and the smaller British industry rather than being a Hollywood brat like Trank.

Trank was often reported as being distant and isolated on set, where Edwoods is so hands-on that he defaults to operating the camera. By this point, Edwoods had also already finished his second big budget movie, and he'd even weathered production travel on Godzilla when the original producers were fired and a lawsuit hovered over the film until well after it's released.

Rogue One was also in a completely different state of development to Trank's film. Most whites were working on a second draft at the script, where Trank hadn't even started work on his screenplay. They had a lead actor locked in and they'd be in Pinewood in less than six months. Lucasfilm hadn't just seen the scripts for Rogue One, but also the entire visual development

and even a shadow version of the film, and they were so behind it that they were willing to let Edwoods go against all expectations and kill off the entire cast.

“Really, the only thing that Garritheadwoods and Josh Trank had in common was that they'd”

both been hired to make a star Wars anthology movie, and now it was just Edwards. But he wouldn't be alone for long. In July 2015, Phil Lord and Chris Miller were announced as the directors for the untitled Han Solo movie. A month later, on the same day that Lucasfilm announced Rogue One had started shooting,

Colin Trevorot was announced as the director for Star Wars Episode 9, just a month after

the incredible success of his second film, Jurassic World.

Once again, Edwards would be the only one of this group to finish his film. Next time on Going Rogue, we'll be getting into the production of Rogue One. Garritheadwoods philosophy of filmmaking and the problems of making a period film set both in the 70s and in a galaxy far far away. Going Rogue is written and presented by me, Tansy Garden, with editorial assistance from

Charles O'Grady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompatec and Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios, and our logo uses a photo by Anakin Mikkelson. You can find a link to this episode's script with all sources in the episode description, or on the show's Twitter account, going rogue under school pod.

I want to give special credit this episode to the IGN Watch from Home Commentary on Rogue

drafts that I did through the episode.

“If you like in the show, please tell anyone else you think would like it.”

And if you don't like the show, please don't use the internet to tell me that you don't

like the show, or that I sound like Julia Gillard with a cult.

Trust me, I've heard it before.