Going Rogue III: The Shoot

a van.

“Edwards acting as the camera operator and director would pile in with the film's two leads,”

their sound operator, the line producer, a local fixer, and a driver.

The van didn't quite have room for the platoon of armed police that accompanied them pretty much everywhere they went, provided by the government to make sure that they didn't get kidnapped. For three weeks, they drove around Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S., with Edwards giving the actors a rough idea of where the scenes should go and leaving them to improvise dialogue,

actions, and character backstory. For the lead roles of Culter and Sam, Edwards had deliberately cast a real-life couple, script-magnarian Whitney Abel, so that their chemistry could carry the film even when they were reacting to non-existent aliens that Edwards didn't even have a solid design for yet. It often make up details on the spot just to give the actors something to work with.

Anything and everything ended up in the final film, according to Edwards, Sam's frustrated

“helpless fear in a scene where she and Culter are waiting for a bus to leave and take them”

to safety, is actually Whitney Abel wondering when she'd finally get a break to pee. At the end of each shoot day, the van, but not the police, would head back to the hotel where editor Colin Gaudy and his assistant Justin Hall would start to sort through the rushes and clear the memory cards for the next day of shooting. By the end of the three week shoot, there was around 100 hours of footage, not 100 hours

worth of repeated takes of the same scenes, but add-liped moments that never repeated.

The first assembly cut was four hours long. Gaudy printed a big sign for the edit suite that said 90 minutes, and over the next eight months, they got it down to that. Also, spare a thought for Colin Gaudy, who had to cut monsters in Adobe Premiere, because Edwards worked in Adobe's sister product after effects.

Premiere is very good now, I actually use it to edit this podcast. But the 2009 version of Premiere was less good, and Gaudy's project for monsters would regularly crash 30 to 40 times a day. As an editor Colin Gaudy has a rare and interesting perspective on Garethhead with shooting style.

After all, Gaudy is the one who's sought through his rushes and actually finds the footage

that works, as well as seeing all of the footage that doesn't. So here's Colin Gaudy, in 2016, talking about Garethhead with shooting style. Two things that Gareth does a lot, and likes to do, he likes to describe it as, there's two ways of shooting a target, and one is, you put a target on the wall, and you shoot, and you try and hit the ball's eye.

And that's the usual conventional technique of feeling, and the other technique is, shoot the wall, and then when you get the best grouping, go and put your target where that was. And that's actually where it is, joking way, of saying, "Go out and shoot a whole load of material, and then go and find in that material the very best moments, and make your story be that."

This is going rogue, a Lucasfilm story, and in this episode we are going to be talking about Rogue One's principle photography, aka the shoot. We're going to be mostly looking at Garethhead with filmmaking philosophies, and some of the practical aspects of making a movie, as well as the thin line Rogue One had to walk between being a Star Wars story and a Star Wars movie.

I'm your host, Tensie Garden, and fair warning, there is going to be some technical filmmaking stuff in this episode, not just about cinematography, but also production, and direction, and some very detailed stuff about the Chinese box office, but I promise it's interesting,

“and it is relevant to Rogue One, and I think it's actually really vital to understand”

the complexities of big, ten-pull studio filmmaking to understand Rogue One. The cast of Rogue One was announced in August 2015, in a Lucasfilm press release, that also confirmed that Star Wars Rogue One had officially started shooting. Alan Tutik and Mads Mikkelson were the only cast members in this announcement who hadn't already been heavily rumoured to be part of the film, or even straight up announced by Hollywood

Trade Papers. Ben Mendelssohn and Faris Wittaker were the only actors considered for the roles of Crennick and saw, and all of the concept art was done as if they had already been cast. The Diego Luna's self-tapped audition for Cassian, Edwards asked him to make sure that he was holding a "real gun."

Edwards probably meant a decent-looking prop, but it's much funnier to think that he didn't. Resarmed's casting was equally chaotic, he sent Edwards a few different takes on the character body, filmed around his apartment using improvised costumes, and then figured, "What the hell I've got his email," and sent in a few more different takes, and then after he'd gotten

You can see some of them in the Rogue One DVD extras, and there are a lot of fun.

“I made recorded himself doing all of the other lines to play off, and it just gives it that”

little extra bit of being drawn mouth of it. Bays were among the last lead cast. Honkong tabloid Apple Daily reported in July 2015 that Donnie Yan had been cast in Star Wars episode 8 over other actors like Jet Lee and Tony Lung, and that he would be playing a Chinese Jedi who meets Han Solo and becomes his ally. Question of all Star Wars reporting aside, if you recognize the name Apple Daily, that's

because it was one of the few pro-Divocracy news sources in Hong Kong and was forced to cease publication in 2021. For Western audiences, Zhang Wen was probably the least known cast member of Rogue One, but he rules. He's an actor writer and director, and he's 2,000 black comedy devils at the door

went to Khan and won critical acclaim before being banned in China and also getting Wen banned

“from making films at all in China for 7 years. Donnie Yan and Zhang Wen had actually worked together”

previously on the Lost Bladesman, a big budget historical action film that put its worst wig on its biggest star. Both Yan and Wen were encouraged to take roles in Rogue One by their children, and were cast so late in the process that their costumes had been made without the costuming team ever meeting them, and were actually only fitted about a week before they started shooting. Now is as good as time as any to talk about the fact that Star Wars doesn't

have a great history of Asian representation. The films have always borrowed heavily from Asian culture, and Asian filmmakers, particularly Kurosawa, and Asian American creatives like editor Richard Chu and production designer Doug Chang have been instrumental to the success of the films over the

years. Despite that, the closest thing that the first six Star Wars films get to Asian

“representation is the Namoydians, an alien species of racist caricatures. What makes the Namoydians”

even wilder is that George Lucas wrote them as a pretty specific attack on House Republicans, who use underhanded political wheeling and dealing to start wars and enrich themselves. A critique that was so explicit that one of the Namoydians was named "Newt Gunray". Despite this very specific origin, the Namoydians were stiled, designed, and voiced as exaggerated, racist, panacian stereotypes. It's bad. Real bad. The Force Awakens had some minor Asian characters. Jessica Hanwick

appears as an ex-wing pilot, and there's also conjure club, a gang made up of eco-uase, Yanyan Ruhian, and Chitip Arif Rahman, best known to Western audiences as the guys from the raid. But those roles were all cameos, so the choice to make half of Rogue One's heroes, Asian, is a big deal, and a big shift for a franchise used to using Asian costume and culture without ever showing Asian faces. There is of course a cynical take on this. Star Wars has little cultural

currency in China, the world's second biggest box office market, and China also has an import quota that limits the number of Western films that can be released each year. Custing prominent Chinese actors like Yanyan and Wen, is a way to secure one of those few slots allowed for Western film releases in China. Disney first dipped their toes in this strategy with pirates of the Caribbean at World's End, which trumpeted Chalian fat on its posters and marketing while killing

him off less than an hour into the film, and literally giving his ship and title to a white woman. For the Chinese release of the film, Chalian fat's 20 minutes of screen time was actually cut down to just 10 by sensors, 4, and I'm quoting here, "Villifying and defacing the Chinese." The opposite happened with 2013's Iron Man 3, which added in four minutes of additional scenes for its Chinese release, starring Wang's fakeie and fan Bing Bing, who do not appear in

any other scenes of the film. Iron Man 3 made $121 million at the Chinese box office,

but there was backlash to how tokenistic and just poorly made the additional scenes were and the misleading marketing campaign that positioned Wang and fan as leads. This isn't an exclusively Disney problem either. Warner Brothers Kong, Skull Island, had biologist Sandley played by Jing Tian, who only has 11 lines in the entire film. And Paramount's mission impossible ghost protocol had Zang Jitu in a role that was described as integral to a major plot twist

and ended up being less than 40 seconds of screen time. So while casting Chinese stars to ensure a Chinese release is definitely a cynical Hollywood

example I'd use. There's a very blurry line between calling out cynical Hollywood decisions and saying racist shit, and frequently one is used as an excuse to do the other. You only have to look at the response to the last Jedi, where a particular breed of branded dipshits decided to say that Kelly Murray Tran was only cast for Chinese box office, despite Tran being a newcomer

who was Vietnamese American. Along with the cast announcement, Lucasfilm released the first image

from the film. Jin, Cassian, Bodhi, Turut and Bayes, all posed in costume in a crowded cargo bay on Yavin 4. It's a promotional still, not a frame from the film, but looking at this first cast image, it's hard not to compare it to the concept art of John Knull's original team lineup. Gone are the alien's center and blue neck, and there's no K2SO since his design was still being finalised at this point. Felicity Jones Jin is the leader of an all-human group, front and

“center and key lit, the only woman with a guard-ed but confident stance. Jones is also the only”

white actor, as opposed to the default whiteness of Knull's lineup. But with the broodie moody lighting

and the lack of aliens, lightsabers or fantastic landscapes, this first image from Rogue One

could easily be from a Star Wars clone, like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. After being pushed back several times, production on Rogue One began in August 2015, only 16 months before the film was due to be released. Some smaller unit shoots had already happened. Jones, Luna, Edwards, and a small location crew had flown to Jordan in July to shoot the scene where Jin and Cassian first arrive on Jetta and look at the city from a rocky outcrope.

It's one of the film's more iconic scenes where a massive star destroyer hovers over a city with tiny human figures dwarfed in the foreground. If you've seen Rogue One about 25 times and are insane, you might have noticed that this is the only scene in the film where Jin has bangs, because Felicity Jones was still growing them out from Inferno and had probably only wrapped a

“week or two beforehand. Jin is also honestly a pretty different character in this one scene.”

She's much more engaged and sarcastic and more militaristic in her body language and actions. Cassian seems to be her equal partner rather than a borderline babysitter, and there's a surprising amount of trust to their relationship that vanishes by the next scene. Rehearsals for Rogue One will limit it, since Felicity Jones only wrapped on Ron Howard's Inferno in late July, and a decent amount of her prep time needed to be dedicated to stunt

and fight training. She actually started her training for Jin while she was still shooting in Furno in Florence. She binge watched music videos, especially Florence and the machine, to create a physicality for Jin, that was a bit like a cage down a mall. Forest Whittaker prepared for his role as saw by watching the Clone Wars, and tied his take on the character to the fact that saw had been trained as a terrorist incident by the man who would

become Darth Vader. Ben Mendelssohn did the very Australian thing of building Crennick's character from the fact that, quote, "He's not a born officer guy. He's a guy that worked his way up and regard the officer classes just not worth their salt." Speaking of Australians, Rogue One now had a director of photography, Greg Frazier, who had previously worked on Brightstar, Snow White in the Huntsman, and Zero Dark 30. Here's Garithead Woods on the director's cut, talking about his

first meeting with Frazier. Getting to make a film like Star Wars, he gets to meet all the

talented people in the world, you never want to meet. I would start every conversation with, I did a very

low budget independent film first, and I got to a big budget Hollywood movie. There's pros and cons to both, and this is all the problems I had when I got to do a big movie, and I don't want to make numerous stakes on this one, and started to explain all the sorts of things I didn't want to do, like having marks for the actors, and letting it be a more organic, and more free form, maybe even handheld cameras. I sat down with Greg, and I started to do the same spiel, and he said, "Can

I just say something," and I said, "Okay," and he said, "I've didn't let a lot of low budget

“independent films, and I got to do some big blockbusters, and I really think there's a middle”

ground that's really good. I want to be more organic." He said, "The spiel that I normally say back to me before I said it, and it was like you had me at hello. You know, it was, it was great." Adorable. Between the two of them, Edwards and Frazier started to nail down the tone and ethos of the Rogue One shoot. In many ways, Rogue One is a period piece. Not only does it

piece within the Star Wars universe. While the Force Awakens would set long enough after the original

films to effectively act as a sequel, Rogue One goes back in time, pre-creating the days before

“a new hope, but not how it was. How you remember it.”

If you want an academic excuse to watch some Star Wars, put on a new hope and count how many shots aren't on a tripod. I got five. There's some handheld when R2 is being captured by Jawers, a dolly shot in the meeting of the Imperial Commanders, a little bit of handheld in the trash compactor and some tight dolly's when Han is being chased by storm troopers. And that's about it. There's plenty of shots that pan or tilt and some focus pools that feel like they're

pushing in, but for most of the film, the camera is pretty much welded to the tripod on a big wide. The Empire Strikes Back has a lot more camera movement, and that's as much a budget-free thing as a stylistic one, but the sweeping shots of half-dagger bar and best been often get

welded to the cultural image of what is Star Wars, in spite of a very static tripod heavy first

“film. The thing is, a new hope didn't really look the way that Jawers Lucas wanted it to.”

The French new wave had well and truly started by the mid-70s, taking advantage of smaller, more manageable cameras to do lighter, faster and loose shots, and giving birth to cinema verite and observational documentary style of narrative filmmaking. George Lucas wanted a new hope to follow in that style, and make Star Wars feel like a thing that had happened that he and his crew just happened to be there to film. Lucas hired director of photography Gilbert Taylor

of the strength of Taylor's documentary style work on the Beatles Hard Days Night, and Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strange Love. To get the siege of the Air Force Base in Doctor Strange Love, Taylor and Kubrick had operated smaller, array-flex cameras in the middle of the action, like combat cameramen, dressed in uniform in case they ended up in each other's shots.

“Guilt Taylor and George Lucas immediately clash over a whole bunch of things.”

According to Taylor, Lucas, quote, "Avoided all meetings and contact with me from day one, so I read the extra-long script many times and made my own decisions as to how I would shoot the picture. I took it upon myself to experiment with photographing the lightsavours and other things on stage before we moved on to our two weeks of location work in Tunisia. When they got to Tunisia, Lucas wanted a heavily diffused, almost muddy look,

which, when combined with the Freak Rainstorm, meant you could barely see R2 or C3PO in most of their desert wandering. When the shoot moved into studio, the sets were, according to Taylor, like a coal mine and almost impossible to light. Taylor took to cutting holes in the wall so that he could actually get lights in. The bright clean cinematography of Star Wars, which so perfectly captures the optimism of early space operas, was basically all Guilt Taylor.

Although he had a pretty rough time on set, Taylor always held Star Wars as one of the high

points of his career. Saying quote, "I am most happy to be remembered as the man who said the look for Star Wars. I wanted to give it a unique visual style that would distinguish it from other films in the science fiction genre. I wanted Star Wars to have clarity, because I don't think space is out of focus." When it came to shooting Rogue One, Garth Edwards was finally able to realise George Lucas's

documentary vision. And that was explicitly what he wanted to do. In the art of Rogue One, he says quote, "I look at Star Wars as a real historical event that took place in the universe, and George Lucas was there with his crew to capture it. And now we're there with our cameras and our crew filming it as it passes through us. There's something I love about organic realism in movies. When you come in with a plan, it can feel true prescribed in a bit false. But when it looks

like you're capturing the images, like you're watching them unfold in real time, it just feels more real." To achieve this sense of organic realism, Edwards would approach every day with minimal rehearsals, often only running through bigger scenes for blocking and rough camera placement the night before shooting. The Tancrade scene on Jetta, where Jen and Cassie and get caught in the crossfire between the empire and source revolutionaries, was completely

unplanned apart from piratenics. Edwards, often operating the camera himself, would move around

new ideas and actions at the actors from behind camera. Every single take looked different.

“To match this shooting style, ILM built digital renders of the space battle scenes that allowed”

Edwards to use a virtual camera to find shots much like he would on set. Think of it like a video game where you can move the camera around to get different views of the same three-dimensional assets. Edwards could go into a rough 3D space and find the best shot, which would then be cleaned up and finished by ILM. Rogue One has two distinct visual styles, a guerilla cinema verite rebel style, and a controlled 70s imperial style. The majority of Jen's story is shot

almost like a conflict documentary with handheld cameras and incredibly shallow depth of field and messy opportunistic shot composition, especially in action scenes, where the camera feels like it's in the thick of it just trying to get the shots as they happen. The more controlled imperial style is the opposite. It's all smoothed dollies and steady counts, carefully brooding lighting and striking very intentional shot composition. It's all very 70s and pretty guilt tailor, although

with much, much less lighting. The realism of the rebel style is particularly interesting because it's often chasing a real-world look in entirely artificial environments. One of the most traditionally cinematic shots of Jen holding her mother's kyber crystal necklace in something close to prayer

“is lit with a natural key light coming in through the u-rings window. The light slices diagonally”

across her face and is pretty harsh in a kind of real, flawed way, like when you glance over at someone in the passenger seat of a car on a bright summer's day. Everything about this shot, the set, the lighting, the window, the spaceship that Jen is on, all of it is artificial. It's all a fake thing built to make this movie, but the effort made to make it look naturally flawed, really does sell the reality of the image and the moment. Initially, Edwards really clearly delineated

these two shooting styles. The controlled empire style and the handheld rebels, but over time, Edwards found that level of separation creatively restrictive. He's still stuck with the two different shooting styles just with the less rigid line between them. He started choosing styles seen to scene, but even that was two controlled and planned, and eventually the decision between controlled and guerrilla styles was done on a shot by shot basis. In the final film, the controlled

empire style tends to crop up when authority is present. Jen's interrogation by the rebel alliance, where she is essentially a prisoner, is mostly on tripop and steady counts. Without clear rules for the two styles, Edwards was also able to play with switching between them for direct contrast.

The first scene between Cranic and Galen is initially very controlled and static,

but as soon as the death trooper starts searching the property for Jen, it switches to handheld. During the attack on Scaroth, Jen, Cassian and K2's infiltration of the imperial facility is all steady count, while the rebels setting up explosive outside is mostly handheld. Sometimes these switches in style are incredibly small. Right after Jedder is destroyed, Cranic and Taken get into a public yelling match, and the whole thing is dollied apart from one loose

close-up of Cranic that gives you a tiny glimpse into how unhinged he is about the whole situation. But there are also less good examples of this. Like in Jen's interrogation, I mentioned before that it is mostly shot in a controlled, authoritative style, but it also has two very random handheld singles of a couple of generals who don't have any lines in the scene. The most charitable reading of this particular example is that it's meant to show that these guys are more sympathetic,

than the rest of the rebel leadership, which is why they're not shot in a kind of imposing style,

but the less charitable reading is that these two characters appear in the third act,

and it felt jarring for them to only show up there, so they went back and tried to find

“rushes of them in that scene, and the only thing they had was a handheld.”

In the interest of spontaneity and capturing the moment, Gareth Edwards encouraged the actors to improvise. With such a diverse group of actors from different schools of training and practice, this meant wildly different things to different people. For Alan Tudick, who was onset in a motion capture suit to play K2SO, improvisation meant throwing in jokes and new lines and taking

blunt thanks to his reprogramming, so a shocked reaction from another cast member actually fitted

“perfectly with the character. One of the best jokes in the film when K2 slaps Cassian while pretending”

to be an imperial droid was completely improvised. In the film you can actually see Diego learn a covering his face to hide the fact that he's laughing through most of the take. Tudick's improv brought a lot of much needed humour to rogue one, but for an act like Ben Mendelssohn improvisation means something completely different to throwing out jokes. Mendelssohn's stuck to the script, but gave a completely different performance for each take,

changing the blocking motivations and intentions of the character. Doing a smiling chronic in one take and a furious chronic in the next. Mendelssohn was singled out by editor Colin Gaudy as the hardest actor in the film to edit because no two takes were the same. Trying to get continuity from his scene was pulling teeth because he'd often be in a completely

“different place physically for each take of the same line. Another issue with doing a lot of improv”

is that Rogue One wasn't shot chronologically, meaning that Rizarmad, who'd done so many different

options for Bodhi in his audition, shot his death scene on his second day and was effectively

locked into his character's arc from that point. He could improvise, sure, but only really to one end for the character which he'd determined on his second day of shooting. It's also worth mentioning that four of the eight main cast members of Rogue One are not native English speakers, which makes improvise a very different, much more complicated ask. I want to make it clear I'm not diminishing the language skills of the cast. I just want to highlight how incredibly

hard it is to both act and react to new lines in your second, third or even fourth language, while also having actions and line suggestions thrown at you from off camera.

“Rogue One also had indie hour and hour at the end of each day to get shots that looked good.”

These shots weren't necessarily scripted or planned or even scheduled, but the time was there if something struck Edward's and it allowed him some artistic freedom over this very large complicated film. Here's Edward's explaining how they ended up with one of the more iconic indie hour shots. Felicity in the tunnel where the lights come on around her. We finished a shot and she just started walking to the next shot, which would be at the end of the tunnel and

as she walked, someone switched the lights on because we were about to now do the tunnel and they were where they turned on and they went like this and she just had someone called her and she just looked round a little bit and I was like oh my god that looked great and it was like stop stop stop stop like everyone stopped like this will take like 10 seconds please just roll the camera and it was like Felicity just just just just turned round and I just get it like

just walk away and Felicity you know she looked round and we and then obviously 10 seconds turned into like half an hour and we probably did like 17 takes and that ended and is that feeling of like what was that for and it's like I don't know it just felt good. Very few of the shots from indie hour made it into the final cut of Rogue One. There's a lot of reasons for that but the main one is that images shot for the sake of being cool images

really add to a story without a set purpose or home for these shots most of them were replaced by standard coverage that could advance the film's story. On a film like monsters a beautiful shot can just be a beautiful shot for its own sake because the story is elastic and being decided in the edit but on Rogue One there's an entire galaxy of backstory and narrative to get through. The Indiana shots might have felt good in the moment but ultimately most of them didn't actually

achieve anything. Rogue One had location shoots in Iceland, Jordan and the Maldives with studio scenes shot at Pinewood in England. The original Star Wars trilogy was also shot in England at the less glamorous and cheaper L's tree studios in the 70s and 80s but Rogue One received a

$45 million tax credit to shoot in the UK. A few things were lost or changed in the

translation from design to real-world location. While location scouting in Iceland for a lush green or so-family homestead for the film's opening, Edwards was struck by the black sand beaches of their backup location and decided to film the scenes of Jin's childhood there, which meant that the early idea of mirroring Jin's character arc in the physical locations of the film kind of had to be dropped. The cycle of idyllic childhood murky adulthood and finally clear

miserable muddy adulthood and finally warm sandy death. Jedda was originally designed as a

“freezing desert planet with snow on top of the sand but that didn't really read on camera so”

the snow and coldness was dropped. A lot of behind the scenes stuff talks about how Jedda was meant to look like Vishy French territory during World War II but the bustling market scenes end up looking a lot closer to contemporary images of Syria and the Gaza Strip. By this point the film had definitely been bumped up from a district nine budget. It had six separate sound stages at Pinewood which is big money, big space, big crude affiliate.

John Null's original idea of reusing the sets from Force Awakens to cut costs wasn't ever realized but in the interest of budget cutting the canary warf tube station became the imperial archives for a few brief scenes. While the Force Awakens stressed its real sets models and locations the marriage of John Null and Garithead Woods meant that Rogue One was a visual effects

“heavy film, often in ways that you wouldn't think. One of the most surprising things to learn”

about the Rogue One shoot was that Garithead Woods avoided using green screen wherever possible. That's not to say he didn't use computer generated backgrounds only that he didn't use green screen. Here's Edward's explaining what that means. And you say to people like on day one I don't want any blue screen don't want any green screen and everyone takes that the wrong way and goes "I want to build the sets" okay oh that's going to be expensive but great yeah and you go

no no no no I just mean at the worst we want a rotoscope round people so we don't want to put a green behind someone we want to put that person in a real environment and then cut around them in the computer and stick the CGI environment behind them because there's something about really being like if we were filming you now and I wanted to replace that world with something kind of red and gray and but a totally different architectural design it would look so much more real just shooting you

now and cutting you out in the computer than if we stuck a big green thing behind you and then

“key there it never the way it bounces off the cheeks and just the ambience of the shot it feels”

fake you can sort of tell when it's happening and so we always try to film real stuff but

we knew we might be replacing as a as a simple role it's like everything within like 10 meter radius of the camera was real gonna stay in the movie and things beyond it might get replaced in most cases there was at least some form of physical reference set the bridge of admiral radicis ship for example was built out of white foam court basically big white polystyrene sets and then all of the console's buttons controls and screens were added by iLM in post

Greg Frazier also worked closely with John Null on developing LED panels that could be used to create more realistic lighting states and backgrounds especially for spacecraft scenes and together they created what would become the volume or stage craft iLM's game changing LED backdrop that would define the Mandalorian there's been a bit of volume discourse lately especially after its disappointing use in the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and I want to say something a bit

radical here how you get a shot doesn't matter whether you shoot on film or digital green screen or stage craft handheld or steady cam primes or zoom scripted or improvised all of these things are tools they all take skill to use well and when they are used well they're both visible and invisible when seen as part of the whole like brush strokes on a canvas where you run into trouble is when a tool is used in place of a skill you can have the best animorphic

prime lens on a brand new RELF but if you're filming paint dry it's still going to look like paint you can have the most expensive special effects but expense isn't a standin for quality when used well iLM's volume looks fantastic and unclockable when it's used poorly it looks bad just like good and bad green screen there's this quote by Steve Yeadlin the cinematographer on the last Jedi that i just keep coming back to which is that no one asks the screen writer what

laptop they use one thing that's really stuck out to me researching rogue one is how often garrithead woods would

have a fairly clear pretty interesting vision and for a whole heap of reasons would never quite

realize it in the hour is a great idea on paper but ultimately it doesn't work with the story that they needed to tell improvised dialogue worked great on monsters but that's because it was set on earth

casts surrounded by decades of lore abandoning a clear delineation between the empire and the

“rebels in terms of shooting style for the sake of spontaneity really just feels like Edward wasn't”

backing his own idea Edward's also said that he was worried that audiences would adjust to the split shooting style and it would quickly lose all impact which feels like a wild over estimation of audiences and a decision really made by someone who makes films instead of watches them to most people cinematography is a subliminal art form felt rather than actively noticed Scott Z Burns 2019 film The Report actually uses a split cinematography style a lot like the one that

Edward's talked about originally using on rogue one in the report it's used to separate the films two time periods and while there is also a very obvious color grade shift between the two the difference between the rough handheld and the static almost sterile tripod shots subconsciously prepares the audience for the two different stories and different time frames one where decisions

“are made in anger and one where they're carefully considered I can understand that it would feel”

creatively restrictive to separate the empire and rebels so completely especially when the film is deeply invested in the shades of grey between the two but the final result of taking away that line between the two shooting styles is this mixed aesthetic that is really interesting when you're

looking out for it analytically for a podcast but on first watch just seems jumbled for every handheld

glimpse at crannies unhinged anger in an otherwise controlled imperial environment there's an unnecessary handheld insert of general dodana in an otherwise smooth interrogation scene the tank read scene on jitter is something I really want to zero in on because it was almost completely unplanned and frankly it shows it's hard to track what's going on at any given moment in the scene even after multiple watches because the perspective and geography isn't clearly

established before it starts and only gets more confusing as it goes on there's a split focus between source rebels who are attacking the tank and gin and cassian who are caught in the cross

“fire which is fine if disorientation is the point but there's also multiple important plot points”

that need to be clearly established in the scene that are really difficult to follow gin gets her classic save the cat moment of rescuing a young girl who's lost in the middle of the gunfight but there's no indication that the kid is there before she needs to be rescued and earlier seen where gin gave the girl an apple was shot but clearly cut for time after rescuing the little girl gin gets stuck in the middle of the battle and has to take shelter behind the tank but source

man is still actively attacking the tank so cassian has to shoot down one of source men to stop

in throwing a grenade that would have hit gin this is seen by source second in command a guy with two

tubes in his face named two tubes and several scenes later after gin and cassian have narrowly escaped two separate squads of stormtroopers two tubes shows up and takes them prisoner to answer for cassian's murder of that one guy who was going to throw a grenade that would have hit gin meaning gin and cassian and their new friends cheer it in bays are taken to source stronghold as captives which is where gin and cassian wanted to go in the first place because that's where

boady the defector is which is what allows the plot to move forwards if that felt rambling and confusing being described imagine how it is to watch especially when the camera is deliberately being operated as if it's a documentary and the operator is struggling to follow the action part of the problem with this scene is definitely editing which we're going to discuss more next episode but given that you can only edit the footage you've got I'd say the footage is more to blame for the confusion

than the edit itself. It's hard to know exactly what the rogue one script looked like during shooting. Chris White said finished up on rogue one when the production moved to London for the shoot in summer of 2015 and thanks to the tight security on Star Wars projects once he and Gary would have finished their drafts they were effectively cut off from the film. White's a script with its rebel commander gin and double agent Cassian was technically the shooting script but beyond

just improvisation and Edward's loose shooting style the script was changing.

The first uncredited writer associated with rogue one was Christopher McCquarie,

no relation to original Star Wars concept artists Ralph McCquarie by the way. Christopher McCquarie is probably best known for writing the usual suspects and writing

McCquarie also has a reputation as a script doctor doing uncredited script work on mission

“impossible 3 World War Z X man and the mummy among other films. A script doctor while not an”

official title is someone who comes in to fix a script quite late in the process often after a shoot has already started when the film just isn't working for whatever reason. A script doctor can do anything from punching up dialogue to changing structure characters relationships backstory tone pacing or any of the many things that come under the umbrella of script problems. Script doctors are usually uncredited and very well paid. Princess layer herself Carrie Fisher was

one of the most in-demand script doctors in the 90s, working on everything from hook to sister act to the Phantom Manus. Reflecting in 2012 Fisher said that she was a good script doctor because quote, "I respect the original tone or dialect of the original and try to rewrite it according to what it is already." In another more sarcastic interview she said her job was to make the

women smarter and the love scenes better. Christopher Macquarie was first linked to Rogue One in

October 2015 when Latino review reported that he had already done a two week polish on the script. It's hard to tell when exactly he would have done this two weeks of script work, but given that his own film mission impossible rogue nation was released in July and Rogue One started shooting in August, it's very unlikely that Christopher Macquarie did his punch up before cameras rolled on Rogue One. Macquarie would not be the only uncredited writer to work on Rogue One.

On the podcast, Happy Sad Confused, Chris White's described the chain of custody like this. Gary Wooder did the first draft and then I came in and did a couple of drafts and after me

“came I think Tony Gilroy Chris from a quarry Scott Burns. I believe David Hart had some notes”

on it and then Tony Gilroy came back on again and it's astonishing to me for my point of view how

it turned out given how many writers were working on it at any time, but I think I'll credit to Gary Thedward's because I think that what he laid down aesthetically and in terms of the feel of the movie is really born out. Couple of notes on that. Firstly, White's probably means Michael Art not David since Michael Art was one of the writers on episode 7 and every single David Art on the internet seems to work in finance. Secondly, White sounds like he's giving a

chronological list complete with Tony Gilroy coming back onto the project as the final credit at the screenwriter. But some rumors from 2016 suggest that Burns was working on the script between white and quarry in 2015. Also, if you've been listening closely, yes, that is the same Scott Burns who wrote and directed the report. The movie I mentioned earlier that really nails

“a split shooting style. It's good, you should go watch it. Regardless of which uncredited writer”

was responsible, it's probably at this point that the character arcs started to streamline. The subplot of Cassian as an imperial spy who wants to kill Sorgararo was dropped in favor of Cassian as a rebel spy who has orders to kill Galina so on site. It's a much cleaner, more self-contained plotline that also makes Cassian much more sympathetic since he is an actively sighting with the guys who built a genocide machine. Jin was moved out of the rebellion.

The film now hard cut from her being rescued as a child by Sorgararo to 15 years later with her as an adult prisoner of the rebel alliance. There's actually a very similar cut in Edwards Godzilla, which goes from Ford Brady watching a nuclear disaster that kills his mother. To Ford is an adult, returning from a tour of duty. It's a cut that works in Godzilla thanks to some very clear, only slightly clunky exposition and a real-world setting. It's not too hard for the audience

to fill in the blanks over the past 15 years of Ford's life. The equivalent cut in Rogue One would have been much more jarring. Jin would have gone from a child being rescued to an adult being held prisoner. With Sorr suddenly out of the picture and even though Jin reveals a few minutes later that she hasn't seen him in a long time, she still doesn't say what happened and the hard cut from rescued child to imprison Adald raises more questions than it could possibly have answered.

The scenes bridging this gap with Jin being rescued from an imperial labor camp by the rebel alliance would be added by Tony Gilroy in a later draft. Also consider this your handheld insert shot of Tony Gilroy in an early group scene, so you recognize him when he shows up and awful lot in the

Woods did on Rogue One that, in my opinion, really work. First obviously is K2SO,

“unleashing Alan Tudig on a Star Wars film was a great call and giving him free reign was an”

even better one. The character design, acting and animation all worked so well as a cohesive whole. The whole cast is really solid, especially Van Mendelsen. Some of the stuff come in the hour that made it into the final film rules. The first shot of Cassian in Jin's interrogation is this brooding silent reaction just barely side lid in teal by a tracking monitor he's leaning up against and it's great. It's a shot that says pay attention to this guy but do not trust him

because he'll listen in the shadows until he has the information that he came for. The reaction shot of Jin on this is great too. You really get the sense that she's scanning the room for potential threats and she has clocked Cassian. The use of practical lighting throughout the film is really great, especially when it throws a pop of colour into the frame. Like that rebel

“interrogation or Vader's Lairon was to far or Jin watching her father's hologram. David Crossman”

and Glen Dylan's costumes are impeccable. They managed to slot seamlessly into the established look of a new hope without feeling like cosplay, especially props for crannix all white outfit which just feels so right for the character who's trying to stand out in a rigid order like the

empire. Also, a director is ultimately responsible for the vibe on set and by all reports,

Rogue One was a pretty fun shoot. Ben Mendelssohn sang to Mads Mikkelson before takes, usually from the Frozen soundtrack. Alan Tudyk bullied Diego Luna by doing a really good impression of him and Diego Luna bullied Alan Tudyk about his ridiculous mocapsuit. Felicity Jones has said that Jin was the most physically demanding role she's ever done. But at the same time, she seems to have really rallished it and also said that she struggled to keep

a straight face in any of her scenes with Alan Tudyk and Diego Luna. There are some really

“solid, great decisions that Garatha had made and honestly, I'd love to have seen a Rogue One”

where he had the time to actually fully invest both in pre and post in the ideas that he wanted

to do. We'll never see it, but it would be nice.

Star Wars Episode 7, the Force Awakens, was released towards the end of Rogue One's Principal Photography and made approximately all the money in the world. It only took 12 days to make a billion dollars and became the highest grossing film at the US box office of all time. Hollywood's famously slippery accounting makes it hard to nail down an exact budget for any major film. But if you take the widely accepted $245 million budget and double it for marketing and advertising

spend, it took Disney less than two weeks to double their investment on the Force Awakens. 2015 was a good year for Disney, between Avengers Age of Ultron, Inside Out and Force Awakens, Disney released three of the top five box office films of the year. And that's even though the Force Awakens was released in late December and was only out for two of the 52 weeks of 2015. The success of the Force Awakens had a knock on effect for Rogue One. The bar had been set

impossibly high, but the idea of releasing a mid-budget district nine-style Star Wars film a year after one of the biggest films of all time was untenable. Rogue One and the Force Awakens were arguably two sides at the same coin. Both had their heartland in a new hope, but were defined as much by the cultural memory of Star Wars as the actual film that they were lifting from. Both had female leads who had to in some way take down a Death Star,

but where the Force Awakens was an optimistic adventure updated for a new generation. Rogue One was a modern look at an old film with modern cynicism and paranoia and grit. Now that the Force Awakens was released, all the elements of Rogue One that were meant to differentiate it. The lower budget, the morally great characters, the grimeo world and the lack of Jedi and Aliens and Optimism, that all started to look like a problem.

Rogue One finished principal photography in February 2016, about nine months before the film was due to the release. Disney and Lucasfilm were determined to stick to their plan to release date. After all, they had promised to Star Wars movie every year. The standard had been set, and there was no way Disney was letting it slip that quickly. In 2019, Colin Gaudy was a guest on the filmmaker's podcast,

Gareth has a really interesting theory, which has never been put into practice because it would

“take somebody with incredible guts to do it. Which is he thinks the best way to make a big studio”

movie were $200 million budget will be to go shoot the film twice. Shoot it. The monster's way with the actors go out and improv it and shoot it with him operating, all improv, do it like that. And then going shoot it with your full unit, your camera cranes and all those things you study comes and then into cut the best version together. Arguably, that's how Rogue One ended up being made.

“Next time on going rogue, the footage has been shot, but now it's time to make it into a film.”

With just nine months before the hard release date, Rogue One is in the edit, and all the issues of shooting for images instead of story are starting to come home to rest. Plus, we'll answer the question that everyone asks when they find out about my Rogue One obsession. Why are the trailers so different from the movie?

“Going rogue is written and presented by me, Tancy Garden,”

with editorial assistant from Charles O'Grady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin MacLeod of Incompetek and Shane Ivers of Silverman Sound Studios, also special thanks to Krasanti, who helped me with the Indonesian pronunciation. Mistakes are mine, not hers. I also want to give special credit this episode to the director's Guild of America's podcast, the director's cut, where a lot of the information from this episode comes from,

and which also just has this really fascinating conversation between Gareth Edwards and Chris Miller, who had just started shooting solo a week before the conversation was taped. It's a time capsule.

And those original movies are basically independent films themselves.

They were made by independent filmmakers, you know, sort of outside the system entirely. And now you're keeping that spirit alive within a giant mega conglomerate. So, congratulations.

No matter how nervous we ever felt though, we always thought this is nothing.

Imagine making the hands solo movie. Those guys can help. Like they're crazy.