Going Rogue V: The Reshoots

adoption of Robert Ludlund's book, The Born Identity.

“Lyman was an indie darling, best known for his micro-budget debut Swingets, but he was”

also a big fan of The Born Books, a universal hope that he would be able to elevate the Born Identity into something more than just a slick thriller. Casey Snyder, the chairman of Universal Pictures at the time, said that she was "intreat" by the pairing of an independent-minded filmmaker with a familiar studio genre. "Look, I'm a moviegoer, and I'm bored.

I'm a tired of movies that all look the same." Lyman wanted to make a character-driven, paranoid thriller, so he teamed up with writer Tony Gilroy, who had written the scripts for Armageddon, proof of life, and the Devil's Advocate. The son of a playwright, who's now been working in the industry for decades, Gilroy likes to say that there's nothing in his life that he didn't pay for by making stuff up.

Gilroy, like Lyman, didn't want to do a straight-screen adoption of Born.

He wanted to flip the dynamic of the book, as he put it in an interview for the film's DVD.

“"The London book is about a guy who thinks that he's a bad guy, and then finds out he's”

a good guy. This is a movie about a guy who works up and thinks why I must be good. I feel good, I'm a nice guy, and then through the movie finds out that he's really bad. If you're gradually found out there are things that you knew how to do, or sort of horrific."

This is coincidentally, the sort of character that Tony Gilroy gravitates towards. Smart, competent men, and they are usually men, who do what needs to be done and do it well, the grey of the morality, the better. These men are normally surrounded by and struggling against a malignant bureaucracy, but facilitates evil in the name of the people it claims to represent, or, as Gilroy put it in

the boring legacy. "We are morally indefensible and absolutely necessary." But getting Tony Gilroy and Doug Lyman's version of Jason Ballon on screen was an uphill battle. Universal might have hired Lyman because they were sick of movies that all looked the same,

but what they really wanted was another studio thriller, just with a coat of independent film maker paint over the top. Lyman clashed with Universal from the very start, initially over the shooting location. Universal wanted him to shoot Montreal as a standard for Paris, which Lyman rightly pointed out, is insane.

Montreal is French speaking, but it doesn't look anything like Paris. The studio also wanted more action scenes, cutting character beats in favor of bigger set pieces. Matt Damon had signed on for the character driven elements of the script, and he wasn't happy with the studio changes, and when he took his complaints to Lyman, Lyman agreed

and tore up the shoot schedule to add back in all those character scenes. The born identities original producer Richard Gladstein had to leave the film, due to his white's difficult pregnancy, and Universal replaced him with Frank Marshall, the legendary producer behind Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, and Diana the Musical. Universal hoped that Marshall would be able to reign Lyman in.

He couldn't. The proxy war between the studio and director turned into an all-out onset war, with Tony Gilroy faxing new pages from New York to Paris almost every day, both following studio notes and then removing them as Lyman demanded. Marshall directed at least one scene that Lyman refused to, and Marshall also claims to have

cut the version of the film that was released. Reflecting in 2005, Frank Marshall said, "I'm not saying I directed the movie, but as the producer, it was my job to get the movie finished." Doug Lyman disputes this. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal about the troubled production, Universal Pictures Chairman

Stacey Snyder said something that would echo through the next two decades of studio film making. "We want to be daring, we want to take risks, but you can't just say let's be bold and daring without parameters."

When the board identity finally wrapped, it was $8 million over budget and several weeks

behind schedule.

“Those weeks behind schedule turned out to be crucial, because the film had to be delayed”

from its original release date of September 7, 2001. Tony Gilroy would later say that 9/11 saved the board identity, because all of a sudden you couldn't have bombs in movies, which gave Universal Time to fix the film and also meant that the final action scenes had to be scaled back to avoid mindless violence, which was Lyman and Gilroy's goal all along.

The film ended up doing four separate rounds of reshutes. When it was finally released in June 2002, the board identity was a massive hit, Universal immediately greenlit a sequel, the Born Supremacy, to be directed by Paul Greengrass instead

Had a Tony Gilroy stuck around for the sequels, but he clashed pretty seriously with Greengrass on the next two Born Films.

“In between Born Movies, Tony Gilroy directed a couple of films, an earned an Oscar”

nomination for his first film, Michael Clayton. When Paul Greengrass couldn't put a script together for the fourth Born Movie, Gilroy stepped up and became the writer-director of the Born Legacy, aka The One Without Matt Damon. If I had to pick a word to describe Tony Gilroy's films, it would be slick.

While his scripts are really interested in moral conviction and human messiness, as a director, there's a really steady confidence to the way he constructs scenes, and he uses all of the tools he has as a filmmaker to really hit the tone that he's going for, whether that's cold, corporate carelessness in Clayton, or just unrelenting horniness in duplicity. Even the Born Legacy has a very deliberate intriguing style, and while it still uses

the series's signature shaky cam, it's always motivated.

Going back to the Doug Lyman's style of an acoustic thriller, rather than Paul Greengrass's almost hyperactive camera and editing.

“But the Born Legacy came with controversy.”

Matt Damon, who had refused to do another Born Movie without Greengrass, retaliated very publicly and very petally against Tony Gilroy. In a 2011 GQ profile, there was meant to be promoting the "fun family romp" we bought a zoo. Damon described Gilroy's draft for the Born Automatum as "unreadable, terrible, and embarrassing,"

saying that if he put it up on eBay, it would end Tony Gilroy's career. Damon also claimed that when the Born Identity looked like it was going to bomb, Gilroy

used the writer's guilt of America's credit arbitration process against himself to basically

share the blame for the potentially disastrous film. Gilroy does share the writing credit on the Born Identity with William Blake Harron, who was brought in by Universal to add more action scenes, but it's impossible to know where the Gilroy started the arbitration process against himself. The GQ article sets a source that says that Harron was the one who got the guilt involved,

not Gilroy.

“But in addition to that, Damon also said that Gilroy used the arbitration process again”

on Born Automatum, trying to claim sole credit, despite having only written a first draft that was then rewritten by George Nulfi and Scott Z Burns. Whether or not it's true, it's real inside baseball stuff for a profile piece that's meant to be a day at the zoo with Matt Damon, and Damon seemed to have realized that. Before the magazine was printed, he ran GQ to clarify about Gilroy, saying "if I didn't

respect him and appreciate his talent, then I really wouldn't have cared." Saying anything publicly is fucking stupid and unprofessional and just kind of do she of me. But when Matt Damon and Paul Greengrass returned to the Born franchise for 2016's Jason Born, Tony Gilroy was conspicuously absent.

Gilroy found another film to work on in 2016. Rogue One This is going rogue, a Lucasfilm story. I'm Tantigatum and in this episode, we are talking re-shoots.

What they are, who does them, why do they happen, and how they aren't always the book

man of modern cinema, but are usually the symptom of a larger, very different problem. We're also going to talk about ADR, the cheaper, easier and more common cousin of re-shoots, and how sometimes you don't even need to re-shoot when you can just re-cut. Chutes are far more common than most people realize. On a major studio film, they're almost always factored into the schedule, to solve problems

that show up in the edit, things as simple as I-line or as complicated as emotional resonance. A lot of productions call them additional photography rather than re-shoots, because they're in addition to the existing film, not a retake. Most directors would love to have a couple of days for re-shoots after post-production rather than relying on ADR and other in-edit tricks to fix mistakes.

And usually, re-shoots and pickups are fitted so seamlessly into a film that you don't even notice them. For example, there's a shot in the Force Awakens towards the end of the lightsaber fight between Ray and Kylo Ren, when Ray has finally felt the force and is pushing Kylo Ren into retreat.

The film cuts from a cinematic wide of the whole fight to a very brief close-up of Ray, with this furious look teeth-bed bringing her lightsaber down with both hands. This close-up is from the re-shoots. It was suggested by Aver Duvenet, the director of 13th and Selma, who watched an early cut of episode 7 and had a bunch of notes for JJ Abrams, including this shot of Ray,

to really connect the audience to her intensity in the situation. It's less than a second of screen time, but going from the very choreographed stage

really sets the scene apart.

“This kind of shot is often called a pick-up, rather than a re-shoot.”

It's picking up a single shot that wasn't filmed on the day. It's also thanks to rigorous continuity and good editing, almost impossible to tell that this shot is a pick-up. Other re-shoots are more significant, like in Get Out, which originally ended with Chris Strangling Rose to Death before the police show up to arrest him and throw him in jail,

incapable of comprehending what he has really been through. You can watch the original ending online, with commentary from director Jordan Peel, who explains why he made the choice to reshoot the ending.

Now I wrote this movie in the Obama era, and we were in this post-racial lie.

This movie was meant to call out the fact that racism is still simmering underneath the surface. And so this ending to the movie felt like it was the gut punch that the world needed. By the time I was shooting it, it was quite clear that the world had shifted, racism

“was being dealt with, people were woke, and people needed a release and a hero, which”

is why I changed the ending, and had rod sharp at the end. The re-shoot ending has Chris choosing not to kill Rose, and Chris's friend Rod shows up as his night in shining TSA uniform. The re-shoot ending had to match some of the continuity from the original ending, which is why Rod's TSA car has flashing red and blue lights to match the cop car of the original

shots. And it also gives attention and release of thinking that the cops have arrived and the horror of the original ending is about to unfold. There's a heap of other re-shoots and pickups in recent films that have gone relatively unnoticed, from everything everywhere all at once to mission impossible.

But to be fair, there have also been some very high-profile crash and burn re-shoots. Josh Tranks Fantastic Four, David A. Suicide Squad, Zack Snyder's Justice League, Stephen Gaggens do little. A big problem with these films is that you can tell that there have been re-shoots, whether it's from disjointed storylines, uneven tone, or badwigs.

But there's another common factor between these films. On all of them, the studio took control, and the director of the re-shoots was not the original credited director. Rogue One always had re-shoots planned, what wasn't necessarily planned was who was doing them.

On May 30, 2016, Page Six ran the headline Disney execs in a panic over upcoming Star Wars film, which is a fun headline that isn't really backed up by the article. Their anonymous source claimed that the film was in crisis, and that quote, "the execs at Disney are not happy with the movie, and Rogue One will have to go back into four weeks of expensive re-shoots in July."

Barry did the bottom of the article, was the much more balanced reminder that the filmmaking

team and studio always anticipated additional shooting and second unit work.

Probably the most damning quote from their anonymous source was that Disney won't take a backseat and is demanding changes as the movie isn't testing well. This was a lie. Rogue One wasn't testing poorly with audiences, because it wasn't being test-screened at all. The locked-down secrecy of Star Wars meant that the film wouldn't be seen by an external

audience until its premiere in mid December, less than a week before its global release. The secrecy of Rogue One was so closely guarded that the international dub translators who, bear in mind, had read the film's entire script and heard all the audio in order to translate it, were only able to watch a version of Rogue One where everything except the actor's mouths was blacked out.

Editors Colin Gaudy and John Gilroy actually both singled out the lack of test screenings or previews on Rogue One as a unique challenge to working on the film. Test audiences get a bad rap in a lot of film discussion as a kind of lowest common denominator, as clueless rooms who don't get what the director is trying to do.

“But they do play a really important part in the edit process.”

Test audiences are a genuine blank slate for the film, and their reactions are a great way to gauge pacing, vibes, or engagement with people who don't have a vested interest in the film like the creatives do. I personally have a very strong opinion that all films should be screened for at least one audience who have no knowledge of the film's plot or dialogue just to make sure that

the sound mix is actually audible. Even if the Page Six story was a little loose with its language and completely wrong

The director's cut had been handed in, and privately, the producers were worried. Perhaps the most damning praise for Rogue One was from Disney CEO Bob Ager, who used to quarterly earnings call in February to give the film his full support, saying we absolutely love what we've seen so far. Even reports from the time couldn't help snarkly referencing the fact that Christopher

McCquarie's rewrite must have paid off. Ager was obviously going to support a film that his company had invested at least $100 million in by this point, but this glowing praise would be wound back by September, when he'd call Rogue One an experiment of sorts, in a very public lowering of expectations. We spoke a little in episode 3 about the mostly uncredited script doctors who tweaked

the Rogue One screenplay after Chris Whites. According to Whites, that was.

“And after me came, I think Tony Gilroy Chris from McCquarie Scott Burns, I believe David”

aren't had some notes on it, and then Tony Gilroy came back on again. And as I mentioned last time, Whites probably means Michael aren't, not David, and the chronology of this is a little weekly.

But as soon as re-shoots were mentioned, even though they had always been scheduled, the

media feeding frenzy started, and with Christopher McCquarie's name already out there, the conclusion was inevitable. Like Josh Trank and David Ayer and Doug Lyman before him, Garret Edwards was being sideline by the studio, and the re-shoots would be shadow directed by a bigger name in an effort to save the film.

By early June, making Star Wars.net reported from anonymous sources that around 40% of the film was being re-shot, and that the crew would be working six days a week for two months with Christopher McCquarie supervising the re-shoots to ensure that he and Edward's work "on the same page."

“There was also a very persistent rumor that the re-shoots included a scene with old”

an iron rick's hand solo, which is just very funny in hindsight. As the rumors picked up steam, Christopher McCquarie hit back hard, tweeting that he was reading some horseshit rumors and calling on bloggers to do their job and actually ask him what was going on. When Slashfilm actually did reach out to McCquarie, he said, "If there are any

re-shoots on Rogue One, I'm not supervising them. For any outlet to say so is not only wrong, is irresponsible. Marathead Woods is a talented filmmaker who deserves the benefit of the doubt. Making a film, let alone a Star Wars chapter, is hard enough without the internet trying to deliberately downgrade one's years of hard work.

Who does that even serve? Let it make his movie in peace."

“McCquarie was the subject of similar rumors in 2022, when his scriptwork on Top Gun”

Maverick was twisted into rumors that he had shadow directed the film, which is a shame because Christopher McCquarie is one of the few working directors who is really candid about the complexities of big studio action films and how they often require re-shoots. The Empire Spoiler Special interviews with McCquarie, which have sadly been moved behind a paywall, stretch to five hours and get incredibly in-depth on the high-pressure juggling

act of making a massive film, including the importance of re-shoots when an idea that felt right in the script and on the set just doesn't work in the edit.

Tony Gilroy's name was first connected to Rogue One when entertainment weekly tried to

debunk some of the re-shoot rumors. Gilroy had apparently been rewriting dialogue since spring and was, according to EW, planning to step behind the camera as a second unit director on the re-shoots. The unit director is a role of varies from shoot to shoot, but it's basically being in charge of additional shoots that take place at the same time as the main unit.

Usually these days, it's stunt and action sequences. A good rule of thumb is that if the main cast aren't in the shot, it's probably second unit, but that covers establishing shots, prop close ups, stunt scenes with doubles, or cutaways, it's a really broad church. Second unit shots are usually invisible in the final edit, fitting seamlessly in with

main unit shots, much like re-shoots.

The second unit director operates independently from the director, who is usually with

the main unit, but also works for them and serves their vision. When reports of Tony Gilroy working on Rogue One broke, a lot of people incorrectly assumed that Gilroy had been hired because of his history on the born franchise with Frank Marshall, who is married to Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy. But the person who really bought Gilroy on board was Rogue One producer Allison Schema,

who had been an executive VP of production at Universal during the born years, and was according to Gilroy as responsible for the series as anyone else.

the team, and she has since sadly passed away.

Tony Gilroy has only really spoken openly about his role on Rogue One once. In 2018, he did a very candid interview with his friend Brian Coppelman, for his podcast the moment with Brian Coppelman. It's mostly a discussion about Gilroy's film Beirut, but Rogue One comes up, and while Gilroy is cagey about details, he's pretty blunt about the vibes.

They were in such a swamp. They needed you. Well, they were just in so much terrible terrible trouble that all you could do is improve

“their position, and what else can I say that's safe and germane?”

The gumption, the balls of Disney and Bob Eiger, and the people there to gamble on what

they gambled on, is astonishing. Tony Gilroy initially came on to Rogue One to rewrite the film in the edit. This job was to look at what they had, and find solutions to the story problems, drafting new scenes by rearranging the footage and adding new lines and scenes where he had to. We spoke last episode about how fundamentally you can change a story after it's been

shot, particularly with the help of automated dialogue replacement or ADR. Gilroy wrote new pages, and sometimes new scenes trying to clarify and simplify the story around a single theme. Things require a purity, if you look at Rogue, you know, all the difficulty with Rogue and all the confusion of it and all the smart people and all the mess.

And in the end, when you get in there, it's actually very, very simple to solve, because you sort of go, "Oh, this is a movie where folks just look, everyone's going to die." So it's a movie that's sacrifice, so it's all a question about why are all these people

“going to sacrifice, and you need to motivate them with a purity throughout the way, and”

every scene has to be, you know, every scene in the movie has to be about the movie, and so is that a theme that everyone's going to die at sacrifice?

I knew exactly when I saw what I saw, it was instantly clear to me the first thing that

had to happen, which was immediately attractive, and I was willing to go, "I went to London for a week." What do you mean? I saw the purity that was missing, and I saw that at least in terms of one or two of the characters, because who knew how big the fix was going to be, who knew what

people would do. I saw something very, it was like, "Well, you have to, if you do nothing else, do this." Gilroy doesn't normally write specifically around theme like this. He usually approaches his scripts in terms of character and story, and lets a theme emerge organically from those. Michael Clayton, for example, is a film about corruption, and how individuals compromise

themselves in the name of personal comfort. But that sense of compromise and corruption comes through the character of Michael and the situations that he's put in. Deeply in debt, thinking about how he could have done more with his life, worried about the influence he has on his son, and suddenly covering up for a multinational corporation's crimes. But with Roguan, Gilroy wasn't developing characters or their stories, he was being given

a mostly shock film, and a few weeks' worth of reshutes, plus the edit, to reshape an over-complicated multi-genre film, shot in a very different style to his own, into one cohesive hole.

“I think it's also worth noting that unlike about 95% of the creative team on Roguan, Tony”

Gilroy is not a star wars fan, so he didn't have the shy reverence for the source material that Garith Edwards did. Gilroy actually saw this as his superpower on Roguan. He wasn't afraid to make changes to ignore canon to truly separate Roguan tonally from the films that came before. That's not to say that he was an asshole about it. He'd often do a star wars fact check on new pages with Colin Gowdy, resident star wars nerd, who could

clock a potential canon issue from a mile away. But in the end, Tony Gilroy's take on Roguan, a star wars story, is that it isn't really a star wars film. So you love the experience? I can make a star wars movie? Yeah, sure they asked you when you didn't want to go. I don't like it. I don't like it. You don't like the world but it doesn't matter. Beyond doing doesn't appeal to me. No, but I don't think Rogue

really has a star wars movie in many ways. To me, it's a battle of Britain movie. In summer 2016, Tony Gilroy's brother and editor John Gilroy joined J. Bezoson and Colin Gowdy in the Rogue One edit bay. As Lucasfilm were, quote, "reconceptualizing some of the story and there was additional photography and they wanted a fresh pair of eyes in the room." While re-shoots is the word that people fixate on, every effort was made

to fix things in the edit, rather than on set. Gilroy would write new pages of the script, shaping them around what they already had and sticking it to that central theme of sacrifice. Scenes were shuffled and re-ordered and because Rogue One was shot in 6.5K, which is

to cut out characters who were no longer in scenes. Other shots could be flipped, lines

“could be cut, reactions could be moved to change the meaning of a scene. Even if Garth Edwoods”

had managed to maintain a rigid order between shooting styles on set, it probably would've been disrupted in this radical re-edit. As it is, there's the occasional hint that a scene has been re-shuffled from an inconsistent shooting style, like the random handheld inserts in other ways steady scenes. But the biggest tool for filmmakers who want to make late-stage story changes is, by far, ADR. ADR or automated dialogue replacement, also known as looping

or re-dubbing, is the re-recording of audio in a sound booth after the footage is shot, usually with an actor watching the footage back and trying to replicate their performance. Film sets are noisy places, so it's often necessary to record a separate clean version of the film's dialogue for later use. Yorn McGregor only recently revealed that apparently

“every single line in attack of the clones is ADR. Thanks to the cabling of the early digital”

cinema cameras they were using, which happened to buzz at exactly the same frequency as a human voice. ADR isn't just for dialogue. It can add to the illusion that what is happening on screen is a continuous unbroken action, especially in rapid cut sequences. A series of quick cuts can be subtly joined by an unbroken audio clip of the main actor, even if they're just having him puffing their way through an action scene. But ADR is also used to add lines

into a film that weren't previously there. You just need to cut to a shot where you can't see the mouth of the character whose lines are being added. That can be a reaction shot from another character, a wide shot, a prop close up, or if you're quick enough, a shot where the actor's head is angle away from camera. It's much cheaper to re-record dialogue with an actor and a sound

“engineer than it is to get an entire crew back to shoot footage. So ADR is the preferred option.”

As I mentioned last episode, the entire ticking clock of the Death Star closing in on the rebel base in a new hope was added with graphic close ups and ADR. But ADR is usually just used to add context or information that might have felt obvious in the script, but needs clarity in the edit. For example, this line from Rogue One, which is said as Jin and Cassian are about to land on Jeddah. That's Jeddah. Or what's left of it? We find so. We find new father.

The second half of that line, find saw we find your father, plays as Cassian walks away from Jin.

So his face isn't visible and it's a neat little reminder of these characters goal for the next few scenes. Often, that's the real giveaway of ADR. When a character says something that is blunt, plot relevant information that's usually already been mentioned. To be clear, I am not saying thing bad. ADR is often seamlessly added to make it easier for an audience who are watching the film for the first time, rather than a creative who has been living and breathing it for months

if not years. But while we're here, here's my least favorite bit of ADR in Rogue One. That last line, daughter of Galen and Lira, is said over a reaction shot from Ben Mendelsen, who is definitely playing the scene as someone who remembers the last name of the guy that he imprisoned and blackmailed for 15 years. As well as sounding slightly more studio recorded,

this line was clearly added in post and I can understand why it was added since it's the first

time Jin and Krenic have come face to face and Krenic has referred to Jin as the child through the opening sequences, which suggests he maybe didn't know her name. But come on, she says her last name. Adding daughter of reduces everything Jin has done down to genealogy, which admittedly is a very starboard thing to do, but even with the charitable reading that this is Jin avenging her parent's death, it's obvious, it's unnecessary, and it's symptomatic of a

much bigger issue with Jin. One of the downsides of this kind of writing and late edit changes is that it leaves fingerprints. There's a whole lot of things in Rogue One that are left over from previous drafts, things like the bull gullett, the kyber crystals, and the mythology of the guardians of the will, that are all still in the film and are given more attention than world-building details, but don't have a payoff or justify the time that they're given. You also get things that

pay off, but aren't really set up, like Edo as a planet, a concept, and the place where Galina is so is. While they're both hanging out in prison cells, Cassian asks Spodie where Galine is,

and Jin watching her father's hologram. Galina mentions Scarif, but not Edo in the hologram,

“and then the death star fires, and as Jin is being saved from certain death by Cassian for the second”

of five times, Cassian yells that he knows where her father is. You can assume the Bodhi told him in

the previous scene, but the first time he actually hear the word Edo is a couple of scenes later,

when Talkin mentions it as a threat to Krenic. The very next scene after that, General Draven and the Rebels get a message from Cassian saying that Galine has been located on Edo, and then finally we get Cassian telling K2 to set a course for Edo at which point Jin asks if that's where her father is. It all just feels a little disjointed, like the scenes are constantly cutting from the answer to the question that's being asked. And if Edo wasn't established location, like Best Ben or Alderon,

it makes sense to kind of withhold that name, but because it's a new planet, all these really achieves is making Jin the last person to know where her father is and where they're going.

“When you add in the fact that all of source scenes were almost definitely re-shot,”

you can assume that Bodhi's arc was also pretty seriously re-cut, and that there was a

difference scene with Bodhi that's missing here, and all of that's tied up with the ball gullet, which got re-written from space Hannibal Lecter to Amnesia Octopus. Through summer, Rogue One did about six weeks of re-shoots, although some spot re-shoots would continue as late as November. By August 2016, Tony Gilroy was supervising the edit. Some reports from the time peg this as a collaborative relationship with Gareth Edwards. The Hollywood reporters at Anonymous Source,

who definitely wasn't from Lucasfilm or Disney, insisted that there are not two separate editing rooms. They're all in there with their ideas. Tony's a strong force, but they're all

working together. Others put it differently, most notably Mike Fleming Jr., who mentioned kind of off-handedly

“in his deadline column that, quote, "On those Rogue One reshewits, it was Tony Gilroy behind”

the camera, and not Gareth Edwards." Rogue One has four credited writers. Unlike Chris White's Gary Witter and John Noel, Tony Gilroy was largely absent from Lucasfilm's version of Rogue One a history. White's Witter and Noel all appear in promotional features and marketing material, as the film's writers, while Christopher Macquarie's Scott Burns, Michaeline and Tony Gilroy do not. But unlike Macquarie and Burns and aren't, Tony Gilroy is a credited writer on Rogue One.

He shares a screenplay by credit with Chris White's. And the fact that Gilroy is credited at all is kind of in spite of Lucasfilm and Disney's versions of events. And it's also the lynch pin of one of the biggest issues with Rogue One. Here's Gilroy, summing it all up for compliment. You came in and you were just saying you'll understand it's better than anything else. And I know you have a lot of geese. I came in after the director's cut. I have a screenplay credit

in the arbitration. That was easily won. The writers give it of America's credit arbitration process is a bit complicated. But here it is in very broad strokes. The production company sends a list of intended credits to all of the writers who worked on the film and the guild. If one of the writers objects to the credit they've been given, or if a producer or director is requesting a writer's credit, a group of writers guild representatives will look at not just the drafts of the screenplay,

but also at treatments, outlines, and any other written development materials from the film, to work out who gets what credit. They also look at work by writers who aren't seeking a credit. So in this case, Macquarie burns an art. This is, by the way, probably how Chris White's knows who wrote the uncredited drafts on Rogue One after him since Lucasfilm locked him out of the process once he finished on the film. The guild arbiters will read all of that written material

and track not just changing lines of dialogue and big print, but also more of femoral concepts, like dramatic construction, original and different scenes, characterisation and character relationships. And will determine which writer is responsible for what parts of the script and how much that contributes to the overall script in a rough percentage. By the guild's own arbitration handbook, there's been cases where every line of dialogue has changed, but the avatars have found

no significant change in the screenplay as a whole, and vice versa where one scene can change the entire script. And if a film goes into arbitration when the guild hands down their credits, those must be the credits on the final film. The production company or studio cannot change them. To win a screenplay credit in arbitration, like Tony Gilroy did, a writer must have written more than 33% of the final screenplay. Tony Gilroy joined Rogue One after the director's cut.

Some of Tony Gilroy's changes to Rogue One are very clear and tangible. For example,

“all of the scenes between the title card and jins interrogation/breathing by the rebel alliance”

were added by Gilroy in reshutes. It's about seven minutes of screen time and it really clearly sets up three of the main characters, but it also has some later-dition baggage. For

example, the fact that jinn has spent time in an imperial prison camp is never mentioned again

in the entire film. Also, jinn is broken out of prison by K2SO and some rebel soldiers who we don't see again until Scarif, more than an hour later. Even though from a story perspective, this scene would be a perfect opportunity to introduce Cassian and have jinn hit him on the head with a shovel. It sets up an instantly antagonistic relationship with a tinge of reluctant obligation, since jinn might not like Cassian, but he did get out of prison. But then you run into the

issue that in the next scene, Cassian is introduced to jinn like they've never met, so you can cut

“around it or get an insert of Felicity Jones scouting when Cassian is first mentioned. But the”

fact that they never mentioned jinn's time in prison is already a reshute red flag and adding Cassian into that mix just draws more attention to it. It's a six of one, half a dozen of another situation, and my guess is, for disclosure, this is conjecture, that this was not at all the story decision, and Diego Luna just probably wasn't available to shoot the prison break out scenes on the same days as Felicity Jones. Instead, Cassian gets a self-contained introductory

mission on the ring of caffeine, which sets up that the Empire Building is superweapon and that body has information about it and is being held prisoner by saw. It also has the character beat of Cassian killing his informant to make a clean getaway. It's a very Tony Gilroy character moment that doesn't really match with the Cassian of the rest of the film, who is a relatively straight-laced order follower. His arc for the rest of the movie is about struggling to kill one

man to save millions, and while in that first scene Cassian does look a bit disappointed with

“himself about doing a murder, I think it's safe to say that that version of the character would”

slit gail and throat with a box cutter in front of gin if it meant saving the rebellion. You can also tell how late this scene was added to the film from the art of Rogue One, in which all concept art for the ring of caffeine is titled as Planet X, and is awkwardly shoehorned into the final pages, since the book would have been headed to the printers by the time this scene and planet were added to the film. While Chris White's added the subplot of Tarkin and Crenix

petty workplace enemies dynamic, White gives Gilroy credit for perfecting it. This whole dynamic is one of Gilroy's favourite writing tricks, to do exposition, right to bad guys, who hate each other. He does it in the born identity, duplicity, Michael Clayton, and he'll probably do it in and/or, because, well, it works. It's a great way to get around the artificiality of most info dance, because we already know that bad guys are petty our souls. So when they're

reveling in each other's failures by listing what the other character has done, it doesn't feel like bluntx position. It feels like a character choice that happens to get the exposition across.

The third act of the film was also heavily reworked. Editor John Gilroy has said that the

changes were both reorganising existing character beats and completely re-shooting some sequences. Because of the intercut structure of the battle with the characters mostly in different locations, doing different things, changes to any one scene would ripple out across all of the others. The second transmission tower and Gin and Cassian's journey across the battlefield to it were completely cut, with a transmission dish placed on top of the main tower that they had

already infiltrated. The scene where Gin climbs the data banks and perfectly times the jump through a shoot with sharp slicing blades has a lot in common with a scene from the born identity, where Jason Born has to climb down the side of a building with nothing but the narrow gaps in the mortar to cling on to. As the third act was streamlined, the locations and orders and circumstances of character deaths were changed. I spoke about this last episode, but I really want to zero in

on BASER's death, because it sucks. He's taken out by a random grenade, which is exactly how BODY dies in the scene immediately before, so it has no shock value or any real emotional resonance. Zhangwan and composer Michael Jikino do their best to make the scene hit, but unlike the other characters, BASER doesn't really get a chance to do anything on Scarroth. BODY establishes contact with a rebel fleet, girrootsets off the master switch, K2 saves Gin and Cassian by locking them in

the vault, and Cassian saves Gin multiple times as well as commanding the mission, but BASER's

potential. He's someone that makes you sit up and pay attention when he shows up on screen,

“a tired dad with an annoying church husband and a machine gun. He's something we really haven't”

seen before in Star Wars, and I want to believe in spite of everything that he had more to do in

the director's cut. It's entirely possible that this was always how the character's death was scripted,

and given the amount of work done on it, this is probably the best version of his character arc that they came up with, but Zhangwan deserves better. There were a lot of different things that Tony Gelroy changed with Rogue One, but I really want to zero be in on one that I'm not sure was entirely intentional. Throughout Rogue One, Jenna so went through a lot of changes, from grizzled battle-worn commando to Jedi's daughter to unruly rebel sergeant to wild

card form a terrorist to who she is in the final film, which is someone who is there. Given that Ford Brody from Godzilla has a very similar vibe of, "Hey, I'm still here for

“plot reasons, it's likely that Jen's awkward, I'm still here for plot reasons, arc, is at least”

partly guaranteed what's doing." It's not a fate she suffers alone, since Girret and Bayes and

to a lesser degree Boady all have the vibe of being there because the story said they needed to, not for any strong character reasons, but there's a silence to Jen that feels less like a character choice and more like an absence. In most scenes she listens and nods and will occasionally scale and say something functional, but rarely character driven or even character revealing. Jen is the film's main character, but she says less than a thousand words in the film's 125 minutes.

Data scientist Amber Thomas did a really fascinating breakdown of dialogue and gender in 2016 films, and the results are damming across the board, but Rogue One in particular has just 17% of its total dialogue spoken by women, despite having a female lead. Jen, who is the protagonist,

“only has about 13% of the film's total lines, which is significantly less than Cassian.”

Thomas's larger analysis of 2016 films was actually sparked by Rogue One, which Thomas notes past the Bechtel test, but surrounded Jen with a man in almost every scene. But when I say that Jen has an absence of character, I mean an absence. This is once again conjecture, but I'm fairly certain that Jen was written and shot as a co-stick, cynical character who was disillusioned with the rebel cause after being abandoned by saw,

but when the film was in crunch mode and the story started to be streamlined around the idea of sacrifice, it's harder to buy that a scrappy sarcastic survivor who's been on her own since her teens would sacrifice her life for a rebellion that she doesn't have any real interest in. Jen's arc was simplified, into the journey of someone who is deliberately apolitical as a survival mechanism, finding a cause worth fighting and dying for. It's a good, solid arc, classic even,

and some of the lines that sell it are great, like this early one from Jen.

You've never had the luxury of political opinions, which Cassie and later throws back in Jen's face.

What do you know? We don't all have the luxury of deciding when and where we want to care about something. These two lines are definitely Tony Gilroy. They vibe very Tony Gilroy, but to make this new politically disaffected but ultimately self-sacrificing Jen work, the sarcastic survivor had to go, and along with her, most of Jen's lines. There are occasional glimpses of a different Jen. I mentioned in a previous episode how Jen feels like a completely

different person in the first scene that was shot for the film, where she Cassie and and K2 are scoping out Jeddah, and Jen is noticeably more talkative, and even cracks a few jokes. It's the fuel for the weapon. The weapon your father's building. Maybe we should leave target practice behind. Are you talking about me? She's right. We need to blend in. I'll tell you where the ship I can blend in. I'm an imperial droid. The city is under imperial occupation.

After people here want to reprogram you, the other half want to put a hole in your head. I'm surprised you're so concerned with my safety. I'm not. I'm just worried they might miss you. And hit me. This scene is a relic of a different movie. When it was shot, Diego Luna was probably playing Cassie and as an imperial mole, an alintudic wasn't even there. The rest of this version of Jen would be

shots covering ADR dialogue. In the three-minute interrogation scene that kicks off the film's plot,

“there is more than a minute of silent reaction shots from Jen.”

Which brings us to the other issue with Jen's arc. It's inherently passive. Because her story is about going from a disaffected outsider to a self-sacrificing freedom fighter from reactive to active, for most of the film, Jen has to be passive. Jen is imprisoned, broken out, blackmailed, caught in a crossfire attacked, kidnapped, bombed, betrayed, bombed again and lightly gaslit before she makes any real decisions that affect the plot.

Prior to going rogue and leading the mission to steal the Death Star plans,

Jen only makes two choices unmotivated by blackmail or direct personal danger,

saving the little girl during the tank battle on Jeddah and climbing the platform on Edu

“to try and reach her father before Cassian can shoot him. Both of these are active choices”

that Jen makes, but in a story sense, they're reactive. She's constantly reacting to situations that other people have put her in rather than driving the film's narrative herself. Jen's actions rarely have any impact on the plot, even during the battle of Scarif. Jen's decision to go to Scarif and steal the plans is largely made possible by Cassian rounding up rebels who are willing to follow them, and those rebels are really following Cassian

rather than Jen since he's the one who gives orders and commands the mission. Jen gives an inspirational speech, but she's a protagonist in name only. In a very star wars twist, her main contribution to the plot is being the right person's daughter.

“Garithead would set out to write Jen as someone who, like Ripley from Aliens, wasn't really”

a female character. She was just a cool character who happened to be a woman. And that's a noble aim, but I can't help but wonder if Jen would be this reactive and passive if the character was male. Tony Gilroy's default character is a shady, morally questionable guy who believes he's doing the right thing and slowly discovers that he's been corrupted by what he thought he was protecting and has to read himself of the comfort of the lies that he has been telling

himself. That's not Jen, that's Cassian. And I don't think that anyone involved ever had an active malicious or even conscious bias towards Jen or made her a passive character because she's a woman, but that's also my point. Bias usually isn't conscious, an unconscious bias is much harder to shake because it's unconscious and also because dealing with it means admitting that you were wrong and that you held biased or even bigoted beliefs. Most of us just don't have that

in us. We let unconscious bias fester because admitting that it's there means admitting that we are not the perfect protagonist of our own little stories. Jen also lived a lot of lives in the three and a half years between John Null's pitch and the release of Rogue One. The Jen of the film is the final version and arguably the real one. It's easy to mythologize an early version of the character

because that draft of Jen never had to be compromised by the demands of reality and reshutes and

potential brand clashes with Ray or Kira. It's easy to imagine that the perfect version of Jen is John Null's 40-something battle-hardened highest leader played by Gina Davis or Lena Heady. It's also easy to imagine that if Garethead would's had maintained creative control and had been given the time he needed, Rogue One could have been a perfect film. Maybe if Tony Gilroy had been hired in the first place, Rogue One would have been perfect. Or if it had been directed by

Christopher McCquarie or Michelle McLaren or Kathy Yan. But none of these versions ever had to exist. And just like it's easy to focus on what might have been, it's also easy to write off reshutes as a net negative for filmmaking. They've become a short-handed reporting for a film that's about to become a massive bomb. But reshutes are valued neutral. What's a much bigger red flag is the number of promising early career directors who have been hired to make massive studio films

given enormous resources and not enough time or support. And have then been creatively steamrolled by the studio. These directors have to stay on set for reshutes to avoid running foul of the director's guild, but they're no longer in control of the film that bears their name.

who put them in an untenable position. I really don't want to make this the story of two

directors, one the hero and one the villain. It's productive and it ignores the actual point.

“The Garathon Woods and Tony Gilroy are two very different directors. I think they're both”

good directors in their element and when they have the time and space to work within their strengths, they can both make really good films. I don't think they ever should have worked on the same project. They have fundamentally different approaches to story and character and process. Gilroy's a script guy Edward's is a visuals guy. Gilroy spent decades in the industry as a writer before he ever directed and Edward spent 15 years in visual effects just trying to direct.

Gilroy is a story and character guy Edward's defaults to picking up a camera.

Gilroy is a new yorker, Edward's as well. They're different guys and they were never going to make

the same film. So bringing Gilroy on to finish Edward's film meant an end to Edward's rogue one.

“Garathon Woods has never really talked about working with Tony Gilroy on the research.”

He's probably signed a lot of paperwork that says that he can't. But when the film was sprinting to make it to the finish line, Garathon Woods went back to what he knew best. While John Gilroy was finishing the cut at Skywalker Ranch and Colin Gaudy was checking film prints in LA, Edward's was at ILM, working on the film's visual effects. The final rogue one trailer was released in October 2016. It contained no shots and only a

couple of lines that aren't in the final film. There is one scene in rogue one that everyone likes, no matter what they thought of the rest of the film. And it was added in re-shoots. So to come up from that slightly downer ending, let's talk about the Darth Vader Corridor scene

“and the man behind it. Rogue one editor, jabbers Olson. In Garry Witter's draft of Rogue one,”

there were two Darth Vader scenes. The dialogue scene between Vader and Krenic on was to far and a scary reputation restoring final scene where Krenic, who survived the Death Star blast, was to be brutally killed by Vader as punishment for letting the plans go. Witter later admitted that it was a bit of a reach for Krenic to survive the Death Star and as geography and logic and poetic justice came into play, Krenic's death was reworked.

But in the edit, Garry Thadwood's realized that they didn't have what he called the T-Rex Jurassic Park moment, of the main bad guy coming back at the very end. Jabbers Olson suggested adding Vader to the final sequence, killing Admiral Radis and a bunch of other rebels as in the background the blockade runner got away with the plans, to which Edwood said, "I'd love to do that, obviously, but we're just out of time."

The next time Kathleen Kennedy came in to check the edit, Olson just brought it up to her instead. Within weeks, they were in Pinewood, shooting what would become the film's highlight for most fans, delivering on the promise of a darker, grittier star wars than what we'd seen, and it feels like star wars because there's a lightsaber and Darth Vader. I don't think it's controversial to say that I really love the corridor scene. It's got great sound design, Greg Frazier really gets

to flex all of his lighting skills, the fight choreography is brutal, and the score is doing a jewel of fate's meat's deus erae that really just hits right. But it also reminds me of George Lucas's reaction to criticism of the prequels, when he said, "People expected episode 3, which is where Anakin turns into Darth Vader, to be episode 1, and there were expecting episodes 2 and 3 to be Darth Vader going around cutting people's heads off and terrorizing the universe.

Only now, with Star Wars completely out of George Lucas's hands, could Darth Vader go around

cutting people's heads off and terrorizing the universe, just like the fans always wanted."

The Rogue One reshutes wrapped in August 2016, leaving just four months for the original rushes and new material to be edited into one cohesive whole. It's still needed music, sound, VFX, and a full press tour, but a quirk of timing would completely overshadow all of that. Next time on going rogue, we're looking at Rogue One's release, and asking a question that has vexed academics and nerds since the 70s. He is Star Wars political.

Ogrady and Christian Bias. Our music is by Kevin McLeod of Incompetek and Shane Ivers of Silverman

“Sound Studios. You can find a link to the script for this and every other episode of the podcast”

with full sources in the episode description. Or on the show's Twitter account, going rogue

on the scorepot. This episode in particular couldn't have happened without Tony Gilroy's

“interview on the moment with Brian Coppelman and Tom Butler's interview with Colin Gauty”

and John Gilroy for Yahoo movies. They're both worth checking out if you're interested in Rogue One

or filmmaking in general, especially the editing interview. I also want to sincerely apologize for

“teaching you what ADR is because you will now never not be able to notice it. I have suffered”

for my art, and now it's your turn.