Gareth Edwards Looks Back on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

It’s not typical that a major studio releases a tentpole film in which all the heroes die at the end. But then, Rogue One wasn’t a typical Star Wars movie. Released December 16, 2016, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story told the tale of how the rebels stole plans to the Death Star, leading directly into the classic Star Wars: A New Hope. It was less space fantasy, more space war, with a grittier tone to match its story of ultimate sacrifice. The film proved to be a critical and box-office hit, and remains a fan favorite of the modern Star Wars era; to wit, Andor, chronicling earlier missions of Rogue One’s rebel spy with a heart, arrives on Disney+ in 2022. To mark Rogue One’s fifth anniversary, director Garth Edwards spoke with StarWars.com about sneaking away to his first Lucasfilm meeting, bringing back Tarkin and Leia with digital effects, and why Rogue One felt like “something we’d borrowed from George.”

StarWars.com: I don’t know if you remember -- I might have done your first Rogue One interview ever, for StarWars.com. A little video piece.

Gareth Edwards: I think I ended up talking about having gone to Tunisia and stuff. 

StarWars.com: Yes. 

Gareth Edwards: I might have embarrassed myself with a few Darth Vader impressions or something.

StarWars.com: Yes, you did. [Laughs]

Gareth Edwards: There you go. Yeah, I do remember.

StarWars.com: It’s good to talk to you again. To start, I wanted to ask, five years later, what comes to mind when you think of Rogue One?

Gareth Edwards: [Laughs] It’s weird because I’ve honestly not sat and watched the film since it came out. You hear filmmakers say things like that and you think, “You’re lying. Of course you have.” 

I’ve seen lots of bits of it. It’s appeared on TV and I’ve kind of watched 20 minutes here and there. I remember having to watch it a lot towards the end, especially with the publicity, and we had various premieres and things. So my memory -- it’s going to be an interesting conversation, because I’ve not sat down and talked about it in depth for what feels like a long time. Maybe you can pull memories out of me about it.

Obviously, it’s a dream come true. I know there’s millions of people like this, that love Star Wars. But this is kind of the reason I got into filmmaking. If someone had told me when I was six that I was one day going to get to not just make a Star Wars film, but make a Star Wars film that connected to the film that I watched over and over every morning before I’d go to school? 

You have to pinch yourself. You start to wonder whether this is all actually virtual reality. It seems too good to be true, like I’m playing the game version where I get to make a Star Wars film. It’s not the sort of thing that should happen to you in your career, like even the best version of where your career could go. I feel very lucky and I consider it very sacred territory.

I remember when I first met with [Lucasfilm’s] Kiri Hart at the very beginning of it all, just snuck in for a very secretive meeting. I think they were meeting with loads and loads of filmmakers, like it was [when] The Force Awakens was beginning. I don’t think anyone had announced the title or anything. We knew there was a Star Wars film happening and probably more to come. At the time I was finishing Godzilla, and they were at Disney, and you can walk from Warner Bros. to Disney in about 10 minutes. I was nervous about telling anyone that I was going for a meeting at Lucasfilm, because if things went well I’d be doing the Godzilla sequel, and so I pretended I had to get some food or something. I just went down and met with Kiri Hart down the road.

I had this great meeting, but part of me was sitting there thinking -- when they started talking about some of the things they wanted to do -- I just remember thinking, “A) They’ll never offer this to me, and B) I don’t think I’d want to do it because you’ve got to be so careful with this stuff.” It’s so important to so many people, including myself. She said, “I’ve got two ideas I’d like to send you that I think you’d be interested in,” and she sent me one. I remember getting this email and thinking, I’ve got to sit down and really concentrate and savor this moment. This is the only time I’ll be sent an idea for a Star Wars movie from Lucasfilm.

So I cleared everything, I didn’t do anything that Saturday, and I kept everything away. I sat down, opened just a page or even a few paragraphs of description, and there was this one idea which was very, very cool and very good, but it wasn’t for me. I just felt like I’m not the guy to do that. 

And then there was another idea as well, which obviously turned out to be John Knoll’s concept for a Star Wars film. I started reading it, and I was like, “Okay, where is this going? What is this? Hang on, hang on.” And then the last paragraph, it all tied in with A New Hope. I had this love-hate relationship instantly where it was like, “They can’t do this film! They shouldn’t do this film, this is like hallowed ground, you can’t! You’re not allowed to!” And the other part of me was like, “Wait a minute, am I being considered for this? I have to do this! There’s no way I can walk away from this. But hang on, no one should do this, but I have to do it!” 

I was really torn. I wrote back to Kiri saying, “I think this would be an amazing idea for a Star Wars film, but are you seriously going to do this? Or is it just like, spaghetti at the wall kind of stuff?” And she was like, “No, no, no. This is what we want to do, potentially next.” 

Then I figured, they’re talking to maybe 20 filmmakers and I’m one of them, so I probably won’t even make the cut. I went in for a few more meetings, met with Kathy [Kennedy, Lucasfilm president], and it was all going very well. And then at one point I thought, I’m just going to ask the question just for my own piece of mind. I said, “How many other filmmakers and directors are you talking to about this?” And they were like, “Oh, none.” I was thinking, “Oh, God, are you crazy?” [Laughs] And then for whatever reason, I got to do it. 

John Knoll was a hero of mine growing up, getting into visual effects. I always wanted to direct films but I came through -- at some point in the industry, if you’re not given a directing gig straight from film school, you have to pick a career. And I picked visual effects. I sat and watched the making of The Phantom Menace to death. I savored everything there was about Industrial Light & Magic. And obviously a lot of that material gravitated to John Knoll. 

So I felt like he was a massive hero of mine. Then I had to Zoom with him to kind of get the gig. Because if he didn’t like me, they’d obviously go with someone else. So I knew there was a lot of pressure on this [meeting]. And I can’t remember any of it. I can’t remember how it went. I remember being nervous. 

I had briefly met him in passing at Warner Bros. He was there for a screening of Pacific Rim and we got invited to it because we were doing Godzilla. And at the end everyone’s going up to Guillermo del Toro and trying to speak to him. All I wanted to do was speak to John Knoll. I went up to him and introduced myself. I sounded like such a geeky fanboy and I was a bit embarrassed about it. He drove off in a golf cart. I was like, “That was it, that was my meeting with John Knoll, I can die happy now.” And then I didn’t realize that this was all going to kick off. 

It never got old with John. You meet a lot of really super smart people in this industry, but John is truly like, a genius. His résumé proves that, but he has such a fascinating mind. To be the guy that A) with his brother, came up with Photoshop, B) then did all that groundbreaking work on all the digital breakthrough films that changed cinema, and then C) to come up with this idea for a Star Wars movie. And then I get invited to the party. It was pretty incredible.

StarWars.com: It was only the second film in this new wave of Star Wars productivity at that time, and there had never been a Star Wars spinoff like this. I’m wondering if there was pressure that came from that, and if that ever got to you during production.

Gareth Edwards: There was pressure. Obviously, there’s pressure at all time, every day in every way, so 1000 percent. 

I got some strange analogies for it that probably don’t make sense in print, but no one can put as much pressure on me than I would put on myself. It’s a strange thing to say, but for a whole generation Star Wars was kind of a semi-religion. I think in the past, kids would grow up and be told campfire stories, or spiritual, mythical stories, you know, and religious stories about the world and fantasy ideas that speak about good versus evil. It really resonates with you as a child. Those stories kind of grew into religion over thousands of years. [Star Wars] took the place of a sort of spiritual foundation in a lot of kids, weirdly. Star Wars was a very profound thing, I think, for a lot of us. 

I felt a lot of pressure all the time, but I also felt like, if I had one specialist subject in my life, it’s probably Star Wars: A New Hope. And if I had one thing that I always wanted to do more than anything else, it’s make films. And so I felt internally confident that I knew what I wanted this film to be, but I wasn’t sure at all that anyone else would want it to be that. That’s probably where any doubts would kick in. 

There’s constant pressure. There’s pressure making just a tiny movie for yourself. The first film I ever did, for no money, [I was under] constant pressure. But making Star Wars, you kind of knew like, this is all or nothing. Everyone is going to see this and they’ll know about it. The sort of pressure to not [mess] it up was probably the most it’ll ever be on any movie you could ever make.

StarWars.com: The first time we talked, you were in pre-production. I don’t think this made the final cut of our interview, but you had talked about wanting to push forward and take chances with Rogue One, because if you didn’t then you weren’t creating in the spirit of George Lucas. After I saw it, I felt that with the digitally created performances of Tarkin and Leia, you were definitely pushing forward. Tell me about the decision to do that and if you were worried about it at all.

Gareth Edwards: Yeah. I think at some point we put a little chart up on the wall, which was what were the characters we could have in this movie that exist in this timeline. Initially in your brain you think, “Oh, this is going to be every Star Wars character you can think of.” But when you go through it, a lot of them are out of bounds, because either Lucasfilm were developing another film or a show, or something else was going on with those characters and they didn’t really want them in our film so much. 

Tarkin was an obvious [choice] -- there’s no way you can tell this story and not have him in at least the periphery of the scenes that were going on, if not front and center. So he was always going to be mentioned, possibly seen, glimpsed, a little moment where you see him revealed somewhere slightly or at least understand that that’s probably him at the end of the corridor. But as we developed the script more and more, it became like, “He needs to be a proper character in this film for this to work.”

So we would obviously talk to John and the team and say, “Is this possible? Is this crazy? Should we steer away from it?” And John would always light up and be like, “No, this is exactly what ILM is about. This is why we exist. Go for it.”

So I felt very encouraged. They were sort of excited about the idea of bringing Tarkin into the movie. We always knew there was probably going to be a Leia shot in some form somewhere, right at the end of the film, at least. So they had that technical hurdle to figure out.

When you make these films, you have to do what’s called a turnover to ILM, where you basically give them shots to work on. The first one we ever did was Princess Leia. We turned it over during filming. It was the very first thing we gave them and it was the very last shot they delivered at the very end of the whole process. So they, in theory, worked on that shot for nearly a year and a half or something. I don’t know if it really was that, but that’s technically what it felt like. 

And Tarkin, they had been doing things like that in other movies, and they had been getting more and more confident with digital humans. It just felt like, “We have to do this.” It’s kind of like, you’re making a film with ILM, you wanna do at least one thing that’s never been done before or feels a bit scary, a bit risky.

It was a fascinating journey. It wasn’t as simple as you have an actor play Tarkin and then you just digitally replace the performance with Peter Cushing’s face. It became very interesting, and the same with Darth Vader, as well. There were a lot of clues, subconsciously to the viewer, that let you feel that this is the original New Hope, which included things like lighting. [Director of photography] Greig Fraser, who’s a master at lighting, he would have preferred to have done a different kind of lighting on Tarkin for a lot of the shots. But we noticed that if we did a more modern take on that, it didn’t feel like him. We had to sort of dial it back to the way they lit scenes in A New Hope, in the late ‘70s. And then it would start to feel more real. 

Same with Vader. Even with shots of Vader, we did a little test shoot. Greig would always say that lighting Vader is like doing a car commercial. He’s got more in common with photographing a car than a human because of all the light reflections and things. [Mimics helmet] We kept looking at these tests going, “This doesn’t feel like Vader, does it? What are we doing wrong? It just doesn’t feel the same.” And we started realizing that normally when you do a shot, you do an over-the-shoulder shot, and you film someone and then you do the reverse when you come around for a conversation. You come around. [Mimics camera rotating] In the original trilogy, when they would come around to do the reverse, the person in the foreground would always feel bigger than Vader, which felt wrong. So they always pull the camera back a little bit and then raise it up so that Vader, his eyeline was always the highest thing in the frame. If you didn’t do that, Vader felt small and not powerful. And so it was all these little tricks that we hadn’t thought of until we started failing at certain things. 

We lucked out with Guy Henry. He was the actor who played Tarkin for us, with all the dots on his face and everything. When I went to speak with him and meet with him to try to talk him into it, it was a strange request for an actor. You’re basically saying, “Can you be in our movie, but can we replace you with another actor and have nobody know that you did this?” You’d imagine him saying a “what’s in it for me” kind of thing. But he said, “You know what, Gareth? If you’d said any other actor in the history of cinema, I would say no, but Peter Cushing was the reason [I’m an actor].” That actor, Guy Henry, his first role on TV was playing Sherlock Holmes. So he watched all of Sherlock Holmes, Peter Cushing’s version of Sherlock Holmes, and sort of started emulating him in the beginning of his career. It sort of stuck, I think. He’s always held him in this high regard, as well. So we kind of lucked out with him, that he had all the same mannerisms in his performances.

But, really, none of us knew if it was going to work or not until the last couple of weeks. We were still doing VFX reviews, I feel like in the last week before the release, the last possible second. It was really to the wire with all of it.

I always remember the reaction. I thought everyone must know we had Tarkin in this film, they must be waiting for it. Then we were in the premiere and that shot came up where the camera dollies up behind him, and then slowly reveals his reflection, and he turns around. And there was an audible gasp from everybody, and it went quiet. I was really surprised because I was half-thinking, “Why weren’t you expecting this?” [Laughs] Of course we’re going to show him.

StarWars.com: I think what was nice was that I don’t remember him being in the trailers at all. I think that made it really have an impact in the theater when you were watching it. 

Gareth Edwards: It’s great when publicity understands there are some things we want to hold back on. I think that really helped that.

StarWars.com: I was wondering if you ever spoke or met with Carrie Fisher, before she passed, about bringing Leia into it?

Gareth Edwards: No, I didn’t. The closest I got, I got to visit the set of The Force Awakens, and we were hanging out there for half a day or something. I remember being by the trailers and Carrie came out from the makeup trailer, I guess, just brushed right past me to go in. There were a lot of people stood around, so she went just right past me to head on to the set. I remember just, like anyone would, doing a double take and looking at everyone else going, “Oh, my God! That was Carrie Fisher!”

We knew we were going to potentially do this, so I always imagined at some point there would be a conversation to be had about it with her, and it was just who would end up doing that. Kathy [Kennedy] was very friendly with her, so Kathy, essentially, was the one to talk to her about it all. And she was in full agreement and happy about it. So we just carried on.

I always thought, “I guess I’ll get to see her at the premiere or at some point afterwards, and be able to thank her personally.” And obviously that was not possible. It came completely out of the blue.

She is such a hero to everyone. It’s sad that I never got to properly meet her.

StarWars.com: I thought that that added some extra weight to the appearance in Rogue One.

Gareth Edwards: It did. But obviously you’d do anything to have her back, and so it was very sad, but kind of strangely poignant that that moment existed in that film.