Gareth Edwards Explains Why Rogue One is Like No Star Wars You’ve Seen Before

Rogue One director Gareth Edwards talks about the film’s unique shooting style, Darth Vader’s role and more

Gareth Edwards took the main stage earlier today at London’s Star Wars Celebration 2016, offering up new details about his upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Following the panel (which you can read about right here), ComingSoon.net joined a small group of journalists backstage for a discussion wherein the director elaborated on some of the elements that are going to make Rogue One stand apart from anything we’ve seen from the Star Wars franchise before.

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“If you look at what George [Lucas] was great at, he’s telling a story about one thing and has a million other things going on in the background,” Gareth Edwards explains. “Ideas that are much wider. Obviously, our film is using that and telling a story within it.”

Part of that story involves the introduction of the planet Jedah, a world of spiritual importance to those who believe in the Force.

“It’s like if ‘A New Hope’ is the story of Jesus, there must be a whole religion beyond that,” Gareth Edwards continues. “For a thousand generations, the Jedi were the leaders of this spiritual belief system. There have to be places like Mecca or Jerusalem in the Star Wars world. It also felt very contemporary to have a situation where the Empire is imposing itself on what means a lot to the spiritual side of Star Wars. Their beliefs and their goals. Within that, there’s a resistance that’s trying to fight back. Our characters end up going to Jedah and they basically end up getting pulled into their story a little bit.”

Because Jedah represents something very new for the Star Wars mythos, Gareth Edwards felt it important to find the proper balance between classic Star Wars storytelling and a more free-flowing style.

“The way I used to try and justify it was that this is a real historical event,” he says. “George is on Tatooine with his camera crew and we’re on our planet with our camera crew. There’s other planets with other camera crews. We may not see those films for awhile, but everyone is making their own movies. They’ll all have their own style and voice. You have historical event like World War II and they spawn films like ‘Casablanca’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ They’re completely different… [But] it’s such a fine line. If you go slightly to the left, it’s not ‘Star Wars.’ It’s some other sci-fi movie. If you go slightly to the right, you’re just copying what George did. Trying to navigate this thing where it’s new but feels fresh was the dance that was the process of making the film.”

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For some scenes, including many on Jedah, Gareth Edwards employed a more experimental approach than we’ve seen from Star Wars in the past.

“We went to Jordan to film,” he says. “We built this set in Pinewood that was 360 degrees. Normally on a set, the extras are told, ‘You go this way on action and on cut you stop.’ We said, ‘For the next hour, you’re going to be this character. You’re cooking food or you’re working on this car thing. Whatever it is.’ The crew were wearing costumes. They had the cameras turned round them so they wouldn’t ruin the shot. We tried to give them freedom so that the actors could go where they wanted and do the scene in a way that felt right. There was a lot of freedom and it had a very different vibe than you associate with ‘Star Wars.'”

Gareth Edwards’ original vision was for the film’s rebel-centric sequences to embrace one style and the Empire sequences to use another.

“We tried to do everything like that,” he says, “But the reality is that you can’t. There was that style, which aims for realism and then there’s the more classical trilogy style which is much more considered. It feels very Imperial. Initially, there was the feeling that the Empire would be done one way and the Rebels would be done another. As we started going, we started mixing it all and it felt a lot better. I was really pleased with the vibe of the film. It feels like the language of ‘Star Wars’ and then goes into something more contemporary. You’re not jarred by it.”

As discussed at the panel and teased in a panel-only teaser trailer, Rogue One is set to feature the return of Darth Vader to the big screen with James Earl Jones once again lending his voice to the Dark Lord of the Sith.

RELATED: Photos from the Rogue One Panel at Star Wars Celebration

“[Darth Vader] has such a gravitational pull the second he pops up,” says Gareth Edwards. “You just get sucked into Darth Vader. It was a process to try and figure out how to pepper that in a way that felt right… What was very clear early on at Lucasfilm is that they wanted to do new things here. This isn’t a karaoke number with winks and fan service. That’s not going to make a good film. You have to create characters that you care about and this is an opportunity to create new people and events that pull you in. Hopefully, the goal is that they come to film for all the reasons that we love Star Wars. You get sucked in and start to care about the new people. In the midst of that, familiar things are going on and you start to remember, ‘Oh yeah!’ But the film should exist on its own terms. If the films are just showing you the character you love, they’re not doing what George did, which is finding stories that are about something. That are saying something. That stick with you even 40 years later.”

Directed by Gareth Edwards and starring Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Jiang Wen, Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk and Riz Ahmed, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is set for release on December 16, 2016.