Rogue One: A Star Wars Story continues to dominate at the box office, having taken in over $800 million worldwide in the past two weeks. With so many people having seen the film, there is a lot of justifiable curiosity as to what was added to and cut from the final cut after extensive reshoots. Now the film’s editors have told Yahoo just what Rogue One additional photography brought to the table.
“The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out,” said editor John Gilroy, recruited specifically for the reshoots by his brother/Rogue One co-writer Tony Gilroy. “We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian’s character and Bodhi’s character. The scene with Cassian’s introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added. Also Jyn, how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.”
“Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting,” said editor Colin Goudie of the character’s initial appearance. “That’s not a nice introduction. So having her in prison and then a prison break out, with Cassian on a mission… everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting.”
Goudie also added that another classic Star Wars element was originally in place but then discarded: Transition wipes.
“I think we used all those original wipes and we temped it with John Williams as well, and it would feel right,” Goudie said. “Once we actually got in everything we’d shot, we no longer needed those things and I was initially sad to see the transitions go, but then when I watch the final film, I don’t miss them, because it feels like a different beast.”
While the editors were hesitant to reveal what scenes were left on the cutting room floor, we do know at least one famous one that was prominently included in the film’s marketing: The shot of Jyn (Felicity Jones) confronting a Tie Fighter. Director Gareth Edwards told Empire why that wound up in the trailers.
“There was a bit of a process to refining the third act in terms of the specific shots and moments, and so certain things just fell away,” Edwards said. “But then what happens is marketing love those shots, and go, ‘oh, we’ve got to use that.’ And you say, ‘well, it’s not in the movie.’ And they say, ‘it’s okay, it’s what marketing does, we just use the best of whatever you’ve done.’ And so there’s lots of little things, but towards the end you go, ‘I know that’s not in the film, but the spirit of it’s in the film.'”
You can read our three Rogue One reviews at the following links: Review #1, Review #2 & Review #3
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Directed by Gareth Edwards, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Riz Ahmed, Jiang Wen, and Forest Whitaker. From Lucasfilm comes the first of the Star Wars standalone films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an all-new epic adventure. In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.
