Rogue One director and producer talk about the reshoots

When it was revealed that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story would be going into major reshoots, the film community jumped into full-on speculation mode. This is Star Wars, after all, so director Gareth Edwards and producer Kathleen Kennedy would have expected mass hysteria at such an announcement. In some kind of damage control, both filmmakers spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the rumours regarding the reshoots, and if they really spelled trouble for the production.

‘I mean, it was always part of the plan to do reshoots,’ Edwards answers. ‘We always knew we were coming back somewhere to do stuff. We just didn’t know what it would be until we started sculpting the film in the edit… There’s lots of little things that we have to get, but it’s all little things within the preexisting footage.’

Edwards revealed that any problems weren’t in the film itself, but on the production side: ‘Obviously, you’ve go to work around everyone’s schedule, and everyone’s on different flims all over the world, and so it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare. That’s why I think it’s been blown out of proportion a little bit.’

Kathleen Kennedy spoke a bit more about the film itself. ‘There’s nothing about the story that’s changing, with a few things that we’re picking up in additional photography… I think that’s the most important thing, to reassure fans that it’s the movie we intended to make.’ And on the subject of the director’s visual style, she sounds quite excited: ‘He does a lot of handheld, intimate, close-up work. That’s not something you’ve necessarily seen in a Star Wars movie before… And we brought in [cinematographer] Greig Fraser, to shoot it, who had done Zero Dark Thirty. So a combination of Greig and Gareth has been, I think, fantastic, and it just gives it a really unique style.’

‘I’d definitely describe it as: It’s got [a] dark tone,’ Gareth continues. ‘The studio has been very supportive of that. I mean, the sort of tone we were going for when we started was the tone you have in films like The Empire Strikes Back. And that’s not in any way been compromised.’

Okay, we’ll admit – any doubts we had about the reshoots have been (almost entirely) quashed. Roll on December 16 when Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is released.