Gareth Edwards Explains Reasons for “Rogue One” Reshoots

Since the Spring, rumours have been flying about why Rogue One: A Star Wars Story conducted reshoots after completing production. After people called for a boycott due to reshoots that supposedly took aim at President-elect Donald Trump, the reason for the extra filming shifted to “fixing” the movie. Director Gareth Edwards broke his silence over these issues in an interview with The Los Angeles Times:

“All great films have stories attached to them of how horrific they were to get made. Knowing that going in, you’re kind of expecting a bit of a war. You end up feeling like the characters in the film, that we’re trying to do this impossible task. Their pretend one is to steal the Death Star plans but the actual one is to make a great ‘Star Wars’ film… What happened was that I’d say a third of the movie or more has this embedded documentary style to it, and as a result we shot hours and hours and days and days of material. Normally when you put a film together it goes together like A-B-C-D-E and you move on. Whereas we had so many permutations, so many different ways it could be constructed, it took longer in the edit to find the exact version.”

It seems reshoots were needed to make the movie what it is now. Re-creating the atmosphere of the original trilogy would have taken time, so it is easy to understand why the production team took this route.

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