This shouldn’t come as a big surprise, but it’s learned that Rogue One was one giant mess, which is really no different than all the other Star Wars movies under Disney and Kathleen Kennedy, right?
Tony Gilroy was brought on board Rogue One late in the game and only received a co-writer’s credit for the movie, but it’s known he did a lot more than that, which included directing massive reshoots.
Now it’s learned that Tony Gilroy did even more than that as his rewrites of the film seem to be just as massive.
In a podcast, Tony Gilroy also interestingly enough revealed that he signed a non-disclosure agreement with Disney not to talk about his involvement with Rogue One, which means following the movie’s release he wasn’t allowed to talk about anything–what he shot and what he wrote.
“I have to be careful,” Tony Gilroy told The Moment with Brian Koppelman podcast. “I don’t know what the statute of limitations is. I’ve never done an interview about Rogue [One], ever.”
He also revealed that getting his writer’s credit actually went to arbitration, which means Disney originally contested it for some reason, and he hints his involvement was bigger than a simple co-writer credit.
“You’ll understand this better than anything else, and I know you have a lot of geeks [who listen]. I came in after the director’s cut. I have a screenplay credit, in the arbitration, that was easily won,” Gilroy said.
Gilroy continues with mention that Star Wars: Rogue One was in terrible shape prior to coming on board, and that he has no reservations in doing so.
“That was my super power,” Gilroy said. “I’ve never been interested in Star Wars, ever. So I had no reverence for it whatsoever. I was unafraid about that. And they were in such a swamp… they were in so much terrible, terrible, trouble that all you could do was improve their position.”
Gilroy goes on to hint how he fixed the movie.
“If you look at Rogue, all the difficulty with Rogue, all the confusion of it… and all the mess, and in the end when you get in there, it’s actually very, very simple to solve,” Gilroy said. “Because you sort of go, ‘Oh this is a movie where, folks, just look—everyone is going to die.’ So it’s a movie about sacrifice… It’s all a question about why are all these people going to sacrifice [themselves] and you need to motivate them with a purity throughout the way.”
Gilory even offers that the Rogue One reshoots cost Disney a boat load.
“The gumption, the balls of Disney and Bob Iger and the people there to gamble on what they gambled on is astonishing,” Gilroy said. “It was just a mess and fear.”
Lucky for Disney and Kathleen Kennedy that the gamble paid off as Rogue One netted just over a billion dollars at the box office, but Tony Gilroy offers an interesting insight into LucasFilm at Disney – especially following Star Wars: The Last Jedi and before the release of Han Solo (which suffered director and production problems of its own) – in that LucasFilm seems pretty much incompetent.
(vio io9)
