One of the highlights of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story amongst the film’s fans was the appearance of Darth Vader. While the iconic character only appeared in a handful of scenes throughout the movie, his scenes were regarded as worthy additions to his arc.
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But, as it turns out, one of those sequences – what has been dubbed as the ‘Walk of Death’ – initially had a completely different outcome. Rogue One‘s director, Gareth Edwards, recently touched on this when talking with Fandango. According to Edwards, the scene was expected to go as follows:
“He arrives and obliterates the Calamari ship, and then the blockade runner gets out just in time and he pursues the blockade runner.”
But apparently, the scene went in a different direction during the film’s post-production process, even though Edwards initially didn’t believe it could be done.
“Jabez [Olssen, editor on the film] was like, ‘I think we need to get Darth on that ship,’” Edwards explains, “and I thought, yeah, that’s a brilliant idea and would love to do it. But there’s no way they’re going to let us do it. It’s a big number and we had, what, like 3 or 4 months before release. Kathy [Kennedy] came in and Jabez thought, f*ck it, and pitched her this idea, and she loved it. Suddenly within a week or two we were at Pinewood shooting that scene.”
While Edwards was ultimately apprehensive about being able to execute the scene, his ambition won in the end. But according to the director, the addition of the scene was handled with great precision. “Because it was my last chance to do Star Wars, and because you know it’s the end, we really were very careful with it. We storyboarded absolutely everything and tried to have no regrets.”
As it turns out, this involved making sure that the stunts in the scene were in line with Darth Vader’s established history.
“It just felt right; it felt like the right thing to do. It really is just the greatest hits of Darth; that corridor. And we really didn’t want to do anything you haven’t seen him do so it didn’t throw people off. We kept it to what had been established.”
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