Star Wars: Rogue One Director Compares Filming Darth Vader to a Car

December 16th marked five years since Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hit theaters, so director Gareth Edwards sat down with StarWars.com for an extensive retrospective interview about the film. Edwards talked about everything from his initial skepticism about the movie’s plot to the fact that he never got to meet Princess Leia star, Carrie Fisher. Naturally, Edwards also spoke about the epic Darth Vader scene which served as a lead-in to the original Star Wars. Interestingly, Edwards compared filming Vader to filming a car…

“Same with Vader. Even with shots of Vader, we did a little test shoot. Greig [Fraser] would always say that lighting Vader is like doing a car commercial. He’s got more in common with photographing a car than a human because of all the light reflections and things. [Mimics helmet] We kept looking at these tests going, ‘This doesn’t feel like Vader, does it? What are we doing wrong? It just doesn’t feel the same.’ And we started realizing that normally when you do a shot, you do an over-the-shoulder shot, and you film someone and then you do the reverse when you come around for a conversation. You come around. [Mimics camera rotating] In the original trilogy, when they would come around to do the reverse, the person in the foreground would always feel bigger than Vader, which felt wrong. So they always pull the camera back a little bit and then raise it up so that Vader, his eye-line was always the highest thing in the frame. If you didn’t do that, Vader felt small and not powerful. And so it was all these little tricks that we hadn’t thought of until we started failing at certain things,” Edwards explained.

The upcoming Disney+ series, Star Wars: Andor, follows Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor and takes place five years before Rogue One. A new casting rumor suggests Andy Serkis is returning as the villainous Supreme Leader Snoke. While the rumor has yet to be confirmed, Luna has confirmed Andor will see some familiar faces to Star Wars fans.

“You’ll definitely see familiar faces,” Luna told Deadline. “I can tell you about this project like no other because I can’t spoil the ending if you’ve seen [Rogue One] already. No matter what I say, I can’t ruin the ending.”

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is now streaming on Disney+ with its prequel series, . If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.

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