Star Wars: Tony Gilroy Teases Characters “Deteriorated” Before He Helmed ‘Rogue One’ Reshoots

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story went on to earn more than a billion dollars worldwide, though one of the reasons it was such a success was due to Tony Gilroy‘s script rewrites and by directing the film’s reshoots. While the filmmaker often avoids confirming how much of the film he helmed, Gilroy recently pointed out one of the film’s issues before he came on was how the characters devolved after multiple attempts to bring them to life.

“When things pass through many hands and there’s a great deal of confusion … and there’s all kinds of accessories and jewelries and bootstraps and zippers, and all the rest of the stuff. The purity for the characters, if it’s not there to begin with, it just deteriorates and just turns into an absolute mush,” Gilroy shared at a Montclair State University event.

Rogue One had one of the more difficult jobs in the Star Wars saga, as it marked the first film that wasn’t directly connected to the Skywalker Saga. While the prequel films introduced audiences to new characters, we had familiar faces to anchor to, making the experience less jarring.

Gareth Evans directed Rogue One initially, with even the first trailers offering audiences sequences that never made the final cut, leaving Star Wars fans to wonder how different Evans’ vision of the film was.

According to Gilroy, the film was in rough shape when he was initially contacted to offer his input, and he ultimately boiled the narrative down to one key component: sacrifice.

“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 shared with The Moment With Brian Koppelman podcast of approaching the film. “Because you sort of go, ‘This is a movie where, folks, just look. Everyone is going to die.’ So it’s a movie about sacrifice.”

What makes the film’s success so surprising is that, while many of the filmmakers involved with Lucasfilm have expressed their admiration of the saga, Gilroy wasn’t much of a Star Wars fan.

“I’ve never been interested in Star Wars, ever. So I had no reverence for it whatsoever. I was unafraid about that,” Gilroy confessed. “And they were in such a swamp … they were in so much terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position.”

The most recent Star Wars film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, also had issues with reshoots, with that film becoming a financial disappointment. Whether the film would have fared better had it not undergone reshoots, fans will never know.

Do you think reshoots always confirm that a film is in trouble? Let us know in the comments below or hit up @TheWolfman on Twitter to talk all things Star Wars and horror!

[H/T NorthJersey.com]