It’s almost inconceivable that Rogue One turned out as great as it did. With all of the production problems, rewrites, stories of Gareth Edwards being fired, this was the epitome of what the ‘A Star Wars Story’ brand was meant to be, enhancing the familiar stories with brand new characters. Certainly, I’ve never paid to see a Star Wars film as much as Rogue One, and probably never will.
But Rogue One could’ve been a very different movie, and nearly was. IGN spoke with writers Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz who revealed some of the many changes it went through during production, including to the character of Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), who had been imagined as similar to Jessica Chastain’s investigative badass from Zero Dark Thirty.
Whitta said, “At one point Jyn was already a Rebel soldier. We toyed with various other possibilities — that she was a deserter, that she was a Rey-like scavenger, but obviously you can’t do that once you learn what the other hand of the Star Wars universe is doing.”
Jyn’s mother Lyra was also written to be a Jedi, at one point. If that had stuck it would’ve changed so much about the Jyn we saw, but the change was made pretty early. Whitta added…
“In the original version — and the kyber crystal was like the last tiny piece that was left — she was a Jedi in hiding. It was one of the first things that got killed, and rightly so. That was kind of a vestige of me as a fanboy wanting to feel like we were checking all the Star Wars boxes. I remember saying… this is going to be the very first Star Wars movie that doesn’t have a lightsaber in it. … Of course, it ended up not being true! We have an amazing lightsaber sequence at the end of the movie.”
Remember how Rogue One was the first and only Star Wars movie not to have an opening crawl? It helped set it apart and make it really feel like a war film? Well, there was an opening crawl, we just didn’t get to see it. Whitta says…
“The way the movie opens is really one of the first interesting questions that [director] Gareth [Edwards] and I had: Should there be an opening crawl? I did write one. You’ll never see it but I did. I wrote more than one. Back when we were still experimenting with the idea of maybe doing one. But one of the things that we arrived at fairly early on in the process is that it was OK to liberate ourselves from the traditional storytelling language of Star Wars. And a lot of the visual tropes — the iris wipes, the opening crawl, things like that — we felt like the standalone movies had more license than the saga films to do something a little more different.”
And what about Diego Luna’s rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor, who is due to get his own Disney+ series soon? Along with very nearly being a love interest for Jyn, Weitz says Andor was once envisioned to be a double agent working for the villainous Krennic.
Whitta revealed, “In a very, very early version of this, he was a Rebel soldier who was secretly working for Krennic. But then as he grew closer to Jyn and realized that the Empire had built this weapon, he’s like, ‘I never signed up for this. I never signed up for killing planets.’ He has a change of heart and flips to the Rebel side, but that’s after he’s exposed as a spy. And at that point in the third act, he kind of has to win Jyn’s trust back. That was all fun and interesting. I think they actually shot some of that stuff early on. But I think this version ended up being more nuanced and more interesting.”
For me, Rogue One is in the top 2 or 3 best Star Wars films, and that’s due in large part to the way it exceeded expectations. With so much free time lately perhaps it’s due for a rewatch.
