Be mindful of spoilers if you haven't seen ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY yet. By now, we all know about how much went into restructuring and reshooting the latest STAR WARS film just several months before its premiere, but with the home-media release of ROGUE ONE quickly approaching, we're about to hear a whole lot more. It was the ending of ROGUE ONE which received the most attention when it came time for reshoots, and Gareth Edwards recently spoke with /Film about why the ending which was originally shot didn't end up working.
I think the main thing that changed at the end…what used to happen, and you can get a sense of this in the early trailers, the transmission tower for the plans was separate from the main base on Scarif. To transmit the plans, they had to escape and run along the beach and go up the tower. In cutting the film, it just felt too long. We had to find ways to compress the third act, which was quite long as it was. And one real, fast, brutal solution was to put the tower in the base, so they don’t have to run across the beach and do all of that stuff to get there. That became a decision that eliminated the shots you see in the trailer of the back of Cassian and Jyn and the AT-ATs. That was some of the reinvention that happened. It was all to do with compression.
One of the most talked about moments from ROGUE ONE, Darth Vader's "walk of death" aboard the Rebel ship, was also an addition which was made in reshoots, and Gareth Edwards revealed to Fandango that in the original cut, Vader never actually boarded the ship at all.
He arrives and obliterates the Calamari ship, and then the blockade runner gets out just in time and he pursues the blockade runner. And then Jabez [Olssen] was like, 'I think we need to get Darth on that ship,' 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.
The sequence had to match up with one which was shot five months earlier, when a Rebel pulled to lever to disconnect the Tantive IV from Admiral Raddus' ship, so the team made sure to be "very careful with it." Edwards asked the ROGUE ONE stunt team to come up with everything they could think of for the sequence and they "came up with a whole shopping list of ideas. 70% we used, and maybe 30% felt a little too extreme. They were things you hadn't seen him do before, and I wanted to stick to what Darth does in the original trilogy."
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY will be released on Digital HD on March 24th and on Blu-ray/DVD on April 4, 2017.