Gareth Edwards says Rogue One: A Star Wars Story may not unfold how we think

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Thanks to the events of A NEW HOPE, we've got a preeetty good idea of how the Rebel team led by Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) in ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY will fare when it comes to locating the plans for the Death Star. However, despite knowing where things will end up, the events which lead to the seizure of the Death Star plans are still unknown, and, according to Gareth Edwards, they may not unfold the way we think they will. The ROGUE ONE director briefly spoke with USA Today to tease the upcoming Star Wars spin-off.

Events take place that just shatter her life and send her off to basically be raised as a soldier in the midst of a war. She ends up not the person she was supposed to be. Even though we’re not telling the story of Luke Skywalker, it was important to me that we capture the same themes and emotion, but the film doesn’t unfold how you think. It’s not the same path as Star Wars.

As Gareth Edwards already knew how ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY would end, he told Entertainment Weekly that it then became a matter of working backwards to figure out how our heroes get to that inevitable conclusion.

The thing every [filmmaker] typically struggles with is ‘How does it end?’ But we knew how our film was going to end. Our problem became ‘How do we reverse engineer from that and know where to start?’ You’ve got a finite number of options and you go through them all like a puzzle to find the one that’s going to lead to the strongest result.

EW also released a new ROGUE ONE photo which you can check out (and embiggen) below. Fun!

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY will hit theaters on December 16, 2016.