It is no secret that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story went through extensive reshoots and revisions. You can see these changes when you watch the film and realize that a lot of the scenes from the trailers didn’t make it into the final cut of the film. (One example of this is the scene where Jan Erso says, “I Rebel.”) In a few interviews a few cast members have even talked about the different versions of scenes that were cut from the movie. This has led to speculation that the Blu-ray might include an extended version of the film.
In a recent interview with Yahoo UK, Rogue One’s editors John Gilroy and Colin Goudie talk about the changes made to the film, and where they happened in the film:
“The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out. We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian’s character (Diego Luna), and Bodhi’s character (Riz Ahmed). The scene with Cassian’s introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added. Also Jyn (Felicity Jones), how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.”
Goudie talked about changing the first scenes of the film:
“The point with the opening scenes that John was just describing was that the introductions in the opening scene, in the prologue, was always the same. Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting. That’s not a nice introduction. So having her in prison and then a prison break out, with Cassian on a mission… everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting.”
According to Gilroy the first act wasn’t the only act that as reworked:
“It changed quite a bit. The third act has a lot going on. You have like seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different. We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original than they were as it was conceived.
Goudie says that there is not an extended cut of the film. Gareth Edwards version wasn’t much longer than the theatrical cut of the film:
“It was not much longer than the finished film. I think the first assembly was not far off actual release length. Maybe 10 minutes longer? I genuinely can’t remember because that was nearly a year ago now. There’s no mythical four-hour cut, it doesn’t exist.”
Edwards told Empire that the original screenplay for Rogue One had an opening crawl:
“The first screenplay that Gary Whitta wrote had a crawl in it…and then at some point, probably like six months before we were filming, we were in a meeting, and they talked about not having an opening crawl, because these are standalone films, not part of the sagas. And if I’m honest, there was an initial kind of like, ‘whaaaa? I want the crawl!… The opening sequence is kind of the crawl of our movie. It’s like the setup. And our film is also born out of a crawl – the reason we exist is because of a previous crawl, so it feels like this infinite loop that will never end.”
Ph: Jonathan Olley
©Lucasfilm LFL 2016.
Will we ever get to see the cut scenes from the film? Probably not, but hopefully some of them make the deleted scenes reel on the blu-ray.
Rogue One is shooting for an April blu-ray release date.
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