Geekery: Rogue One Editors Speak
Colin Goudie and John Gilroy talk about some of what was cut/added and why.
The fact that Rogue One is missing quite a few scenes from the trailers has been talked about a lot since the movie came out. John Gilroy and Colin Goudie sat down with the folks at Yahoo Movies UK to hash out the reasons behind some of the choices made during re-shoots and in post production. They also talk about how some original trilogy footage wound up in the final cut.
They did do some character building that wasn’t in the initial cut, from John Gilroy:
“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 [Jyn Erso, the reluctant leader of the film, played by Felicity Jones], how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.”
Gilroy also spoke on how the much the back third of the movie was changed after re-shoots and editing:
“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 then they were as it was conceived.
Because you needed to figure that out, and everything else changes. Everything was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change all the other venues, so really we had to… we were working on that until the last minute, because we working closely with ILM, they were giving us temporary shots and we’d put them in, we’d work them, we’d reconceive again.”
He talked about using archive footage in the last space battle to add Angus MacInnes as Red Leader, which was executed perfectly:
“That was fun. In the star battle we see Red Leader and Gold Leader. They had these dailies, and they thought it would be a really great idea if we could work it in. So we’re going through the dailies from 40 years ago, picking up pieces that were not used in the original, and then working them into scenarios in the air battle.
You’re grabbing a microphone making up some lines and putting them in someone’s mouth, and then you finally have this finished thing. It’s exciting!
Gold Leader, that actor [Angus MacInnes] is still alive, so we looped him [re-recorded new dialogue to dub over footage] and I think it was a really heady experience for him to be looping himself 40 years later, but that was a lot of fun.”
It’s a great interview – and I think it may help satisfy some of those that were a bit disappointed in the cut we saw in the theater. Read more here. Still hoping to get a full set of cut scenes in the BD release, though.
