The Truth About the Star Wars: Rogue One Reshoots. - Star Wars News Net
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The Truth About the Star Wars: Rogue One Reshoots.

by · June 4, 2016

Rogue One 01Recent rumors postulate that Christopher McQuarrie will had a hands-on role in the forthcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story reshoots, which he vehemently denied. Entertainment Weekly follows this up with an article going with an in-depth explanation of what to expect from the reshoots.

 

 

Slashfilm, which had recently reported an article describing the rumor that as much as 40% of Rogue One needed to be reshot, reached out to McQuarrie (who is said to have rewritten part of the movie’s script) for answers. He had the following to say:

If there are any reshoots on Rogue One, I’m not supervising them. For any outlet to say so is not only wrong, it’s irresponsible. Gareth Edwards is a talented filmmaker who deserves the benefit of the doubt. Making a film – let alone a Star Wars chapter – is hard enough without the internet trying to deliberately downgrade one’s years of hard work. Who does that even serve? Let him make his movie in peace.

In addition, McQuarrie took to Twitter to debunk the rumors, along with thanking Slashfilm for reaching out to him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The official story is that Rogue One is slated for some reshoots, but they aren’t as extensive as the eight-week shoot that was recently reported. From Entertainment Weekly:

Here’s what’s true: the film, which is about Rebels stealing the plans for the first Death Star just before the events of 1977’s original Star Wars, is undergoing four to five weeks of reshoots, beginning this month and ending just days before the Star Wars Celebration fan event in London on July 15.

In what may reassure fans, reshoots were scheduled for the film before even a single scene was shot. It’s standard practice now for large-scale films to build in additional weeks of shooting so filmmakers can tweak a movie after the first assembly cut.

Those reshoots were originally planned for the spring, but were bumped to mid-summer to allow for extra time as director Gareth Edwards and the creative team decided what they wanted to alter. “The changes have everything to do with clarity and character development and all take place [as inserts] within scenes we’ve already shot,” said one source on the project.

In other words, the changes involve more intimate moments – not redoing entire battle sequences or plot lines. “It’s a lot of talking in cockpits,” as one insider described the new footage.

Rogue One

According to Anthony Breznican’s report, if everything goes as planned, the movie will be locked in August and will be scored in September – both of which would actually come at an earlier point in post-production than similar benchmarks in the post-production cycle of The Force Awakens. The rumor that as much as 40% of the film would be reshot was equally as derided as it was mocked by EW’s sources. If that much of the movie needed to be reshot, then the movie wouldn’t make its December 2016 release date, and word that there were issues with the production would have hit much earlier than a mere six and a half months before release. The month-long period of reshoots owe themselves over to the schedules of the cast, many of whom live in completely different areas of the world; if the reshoots had been set for when they were originally planned, then the filming period wouldn’t have taken as much time.

 

One of the big fears about the reshoots that people have heard recently is that they will make the movie “Disneyfied”; which is to say that the movie might be a lot less like Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, or Zero Dark Thirty as some fans had hoped for. However, EW’s sources clarified that the intention is to keep the film tonally-distinct from a movie like The Force Awakens, and that it is still very much a “war film” like director Gareth Edwards had discussed back in Celebration Anaheim. (The only people outside of Lucasfilm to see the movie are Disney representatives Bob Iger and Alan Horn, who were said to be helpful with the film’s production and not meddling in nature.) A new addition to the film crew will work toward keeping the film’s gritty tone intact with the reshoots. Tony Gilroy (who wrote and directed Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy, along with writing the first three movies in the Jason Bourne series) contributed to the movie after production had wrapped, and his additions will be looked at as a major part of the reshoots. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, whose husband (producer Frank Mashall) has worked with Gilroy in the past, has apparently appointed Gilroy as a creative consultant on other Star Wars projects. Gilroy also did some work for Godzilla, the previous movie that Edwards directed, and will serve as the second unit director for the reshoots.

 

One last thing to note is that one of the representatives has said that fans should “go insane” when they see what they’ve cooked up in time for Celebration Europe. We know that there’s going to be a big Rogue One panel that Edwards himself will attend, so it seems incredibly likely that we’ll be seeing a trailer when the big Star Wars fan convention arrives.

 

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