One of the Biggest Moments in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Was Barely Scripted

A new era of Star Wars began last December as Rogue One, the first Star Wars spin-off film, opened in theaters across the galaxy. The film was designed to set the standard for many more to come, and prove that Disney and Lucasfilm can tell stories with great originality. Today we have new details about how one of the film’s biggest and most original elements in the production process wasn’t fully realized from the get-go. Read on for more details….

 

 

Yet another article dedicated to the Rogue One: A Star Wars Story home video release is here. This time Lucas Siegel of SyFy Wire caught up with executive producer and visual effects supervisor John Knoll, who also has a story credit on Rogue One. He revealed that the Battle of Scarif’s biggest moment and climax that included the most spectacular destruction of two Star Destroyers wasn’t entirely scripted.

 

Because of its busy and grueling production schedule, Knoll told SyFy Wire that, “the space battle, which was largely a virtual thing and done in post, was kind of left until the end. Editorial was so busy with it that they finally said, ‘You guys need to figure this out, we don’t have time!'”

 

 

The writing team from ILM only had a brief outline of the climactic sequence for its epic Battle of Scarif:

 

“The first beat is about the fleet arriving and the first wave of X-wings that peel off to go through the shield gate,” Knoll said. “Then it’s a lot of what needs to happen in each beat, and left a lot of what shots those beats are going to turn into up to us to figure out! In fact, one of the story beats was: ‘and then the Rebels take out two Star Destroyers in an interesting way.’ (laughs) And then they left that up to us to figure out how we’d do that in a way that was interesting and different.”

 

 

One thing that John and his team were interested in was exploring new and interesting viewpoints on specific action sequences. Knoll suggested using existing Old Republic-era games and comic material. That’s where his idea of using the Hammerhead Corvette in the productions climatic finale came from:

 

“Yeah! That was something I came up with, this idea of pushing one Destroyer into another, using a ship as essentially a tugboat. That was really great fun. It was up to us how we clearly and efficiently tell those moments, and at the same time include things that are exciting and satisfying and something you haven’t seen before,” he said. “Blowing something up by hitting the weak spot and making the reactor blow up has just been done so many times, even outside of Star Wars, that I really didn’t want to do that. I love this idea of making it all about the mechanical damage,” Knoll said.

 

 

So how does Rogue One’s finale match up with the rest of Star Wars? Discuss it below!

 

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hits Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray, and DVD today.

 

 

May the force be with you.

 

 

+ posts

36 thoughts on “One of the Biggest Moments in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Was Barely Scripted

  • April 4, 2017 at 8:39 pm
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    There was a script?

  • April 4, 2017 at 8:44 pm
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    Now we know who to blame for that ‘ramming spaceships’ thing

    • April 4, 2017 at 10:42 pm
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      you misspelt commend coz it was an awesome idea!

    • April 5, 2017 at 2:50 am
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      One of the absolute best moments in a remarkably fun and well-done film. But then again, I’m a KOTOR nerd.

    • April 5, 2017 at 4:21 am
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      Kind of like how firefighters get “blamed” for rescuing kittens?

      That kind of blame?

    • April 5, 2017 at 7:17 am
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      Thought it was pretty badass, personally.

    • April 5, 2017 at 1:24 pm
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      That was one of my favorite David-vs.-Goliath moments from any movie, ever. I wish I could have been the one that is blamed for coming up with it.

    • April 5, 2017 at 1:55 pm
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      Yes. Nice to have something epic to place blame on rather than having to lay blame for things like Jar Jar Binks on someone.

    • April 6, 2017 at 12:11 am
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      Never thought people liked that sooo much, good for you. I thought it was kinda far-fetched (even for SW) but then again, I thought TFA was not that good, so what do I know.

  • April 4, 2017 at 8:49 pm
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    I was hoping there would be an actual fleet battle, with capital ships exchanging shots, but I don’t the Rebel flagship ever closed with the Star Destroyers. I’m wondering if that would have been more difficult to render, so they went with a more traditional starfighter-centric battle. Since it wasn’t scripted, that also explains the semi-random direction of the battle, i.e. “let’s attack with ion torpedoes-ISD disabled-ramming attack” rushed through that sequence.

  • April 4, 2017 at 9:28 pm
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    Curious… Something was brought to my attention (don’t have the bluray yet, so i can’t check) but how many ships got through the shield gate before it closed? At least, what…. 3-4 x-wings, but do we see the U-Wing get through?…..

    • April 5, 2017 at 4:20 am
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      We don’t see every ship as it goes through, but you see at least one U-Wing taking part in the ground battle.

      • April 5, 2017 at 4:30 am
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        Someone really hated Rogue One and said that only like 3 ships got in, and yeah.. this person also didn’t like any of the characters lol

  • April 4, 2017 at 10:03 pm
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    Letting some time sink in…but for me, R1 is neck and neck with ESB as my favorite. They nailed it!

    • April 5, 2017 at 2:23 am
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      Like your avatar. I enjoyed Legacy of the Force more than most.

    • April 5, 2017 at 4:20 am
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      Nice, I like seeing some positivity from you 🙂

  • April 4, 2017 at 11:40 pm
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    when improvisation works, it´s always better than too much panning

  • April 5, 2017 at 12:11 am
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    There have been recent rumblings of another WGA strike, which although is unlikely to materialize, still raises a red flag. If this particular film was made in the midst of the 2007-2008 strike, they would’ve be totally screwed.

    For example, J.J. Abrams legally couldn’t improvise a single beat in his first Trek film. They had to shoot exactly what was on the page, and so many opportunities for ad-libbing had to be scrapped. (Not that you can tell, watching that Orci/Kurtzman-scripted gem.)

    Lucasfilm got very lucky this time, but in the future I hope the don’t rely so heavily on making these films on-the-fly like this.

  • April 5, 2017 at 2:31 am
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    Oh well, leaving such an important and big aspect of a movie for visual effects guys and not actual writers is a pretty bold decision… Irresponsible I’d say… Good thing they nailed it

    • April 5, 2017 at 2:39 am
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      You gotta trust your team. A director is much more a manager than an auteur…

      • April 5, 2017 at 2:55 am
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        Did I mention the director? I was talking about writers

        • April 5, 2017 at 2:59 am
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          Oh yes. I assumed the director would have made the call to let the effects team develop ideas rather than scripting the sequence.

    • April 5, 2017 at 7:16 am
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      Fascinating idea though…it worked so well, bet it becomes much more common.

  • April 5, 2017 at 7:21 am
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    There wasn’t enough discussion on how awesome it was that Vaders fleet hyperspaced in, causing the rebel fleet to get smashed as they tried to leave…I just thought that was as epic (different level) as Vaders slaughtering rebels.

    And did the ship from Rebels (ghost?) Get smashed too, I don’t recall if they showed it making it out.

    • April 5, 2017 at 1:52 pm
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      I think only a medium transport actually got smashed, then Vader’s forward guns tore apart a frigate before the Mon Cal got hammered.

      Not sure if the Ghost made it out, one would assume it did.

      • April 5, 2017 at 3:10 pm
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        I’d love to see an episode of Rebels about the battle of Scarif from their perspective. That’d be great!

      • April 5, 2017 at 4:15 pm
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        maybe they’ll cover the batlle in more detail in a comic???

        • April 8, 2017 at 12:26 am
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          I’d read it 🙂

    • April 5, 2017 at 10:04 pm
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      The Ghost’s fate is unknown. There’s no shot of it getting destroyed.

  • April 5, 2017 at 3:10 pm
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    The only thing I didn’t like about the battle, was the Y-wings disabling of the Stardestroyer. It seemed way too easy for a ship like a SD.

    • April 5, 2017 at 10:49 pm
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      That’s true, at first that seemed too easy to me, as well. I did notice while watching it last night though, that they say something like “Hit that open window” (paraphrasing here) when releasing the ion bombs – meaning that someone was able to temporarily open a hole in the Star Destroyer’s shields so that the ion bombs could be delivered. I need to watch again to find out how they dropped the shields.

      • April 5, 2017 at 11:27 pm
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        I think they should’ve emphasized more that the SD was weakened.
        It’s probably an editing mistake though, they didn’t have the time to built up to the ion torpedo scene imo.

  • April 5, 2017 at 5:24 pm
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    The more I hear the behind-the-scenes interviews, the more I believe that MOST of the movie was unscripted. Or at least the last half.

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