‘Andor’ Director Toby Haynes on Recruiting Andy Serkis, Working With Forest Whitaker, and Much More
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Andor director Toby Haynes discussed his time working on the series, especially how he handled episode 8, titled Narkina 5. Haynes, who also directed episodes 1-3, is now back to direct 8-10. He discussed how his Star Wars fandom affected his time on the series, how Fiona Shaw would shoot her scenes in the freezing cold for a more realistic look, how Tony Gilroy recruited Andy Serkis, and how shooting the Luthen Rael-Saw Gerrera scene was a career highlight. What follows is a recollection of the highlights from the interview posted on THR, but make sure to check out the original piece for the full interview (linked above).
Haynes took over directing duties on the first three episodes from showrunner Tony Gilroy in September 2020, a couple of months before shooting started in the U.K. Despite that short amount of time, Haynes insisted that he had enough time to prep, though it took a while for him to realize the sheer scope of the project he’d embarked on:
“Yeah, I probably had more prep on this project than I’ve had for most of my projects. So it was a very generous amount of prep time. But the scope and the scale that they wanted, like all projects, always outstrips the budget and the time that you have to do it. So we had to hit the ground running. On my second day or something, I went out to see the construction they were doing at Marlow, which is where they built Ferrix, and I saw the scale of what they were doing. And that’s when I realized just how deep the shit that I was in. (Laughs.) So it was a huge responsibility, and it was incredibly exciting.”
Haynes, a lifelong Star Wars fan, was a bit hesitant at first when he got the job because Gilroy insisted on people involved in the series keeping their fandom apart and focusing on telling the story he’d laid out as close as possible. However, Haynes and Gilroy got along very well thanks to the latter’s work dynamics. The director said the following about Gilroy:
“He’s super smart, and it’s clear on the page what he wants. But he’s also incredibly fluid and open to ideas. He really wanted me to take ownership of it, visually, and bring my own style to it. I kept saying, ‘Do you want to know more about my lens choices?’ And he said, ‘Do you know what you’re going to do?’ And I was like, ‘Yep.’ And he was like, ‘That’s all I need to know.’ So he’s the best kind of exec to work with in that way. There was some stuff from block one that he’d really envisaged quite clearly, and he wanted to see that realized. But then he was equally ready to throw it away when there was a better idea or a different idea. So he’s very adaptable.
[Tony] was nervous about how much I love Star Wars, but I always say that I’m a dramatist first and a Star Wars fan second. So what comes first for me is the story and the characters and what we’re trying to do. But when you see your first droid on set, you do get really excited about it, and you have to make a concerted effort to make sure it stays in the background. Tony was very clear about that. He never wanted to foreground the monsters. He never wanted to foreground the droids. He wanted it to be part of the fabric of the piece, but not do a special shot where you’re announcing a new alien or something like that. He really wanted it to feel completely integrated in the world that he was presenting and not presented [in and of itself].
In the first arc, Maarva (Fiona Shaw) wouldn’t turn on the heater when Cassian and Brasso insisted on her doing it. Haynes, who also directed those episodes, explained that they shot those scenes around Christmas, and it was so freezing that Maarva’s breath seen in the episode was completely realistic:
“There was a time when it had snowed, and so there were people using heaters to burn the snow off the ground and keep the continuity. But it was freezing. Maarva’s interior and exterior set were the same set, so it was a fully three-dimensional world. But it was so cold, and that’s why you can see her breath when she talks. You can see that she’s freezing cold and that’s why she’s not putting the heating on. Cassian was worried about her sitting in the cold because she’s going to get sick.”
Episode 8 included the surprise appearance by the one and only Andy Serkis, who had already worked on Star Wars in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi as Supreme Leader Snoke. In Andor, Serkis plays a brand-new character named Kino Loy, and as Haynes revealed, Gilroy had been trying to convince him for a while to join the series:
“Tony had been talking to Andy for a while. He was trying to line him up, but he was unsure whether he was going to do it or not. He was coming off a big directing gig. But we were all very excited by the idea of him joining. I know Andy separately through an old friend of mine, and I’d met him a couple of times. So the chance of actually working with him was very exciting for me, and then suddenly, there he was on set. It all came together in a very short space of time, and he had some big ideas of what he wanted to do with the character. And now I can’t imagine it being anybody else. There was never any other option, really. It had to be Andy.
The fact that he has Star Wars heritage was neither here nor there for us. To us, he was Kino, and it was all about him and what he could bring to it. It was a chance for him to really act a lot. He got a lot of screen time in our short block.”
Apparently, Serkis, whose mother is half-Iraqi, tried a different accent in rehearsals, but they ultimately decided against it:
“No, but he did try an accent in one of the rehearsals. He was playing with the idea of an Iraqi accent because he has some Iraqi heritage. But it never quite fit. With Andor, I don’t think we ever had an actor do an accent that wasn’t their own. We had everybody use their own original accents, without trying to soften them or anything. It’s part of their own character. It’s the realism of them, so there’s no additional layer of fakery.”
Also, interestingly, Haynes dodged a question about what they are building inside the prison:
” It’s the building blocks of the Empire, but that’s probably a question for Tony. “
Haynes also discussed filming the interchange between Forest Whitaker’s Saw Gerrera and Stellan Skarsgård’s Luthen Rael in the eighth episode, which he was extremely excited about and described as a “career highlight”:
“Oh my God, that was an amazing day. We were all nervous. I had phone calls from Forest the night before, and he was asking me questions about Kyber crystals and backstory. But we did this incredible rehearsal where they just read the scene for the first time and went at it. They really went at each other, and there was this incredible tension in the room as they read this scene. And honestly, if I could have filmed that first time they read the scene, I would’ve been overjoyed to have gotten that performance from both of them.
I had this idea about how to structure the scene. I wanted to end on an extreme closeup of Forest at the end of his rant about all the separatist groups of the alliance. A really direct, face-on shot would really bring you into the argument and build that intensity. And so I just got him to do that speech over and over again. I was just like, ‘Go crazy with it,’ and that closeup was one of the best closeups of my career. Seeing him do that was just absolutely magical, and to have him play opposite a heavyweight like Stellan was a career highlight.”
About the Cinta and Vel relationship, Haynes said the following about portraying their intimate moment in the last episode in a subtle but meaningful way:
“For any beat, I’ll make sure that it’s turned up to the right level for that moment, and I want to feel it. When I’m sitting on set and I’m looking at the performance, I’m going, ‘Am I feeling this or am I bored? Am I thinking of other things?’ And when I’m sitting in the edit and I’m seeing what we’ve done with it, I’m asking those same questions. I’m asking those questions all the way through. I’ll even ask them when I first read the script. ‘Does this moment land?’ And so I did the same with that moment.”
Every director or creative working on Star Wars usually has a pinch-me moment that they refer to in interviews, the moment they realized they were working on and adding to the legacy of the franchise. For Haynes, it was definitely an unexpected one:
“In the first block, a pinch-me moment was when we first introduced B2. When we introduced B2 on that Ferrix street, I had a sleeping giant animal down the street that’s breathing, and I had all these sleeping droids around the place as B2 is moving through. And then we set these dogs off, and one of them pees on B2. It was the craziest thing. There I was in a galaxy far, far away, and I’m doing a scene with a droid. I’m doing Star Wars. It’s this amazing thing for me, and then I do a scene where a dog pees on a droid. It’s totally insane.”
Haynes also discussed how the show deals with the gray areas between the blacks and whites depicted in the original Star Wars trilogy during the Galactic Civil War. For that, Gilroy used the characters of Luthen Rael and Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), and Haynes couldn’t help but praise that decision:
“It’s very easy to paint the bad guys as black-and-white bad guys. The scariest kind of bad guy is a bad guy who genuinely thinks they’re doing the right thing. And so to see that in three dimensions, it makes you think a lot more about what it takes to be a good guy. It’s also important to subvert the moral construct of what the alliance really is. They’re the good guys and live by a moral code, but I think Tony is trying to say that if you actually want to get something done, you sometimes need people who live in the gray areas, between good and bad. Sometimes, you have to do things that you are not happy about and you have to break your own rules. People are constantly struggling with whether or not they’re doing the right thing, and you see that with Luthen and Syril.”
Andor will be back next Wednesday with the ninth episode, which Haynes will direct once again, with a script by Beau Willimon. You can check out Miguel’s review of episode 8 here, and The Resistance Broadcast’s discussion on TRB Live! from this week here.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as movies from Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
