‘Andor’: Tony Gilroy Says Lucasfilm Left Them To Do the Show They Wanted
In a new interview with The Wrap, Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy walked fans through the process of how the series came to be, and gave a few interesting new details. He’s mentioned before how, when Lucasfilm first set out to make a Cassian Andor series, they didn’t have the money to make the show Gilroy had proposed. You can check out an extended look at the early days of the show here, but in this new interview, Gilroy also addressed how Lucasfilm barely blinked when he included a brothel in the opening scene, and how the series will explore the Empire’s regime all across the galaxy, in one of (if not the) most ambitious Star Wars projects ever.
Gilroy explained how, once he convinced Lucasfilm to do the show, the company barely gave him notes:
“We’ve had very little adult supervision along the way. No kidding. We are very much left to our own devices here. It’s a very small brain trust of people that figure out what to do.”
One of the main goals of the show is to show the extents to which the Empire has taken over the galaxy. This is one of the main things that drove Gilroy to tell this story:
“It also is absolutely canonically pure. This is the moment as the Empire is absorbing everything else as they’re spreading. One of the things they’re doing is nationalizing all these corporate planets. By the time we’re done, we’ll have shown all the ways that the Empire, with all of its fascistic appetites, is being satisfied around the galaxy, in every variety of way – environmentally, corporately, economically, socially, every way. And it was a cool way to do that.”
Andor, as it’s been advertised for a while, did not use the Volume for production, but instead, they built real sets and filmed on location. Gilroy explained how the limitations that the Volume presents prevented the crew from using it to film the show:
“It’s a pretty simplistic tool with some pretty serious limitations. It’s a box and you can go in it, but you can’t go past a certain point. It’s very expensive. But the main thing about it is you have a completely different workflow.
We’re doing 12 hours of 190 speaking parts along the way. We’re going for an abundant show. And economically it’s a disaster to do that. And you can’t mix. You can’t sort of say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a vegetarian for the next two days. And then I’m going to go back to eating meat.’ You have to commit. It’s not a disagreement or an argument or a rejection. It’s just a matter of work and flow.”
He also explained that Andor will not be using cheap fan service as a tool in the box. Every character that appears in the show does so because they have a reason to be there. That is the case, for example, for Saw Gerrera, as he said:
“Popping up is not something we’re doing. We’re not doing any popping up. If people are meant to be there, I mean, it’s logical to assume that if we’re going to go to Yavin at the end and there’d be who’s in Yavin. And it’s logical to assume that everyone knows Forest Whitaker’s in here now as Saw Gerrera figures prominently into ‘Rogue.’ But no, there won’t be anything gratuitous. If people are there, they’re there for a reason.”
It’s definitely interesting the reasoning he gave, as that could also be applied to Ben Mendelsohn’s Orson Krennic. The character has long been rumored to be making an appearance in the first season, but Lucasfilm never made the official announcement, and we have yet to meet him.
New episodes of Andor debut on Disney Plus every Wednesday. You can check out our written review of the fourth episode here, and watch The Resistance Broadcast’s live discussion 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.
