Diego Luna Talks on Sith Council About the Reception to ‘Andor’ Season 1, Whether He Considered Directing for Season 2, and the ‘Rogue One’ Ending
Taking a break from the set of Andor season 2 in the UK, Diego Luna was a guest on the latest episode of Sith Council, where our friend Kristian Harloff got the chance to ask him a few questions about the first season of the Disney Plus series, whether he ever considered directing for the second season, and how much of Rogue One‘s ending was changed during the reshoots. What follows are some of the highlights from the interview, which you can check out in full on the video linked at the end of the article.
First, Luna talked about how, now that the show is out, he gets to see that what they intended to do came off the right way, as audiences are cheering the show for precisely the same reasons they all jumped on board:
“I love now that we have the opportunity to actually get feedback. Through social media and the reviews. It seems that if you know how to handle it, it’s very useful, in fact. You have to see if the reasons that made you do something, or what you were aiming for, is actually what’s getting out there, you know? And with this show it’s very special, because the words and the concept and the ideas we had, is what people are celebrating, which I love. I remember talking to Tony and saying ‘We should be able to do something complex, where the characters are real, are grounded, where the moments feel intense and intimate.’ […]
Tony was always reminding us ‘Everything needs to have a meaning, there has to be a reason for things to happen, it has to be real, this has to be happening.’ And then you go to the reviews and it’s like ‘It’s so real!’ The series has been celebrated for the same reason I decided to do it, you know? And that is unique, and it doesn’t happen often.”
Luna also weighed in on the layered characters and how the show shied away from characterizing any of them as pure good or pure evil. Instead, it treated them as humans that make choices, and through those choices, they reveal who they really are:
“I know it sounds cliché, but there [are] no good and bad people here. There [are] people making choices. Many make the wrong choice, but there has to be that element that connects you to them. Even though you’d be like ‘I would probably never get that far, you know? But I can see a human making a choice, a decision.’ And yeah, people dealing with who they are, and that complexity, that reality. I remember thinking a lot ‘This has to be in the gray area.’ It can be easy to say, ‘Ok, this guy is good, this guy is bad.’ Cassian starts making a choice that is very complex, let’s put it that way. And he takes the decision in a second and executes it, and starts running. And probably he’s gonna question that decision for years of his life. But in the moment, he was just there, reacting as best he could. I like that the show tries to avoid these movie moments that make the characters heroes. It’s just regular people here, capable of doing extraordinary things. And you were saying it, you wanna see all the other characters. And it’s important to say it, because Cassian is a great excuse to understand why a Rebellion is needed. A rebellion, a revolution, is about an ensemble. It’s never the story of someone, therefore this character is gonna take you to all of these other stories that are so interesting and end up shaping you.”
Luna also talked about how the show came together in the first place, beginning with an idea by Kathleen Kennedy that was then shaped into the show we have with Tony Gilroy:
“It was Kathleen Kennedy and yes, it was an easy one to respond. Because she was like ‘Should we explore the possibility of doing something, of telling the backstory of the character?’ So I was invited at the right moment, and with the right words also. ‘We should try to explore this and see where that gets us.’ It sounded perfect to me, it sounded risky, which is something we owe to Rogue One, you know? […]
And then Tony Gilroy came in and when he pitched that idea, it was clear that it had to be done. It is what it is, we didn’t move much. When he sat down for the first time -it was on the phone, in fact- and he explained to me how he was seeing this and what the possibilities were, and the characters we were gonna have, and how it was gonna be structured… It sounded risky as nothing else, and it sounded so interesting to say ‘Wow, Star Wars is going there? That makes it already very interesting.’ Because it is quite bold and risky to go there. And I think that people started to get involved with this project for the right reasons.”
Luna also discussed how television was just the perfect format for the scope of the story they were trying to tell. When asked if it was the streaming model that allowed them to really explore and develop these characters and storylines, he said:
“I think there are great examples of how television can become that. Not just by doing television you’ll be doing it, because it also depends on the team behind, and I think that the confidence that the company or the studio that is paying for it has matters so much. I think the freedom that we have with Andor, the freedom and the confidence and the support we have from Lucasfilm and Disney matters a lot. If you think about it we shot the first whole season and we started on the second season without the first being out. And there is confidence in what we’re doing. […]
Having something to say that lasts 12 episodes is something. having a story that is so complex and with so many characters that needs 12 episodes… That is very cool.”
Andor is famously the first Star Wars show to be shot outside of the Volume, the massive LED screen built by StageCraft and ILM to create a virtual environment on a sound stage without the necessity of green screens. While the show has been widely praised for its authenticity and the sense of real locations, as opposed to the claustrophobia that the Volume sometimes brings in, Luna also gave a very interesting example of how that also helped them on set to make the show even better:
“I remember in Maarva’s house, I was rehearsing with Ben [Caron], one of the directors, and I was like ‘Ah, I think I should open that shelf, we should see if we can put something in the shelf that I can use [in the scene]’ And then I go and I open the shelf and when I look inside the shelf, there’s stuff there. And there’s a reason, and it’s all cooking stuff. And it’s there because it’s close to the kitchen, and there is a logic about it. And then I go like ‘Shit!’ I don’t even have to talk to props, this is already happening, this is a house. And there is a logic behind this house, so I opened it up, saw what was there, and we came up with an action that had to do with those props that were already placed by someone else there. That specificity… The shelf could have never been opened and the stuff was gonna be there anyway.”
That level of detail was applied to every aspect of the show, even when they were coming up with Cassian’s droid, B2EMO. Luna explained how they had to find someone to voice the droid on set so that he would be able to react to it while filming:
“I was talking about the team designing and operating B2, for example. The amount of time put behind that droid, how it was gonna move, how it was gonna interact with you, how it’s gonna receive that information… And this is something I learned in Rogue One. When you’re supposed to act in front of a droid or a creature, the voice has to come from when you’re reacting to, otherwise, it fucks with your brain. If you’re listening to a voice [over there] and you’re reacting here, for me it’s quite impossible to do it. There’s something that doesn’t connect in my brain and we start going crazy. So we had many tests to find the right speaker to be inside the droid for the voice to come out with the right texture. “
Luna was also asked about whether he ever considered directing on the second season (the actor has ten directing credits on IMDb that range from shorts to TV episodes to feature films). He said that while the idea was floated around in a casual way at some point, it never really went anywhere for two reasons:
“I spoke once to [consulting producer] Sanne [Wohlenberg]. She’s our producer, the one that is actually there every day, the one that keeps everything moving forward. She’s fantastic. We talked about it but it would be impossible because, again, the amount of time it takes the pre-production of the show is crucial. Directors work three months before going on directing their blocks. We shoot a block of three episodes, which is 120 minutes, a movie, and you get three months to prepare your movie. So you’d lose your actor for three months, or I would have someone else prepare the show you’re supposed to direct, which makes no sense. But besides that, I have a rule and I don’t think I’m gonna break it. As a director, I don’t wanna be acting, and I think it’s really unfair to ask an actor to be his own director. The beauty of being directed is that you put everything to serve someone else’s perspective and point of view. And that you can trust someone to let you go, and be vulnerable, and that you will have someone there to catch you.”
Finally, the topic of Rogue One came up, and Luna was asked about the original ending, and whether or not it was true that Vader was supposed to kill all the crew at one point, but Disney decided against it, fearing it would be too dark. He said the following:
“The first time I was asked to sit down with the director, in Los Angeles, I was asked into a restaurant, and the restaurant was empty. He was giving his back to the wall with his computer open and he asked me to sit down next to him. He started telling me a story and kept saying ‘And then this guy, and then this girl, and then this guy…’ And started showing me drawings and concept art, and then at the end, I was like ‘Why is he phrasing it that way?’ And he goes like ‘I want you to play the guy’. Then he said, ‘If you want to, now we have to convince everyone else, but I would love to do this with you.’ And I was like ‘Oh, perfect.’ And the story he pitched me is the one we saw, in terms of beginning and end. Many things changed along the way but not the end.”
Make sure to check out the interview in full, as well as the rest of this Sith Council episode, in the video here:
The episode is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Andor season 2 began filming in the UK in late November and will be in production through next August, aiming for a release on Disney Plus sometime in the second half of 2024.
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.
