Robert Rodriguez Talks About Directing ‘The Mandalorian’

Robert Rodriguez with Baby Yoda for The Mandalorian

 

Robert Rodriguez’s directorial debut on The Mandalorian was a crowd pleaser for many reasons, and now he’s opened up about what it was like getting to direct a Star Wars project.

 

Please be aware that spoilers follow for The Mandalorian Chapter 14: The Tragedy.

 

The Tragedy is notable for the triumphant return of Boba Fett post-Return of the Jedi in his classic armor, and Rodriguez spoke to Collider at length about how that was something he had dreamed about since he was 12 years old.

 

It was my 12-year-old dream. When I was 12 was when Empire Strikes Back came out and I was a huge Boba Fett fan. You know, they would tease him out before the movie came out. You already knew he was going to be a character to watch. The marketing was really great, like, ‘This character Boba Fett,’ and so when you saw the movie, you couldn’t wait to see him. He captured your imagination before the movie even came out; it’s all we were talking about at school. I still remember that, how mysterious that character was. You got a little taste of him but you were waiting to see more.

When I saw the script (on sent me the script) and it said ‘Boba Fett’ and ‘Darksaber’ and ‘Mando’ and ‘Fennec,’ I was just like, ‘This doesn’t even feel like a real script. It feels like a fan wrote this in a fever dream hoping that this would be an episode.’ And yes, this was the script. It had all the good stuff in it. It was like a ‘Greatest Hits’ of all the good stuff; I couldn’t believe it. To go play in Star Wars with all the toys and to get to play with Boba Fett as one of your main [characters] — I just thought, ‘I gotta go in there and just have him be… I don’t know if he’s going to show up in any more episodes or what, so I just gotta make him super badass in this moment [and] be that character that I imagined him being when I heard about him when I was 12. That was my mission, just to go satisfy that 12-year-old fascination with the character.

 

Collider asked Rodriguez if there were any other scenes that had been left on the cutting room floor, but the director actually revealed the opposite was true, and that “the script was really short”.

 

The script was much shorter than the episode. The script was, like, 19 pages so that suggests 19 minutes. I added a lot of action to this [episode]. I even asked Jon [favreau], I said, ‘Is it okay that my script is only 19 pages? Because I cut really fast and it’s probably going to end up being 16 minutes. Do we need to add more pages?’ and he goes, ‘No, that’s what you’re here for! You need to fill that out.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll try and make that battle longer.’ So that’s where that extra battle came from.

I know my tendency is to cut things pretty tight. If I have a 100-page script, it’s a 90-minute movie. So I had a 19-page script [and] I thought, ‘Whoa! I’m gonna run out of things to do, so I added a lot of action.

 

Historically, episodes of The Mandalorian have run surprisingly short, so we’re grateful to Robert Rodriguez for finding some extra time to give us some more Boba Fett action. If you’re looking for any extra insight on the return of Star Wars‘s most infamous bounty hunter, Temuera Morrison has also spoken up about his return to the Fett family.

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Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.

Josh Atkins

Josh is a huge Star Wars fan, who has spent far too much time wondering if any Star Wars character could defeat Thanos with all the Infinity Stones.

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