ANDOR Writer Tony Gilroy on How the BOURNE Franchise Influenced the STAR WARS Series
I initially was not excited about the upcoming Star Wars series Andor. While I loved Rogue One, I just had no interest in Diego Luna's Cassian Andor. But, after watching the trailers for the series, now I’m actually excited about watching the show! The setting of the story is definitely the most interesting aspect of it.
The story is set five years before the events of Rogue One, and it tracks how and why Cassian joined the rebellion as the Empire aggressively expands its reach across the galaxy. The series is described as a "refugee story" that sees people trying to escape from a fully powered Empire. Luna previously shared, “It's the journey of a migrant. That feeling of having to move is behind this story, very profoundly and very strong. That shapes you as a person. It defines you in many ways, and what you are willing to do."
The 12-episode series was created by Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote the Rogue One screenplay and was the uncredited director on reshoots for the film. He also scripted the Bourne franchise, and in a recent interview with SFX Magazine, he talked about the influence that Bourne had on Andor.
"[With Bourne] I had been trying to get people to make an acoustic action movie, because action movies had gotten so bombastic in the ’80s, they were just enormous. So when Bourne came along, we went way down to nothing.
"It was about making it real. Keeping someone you really understand and really care about in a place that you understand the geography of, with stakes, is much more involving than a guy on a train with 15 machine guns and a helicopter coming down. That aesthetic, that idea, does carry over to Andor because we are on the ground with these people, so that everything that we do has an intimacy and an acoustic nature to it within the grandeur of Star Wars."
It sounds like this is going to be a down and gritty series, which is great! Gilroy goes on to explain that Andor is “an adventure story and It’s one man’s odyssey through the center [of the story] and then all these peripheral characters surrounding him and spinning around. I mean, god, it’s looking to be entertaining. It’s heavy material, heavy things are happening, but it’s an adventure story, too."
Awesome! Forest Whitaker is reprising his role from Rogue One as Clone Wars veteran and radical insurgent Saw Gerrera, and Genevieve O’Reilly is returning as Mon Mothma, one of the founders of the Rebel Alliance. The series also stars Stellan Skarsgard (Thor), Adria Arjona (Morbius), Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve), Denise Gough (Under the Banner of Heaven) and Kyle Soller (Poldark). Then there’s Ben Mendelsohn, who will reportedly be back as Imperial Director Orson Krennic.
The first three episodes of the series will drop on Disney+ on September 21st. You can watch the latest trailer for the film here.