Robert Rodriguez Talks About Playing with Boba Fett in THE MANDALORIAN and How He Added Lots of Action

As we previously reported, Robert Rodriguez was a last-minute addition to direct Chapter 14 of The Mandalorian “The Tragedy”. Jon Favreau called him in to helm the episode when things with the other director they had lined up didn’t work out.

Well, as you know, Rodriguez did a hell of a great job with “The Tragedy”! He made a super kick-ass episode, and in it, he got to play with the legendary Star Wars character Boba Fett. It was so much fun watching Boba Fett kick ass! As it turns out, Rodriguez had to pump things up in the episode and add a lot of action because the script was initially only 19 pages long.

During an interview with Collider, Rodriguez said that Favreau entrusted him fill in all those action scenes:

“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.”

Rodriguez went on to explain, “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.” I’m sure that the fans didn’t mind watching all that action unfold! There was a lot of great stuff included with Mando, Boba Fett, Fennec Shand, fighting a horde of Stormtroopers.

One thing that Rodriguez really wanted to do right in this episode, though, is make Boba Fett shine. He went on to say:

“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.”

He totally succeeded! Star Wars fans loved what he did with the character, and we can’t wait to see how his story continues!