ROGUE ONE Director Gareth Edwards Addresses His STAR WARS Movie Experience after Tony Gilroy Replaced Him for Reshoots
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards, who recently directed the upcoming sci-fi epic The Creator, recently addressed his time working on his Star Wars movie. While Rogue One ended up being a great flick, the movie went through some behind the scenes drama and extensive reshoots.
Edwards was replaced by the film’s screenwriter Tony Gilroy for those reshoots and the post-production process. While it seems like it might have been a hard experience for Edwards, he has no hard feelings and he was grateful for the time that he spent making the movie. During a recent interview with Variety, he said:
"Look, the only thing I can say is I was incredibly lucky. I got to make a Star Wars film. I won the lottery, in that sense. The idea of someone as privileged as me in any way implying that it was anything other than the amazing experience that it was to some extent – like, I don’t have any empathy for that person, and I don’t want to be that person either."
In regards to the reports of Gilroy taking on the directing duties, this is "as close as Edwards gets to addressing" those Rogue One reports:
"The way you make a film is as important as its screenplay. I would take full control over the process and a mediocre screenplay over a really good screenplay and zero control over the process.”
After he made that movie, Edwards took a seven-year break from making movies and then he jumped on board and made The Creator. He explained:
"I needed to get off the merry-go-round, do you know what I mean? In Hollywood, you can get stuck on the hamster wheel, or whatever analogy you want to use. I just wanted to get off and have a break to take some time thinking about the next thing."
He went on to explain that while he was making these big-budget Hollywood movies, he found that more money didn’t necessarily give him freedom:
"I got to make a very low-budget science fiction film with Monsters, and I realized there were some serious advantages to having no money. It was kind of a shock to have all the money you could ever want, and still be limited. I felt like if I could somehow get that big bag of cash and send it back in time to me when I was making Monsters, the possibilities would have been infinite. And so, in a weird way, I was trying to find that kind of scenario again. I was as much interested in the process of how to make the film as I was the idea."
The Creator tells an epic-scale story, which is set in a distant future after a “catastrophic and apocalyptic war” between humans and artificial intelligence. John David Washington stars in the film as a character who is tasked with saving the world, but he might have to kill an AI robot child to do it.
The movie is based on an original story and screenplay that Edwards wrote with Chris Weitz, and the synopsis reads: “Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself.
It’s explained: “Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.”
After The Creator comes out, I’m sure that Edwards is going to be offered a lot of film projects. Whatever went on behind the scenes with Rogue One will be forgotten, because The Creator looks like it’s going to be an awesome film!