To say that "Rogue One" has been plagued by less-than stellar buzz the last 5 months would be an understatement. Last week its star Felicity Jones came out to try and defend the re-shoots by saying "Obviously when you come to the edit, you see the film come together and you think, 'Actually, we could do this better, and this would make more sense if we did this,' " she says. "I've done it so many times. I mean, you wouldn't just give your first draft on this story, would you?"
I was contacted earlier last week by a person that claimed he or she was on-set during the shoot of 'Rogue One'. They did not want to give me all the details about their connection to the film, but the on-set details they described to me were enough to give us a fuller picture of what actually happened. Take this with a grain of salt, but it's worth pondering over until we see the actual finished product.
Here are the most telling excerpts:
"The film has been in trouble since production. They had a lackluster script to work with and during filming they decided that the film was in trouble so they decided to get Christopher McQuarrie come in and help with the script. He's known to be one of the best script-doctors in Hollywood. Around the time the first trailer came out in April the Disney suits did see the film and were mostly pleased with it. They were going to fix some things later on but nothing they were too concerned with. They were going to wait until the release date to hype the film. Everything was fine until sometime in June they got nervous or worried about the film."
"So they arranged to have a non industry test audience to help screen the film to help Disney gauge what the general public's reaction would be. They hated it! This sent Disney into a major panic. The bad news leaked and Disney went into damage control mode. They denied they had a test audience. They said only the Disney execs saw it. That's a lie. They can dismiss they had a test audience because they had the audience members sign NDAs to help them keep quiet. It gave Disney wiggle room to deny. After the disastrous test screening of the "rough draft" of the film as Felicity yaks about. That was the finished film. That was supposed to be the one the Disney execs were happy about and wanted to release originally."
"Things went into a tizzy soon after, Disney ordered immediate re-shoots and urgently recalled everyone involved on the film back to immediately begin re-shooting the film. They had to pull actors off of other projects and Gareth Edwards was dropped from the Godzilla 2 project. Disney has been in damage control spin since the re-shoots and has been spewing out PR BS since."
"That Hollywood Reporter fluff piece was just ego boosting for Felicity and damage control PR for Disney. From what else I've learned Disney ordered 40% of the film to be re-shot. They had to rebuild entire sets and they didn't know who would come on the film to help save it. So they asked Christopher McQuarrie to come back to help save the film. For whatever reasons he walked off the production. I think they couldn't see eye to eye on things and too much was going to leveled onto his feet. Anyway he balked. They were considering getting JJ Abrams to come by and helm/direct the film but he seemed not to want to get involved. That's when Tony Gilroy was brought in to save the film. According to sources he took over from Gareth Edwards in the director's chair. He also took responsibility for the writing as well. It seems that Edwards was kicked off his own film."
"I don't know how they are going to gloss this fact over for credits or how they are going to cover it up, but that's what happened. They'll probably just say he "helped", but that's as close to the truth they'll admit to. They also replaced the main composer of the film from Alexandre Desplat to Michael Giacchino. They seemed to play re-arrange the deck chairs on the Rogue One ship to keep it from sinking. "