ROGUE ONE Director Gareth Edwards Gives His Side of the Reshoot Controversy


"Rogue One" Director Gareth Edwards tries to save face about the reshoots. Say what you will about Disney, but they sure know how to expertly conduct damage control. Edwards to spoke to the L.A. Times about the Star Wars experience, but these are the juicy tidbits we gathered concerning he rumored reshoots:
"What happened was that I’d say a third of the movie or more has this embedded documentary style to it, and as a result we shot hours and hours and days and days of material. Normally when you put a film together it goes together like A-B-C-D-E and you move on. Whereas we had so many permutations, so many different ways it could be constructed, it took longer in the edit to find the exact version."
"We’d always planned to do a pickup shoot but we needed a lot of time to figure out all this material and get the best out of it. So that pushed the entire schedule in a big way. Then Disney saw the film and reacted really well and they said, “Whatever you need, we’re going to support you.” Our visual-effects shot count went from 600 to nearly 1,700, so suddenly we could do absolutely anything we wanted. To design 1,000 visual effects shots should take a year, so it was all hands to the pump and we never came up for air really until about a week ago."

"Things kept improving constantly and the film was getting better and better — and if you’re improving it, you don’t stop. I think any other movie you would say, “That’ll do. We’re going to get a hit.” But “Star Wars” is going to live forever if you do it properly. We just can’t let it go. You’ve got keep going until they prise it out of your hands."
"Making “Star Wars” is a team sport, really. You can’t make these massive movies completely on your own. Even from the costumes to the guns to the ships to the VFX, it’s a real team effort."

What's even more worrisome is the fact that it was reported earlier last week that writer Tony Gilroy made $5 Million dollars off the reshoots. He was the rumored guy that replaced Edwards as director, although never officially. This goes exactly the way my insider source described to me the on-set friction and how Edwards was pushed aside. Gilroy basically became the main director when the reshoots started. I got a lot of heat from fanboys for posting the article, but, fact of the matter is, I believe what he said and he was credible.