‘Star Wars’ goes Rogue

Lucasfilm’s new series of Star Wars standalone films starts with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It’s a film set in the universe fans know and love, but featuring new characters and storylines.

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When Lucasfilm President and Star Wars Producer Kathleen Kennedy first sat down with George Lucas as he outlined his plans to continue with the Star Wars saga and to make Episodes VII, VIII, and IX, he also revealed another ambition: “George decided he was going to make more saga films, but he said he felt there was also an opportunity to tell more stories inside the universe and to make films not related to the Luke Skywalker story.”

And so was born the idea of creating films that would complement the new saga films, but also allow Kennedy and the Lucasfilm team to explore the universe and experiment with different styles and different ways of telling stories.

Rogue One tells the story of a group of unlikely heroes, who in a time of conflict band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.

The director’s vision

Before Director Gareth Edwards could focus on the important job of casting the film, he had to take a step back and think how he could give the film its own identity within the Star Wars universe and make it his own. 

To do this, Edwards felt he had to take all that he knew about the films and take each element to its breaking point to find out what ultimately makes a Star Wars film feel exactly that, but equally, how he could make it fresh and exciting.

Kennedy was very supportive of Edwards’s desire to experiment and to give the film its own unique personality: “The Star Wars saga films have a responsibility to maintain a continuity of tone and stylistic device. Things like the crawl at the beginning, and the wipes. But with the standalone films we’re relaxing some of those rules so that we can try stylistic and tonal experiments that depart a bit from what we’ve seen and are exciting.”

Edwards also wanted to make his film feel more grounded in reality and to give Rogue One a sense of gritty realism very reminiscent of his style of filming in Monsters. “What I wanted to do was to make Rogue One more natural, more realistic, and a little more organic; to make it feel like a real world. This is a time with no Jedi, no god to come and help the people who are under this massive threat,” explains the director.

Making Rogue One

Neal Scanlan who won a BAFTA Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is once again responsible for creating the creatures that inhabit the world of Rogue One.

Edwards gave Scanlan and his team creative freedom and a chance to develop the characters in a new way. He wanted the characters to be spontaneous and that allowed the characters to evolve naturally. The end result is that the creatures are treated the same as the other actors on set, even to the extent that Scanlan asked the hair and make-up team to add dust, grime, sweat, and grease to the creatures, just as they would any of the other cast.

Considered the world’s leading authority on visual effects, Executive Producer John Knoll was able to introduce new and exciting technologies to the production of Rogue One. Knoll brought real-time visual effects to the set making it possible for Edwards to be able to gauge what the final world would like while he was actually shooting the film. The real-time visual effects would literally create the environment on the screen for Edwards to watch as the cast performed the scene.

Knoll also introduced new techniques when shooting the interiors of the ships as they battled through attacks by the Empire. Historically, although a craft may be placed on a gimbal to simulate movement, the exterior would often be blue or green screen but Knoll and his team built a giant wraparound LED screen that was 50ft in diameter with a central band 20ft high and had imagery play on the screens. By taking this approach they could add lasers that fly by in the space battle, creating a very realistic look.

The filming of Rogue One primarily took place again at Pinewood Studios, but where possible Edwards also built sets in actual locations both in England and as far afield as Iceland, Jordan, and the Maldives.  Examples of the practical sets include the rebel base Yavin 4, an enormous set built to scale at 350ft long by 200ft wide; and the 58ft-wide, 21ft-high Death Star, painstakingly recreated from research and photographs.

Rounding up the cast & crew

A big production like this needs big names to support it and the overflowing amount of talent involved in the making of this Star Wars film is nothing to scoff at.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Monsters) and produced by Kathleen Kennedy, Allison Shearmur (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Cinderella), and Simon Emanuel (The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2). Veteran ILM visual effects supervisor John Knoll (Pirates of the Caribbean), who shares a long history with the Star Wars films, is executive producer alongside Jason McGatlin (Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The War of the Worlds).

Academy and BAFTA Award nominee Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything, Like Crazy) heads up the cast and stars opposite Diego Luna (Milk, Elysium). Joining them are Ben Mendelsohn (Bloodline, Animal Kingdom), Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale, TV’s Hannibal), Alan Tudyk (Frozen, I Robot), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, Jason Bourne), and Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland, The Butler). The film also welcomes two of China’s biggest stars, Donnie Yen (Ip Man, Blade II) and Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly, The Sun Also Rises).

To create the distinctive and contemporary look of the film, Edwards chose revered cinematographer Greig Fraser (Zero Dark Thirty, Foxcatcher) who teams with Academy Award–winning special effects supervisor Neil Corbould (Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan). Star Wars veteran Doug Chiang (Star Wars Episodes I and II, Forrest Gump) and Neil Lamont (supervising art director on The Force Awakens and the Harry Potter film series) join forces as production designers, and Neal Scanlan (Prometheus) returns as creature effects supervisor having recently won a BAFTA for his work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Additional key crew include costume designers Dave Crossman (costume supervisor on The Force Awakens and the Harry Potter film series), and Glyn Dillon (The Force Awakens and Kingsman: The Secret Service costume concept artist), as well as stunt coordinator Rob Inch (The Force Awakens, World War Z).

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story opens in Philippine cinemas on December 15.