The pitch was so compelling
that I immediately said, "I think this could be great."
I think it might actually be one of the best stories
to start off the new stand-alone movies.
It seemed to fit very much into the direction
and some of the ideas that we'd been kicking around.
And the fact that this sort of falls into the genre
of a World War ll-type story, a heist movie.
So in May of 1978, that was the year after Stat Wars came out,
my dad had a conference in Anaheim,
and he brought my brothers and I along.
This was my first trip to California.
And I had read this amazing article
in Cinefantastique magazine.
They had fairly substantial interviews
with a lot of the folks that had worked on New Hope at ILM.
I was 15, and there I was in the hotel room in Anaheim.
And I picked up a phone book and just, on a lark,
looked to see if there was a listing for Industrial Light & Magic
and there was.
So, I called up and I said, "I'm a model maker,
"and I'm interested in working in the industry."
They said, "Why don't you come on down and we'll show you around?"
So, the next morning, my dad drove me to Van Nuys
where ILM was, dropped me off.
I spent the entire day at ILM.
And I saw them building models in the model shop
for the next episode.
That was a pretty transformative experience.
When Kathy came on board at Lucasfilm
and we announced these stand-alone stories,
I just started thinking,
"You know, that idea from the opening crawl of New Hope,
"of stealing the Death Star plans, it's just a bit of backstory,
"but it seems like that could be a pretty compelling film just by itself."
We'd be talking in the hallway with friends of mine
and I would pitch them a 30-second version of the movie.
And they'd say, "I want to see that."
"You need to go make an appointment to pitch this to Kathy.
"You have to pitch this to Kathy."
So I made an appointment and I pitched it to Kathy.
John, who is somebody I've known over the years,
called me up and said,
"I've always had an idea that I've been thinking about and kicking around,
"and I'd love to come in and talk to you about it."
And he came in and essentially pitched the idea
that's spelled out in the opening crawl of New Hope.
About Rebel spies that go in to steal the plans to the Death Star.
It was immediately plausible
that we could do something within that World War ll adventure genre
and have it still feel very much like Star Wars.
I didn't hear anything for about a week,
so I thought, "All right, well, okay, at least I did it."
And then I got an email from Kiri that...
"You know, this is... We're really intrigued by this.
"We may want to proceed."
To read that... You know, I was just all alone,
and like, "Oh, man, I want to tell somebody."
But it's all... Gotta keep it quiet.
John and I go way back.
We probably started at ILM almost the same year.
When I heard that he had pitched this idea
and that it was actually on the slate to be one of the films,
I actually ran into John in the hallway and said,
"Hey, tell me about what this film is.
"How can I help you? How can we kick-start this?"
And at that time, we didn't know who the director was.
We didn't even have a writer.
Basically, I pitched him,
"Can we actually start a small development team,
"just some of the initial ideas, under your guidance?"
And we started to develop the world of Rogue One.
The whole idea was to just help launch the project
so that when the writer came on board, and when the director came on board,
we had a head start.
Doug told me that John Knoll
had a project that he wanted help with.
And it was just going to be a small in-house thing
between a couple of artists and John.
My first task that John wanted me to work on
was to get one piece of art depicting this Rebel unit
and really showing that they're this motley group.
It was a variety of humans,
the droid, and then the two aliens,
each with different skills and different abilities.
Even back in this first iteration, the commander was Jyn.
What makes something a saga film is
it's related to the Skywalker family in some way.
But Star Wars stories, I think, can be anything.
We want these movies to have a distinctiveness to them,
and so we're very interested in filmmakers
who have really strong points of view
when it comes to their visual take on things.
And this movie in particular,
we wanted the right person to tackle this particular set of events
that are so important to what happens in EP IV.
Retreat!
We popped in a Blu-ray of Monsters in George's screening room
in the main house at Skywalker Ranch.
We watched Monsters and came out of it and said,
"Great, looks good. Gareth's going to be our guy."
Monsters was Gareth's first film.
It has a really fresh, very interesting visual point of view,
that we thought would make Rogue One special.
So, we sat down and talked to him, and again,
what we were surprised by was what an incredible fan he was.
The affection that he had for Episode IV was so palpable.
So this is the actual one he played with?
And not just affection, but knowledge.
Deep, deep knowledge of it.
I said all my embarrassing stories
about going to Tunisia and things like that.
Star Wars means the world to me.
I never ever, ever, ever thought
that I'd be lucky enough to be directing a Star Wars movie.
The very first thing that he said when I asked him,
"Can you tell me what you love about Star Wars?"
was, "I've always wanted to join the Rebel Alliance."
We're creating a narrative
that explores the idea of the Alliance coming together.
So we wanted this to be an extremely diverse group of characters.
And as we tell the story about the coming together of the Rebel Alliance,
how do we represent that in the ensemble?
And that's a lot of fun, to figure out these characters,
so that when they do come together,
it feels like they're all true Rebels.
That process was to really refine
the emotional biographies of the characters.
It was important to us to really make sure
that we're not just telling the story of this super-weapon,
but that we're telling the story of these people.
She's very determined.
She's strong-willed.
She has an independence.
But I didn't want her to become a caricature.
It was very important
that we found her humanity and her vulnerability,
and also that the audience would be with her.
We really owe Felicity a manicure after this.
And a nice hair treatment.
My first memory of it was watching it at my cousin's house.
And I just remember so vividly the introduction
as it goes up the screen.
But I've really rediscovered it from, obviously, doing this film
and going back and watching everything.
And then, just realizing, "Oh, my God, this is Star Wars, “ was so...
You could do a degree in it. There's so much detail.
And I'm constantly going onto Wookieepedia
and checking things and checking references
and trying to work out the history and all the characters and...
I've such affection for it.
In the original story pitch that I did,
I described Jyn Erso,
team leader, female, smart and tough, battle-worn.
A little cynical and jaded from everything she's been through.
She's seen it all,
and maybe that makes her seem a little callous
to those who don't really know her.
Jyn is sort of the central figure in this team,
but she's sort of distanced herself from people.
She's a survivor.
She's more of an everyman character, an every-woman character.
She gives us a chance to understand
what it's like to be a regular person inside of Star Wars
and see the events that we were familiar with
of the Civil War between the Rebellion and Empire
through a different pair of eyes.
That felt proper to us.
It felt right for this particular story.
If the Empire has this kind of power, what chance do we have?
What chance do we have?
The question is "what choice."
Jyn comes at this with an unusual hook,
and that is, so much of Star Wars is spent
with our heroes wondering where they came from,
not knowing who their parents are.
I love you, Stardust.
I love you, too, Papa.
Jyn, she knows where she comes from.
And that really does define who she is.
Father!
Jyn's father kind of got talked into creating this super-weapon,
like the nuclear bomb of Star Wars, in order to protect his family.
And so that guilt hangs over her.
A lot of it is about relationships between children and parents.
Papa. Papa, it's me.
Because of this, Jyn hates the Empire.
So whenever Jyn sees stormtroopers,
she just wants to annihilate them.
Which was great fun to play.
Just being able to bash stormtroopers on the head
without any feelings of guilt.
I love the chaos, I love it.
Jyn, no!
So the fitness... Nothing compared to doing Rogue One.
Every day there's some kind of assault course obstacle
that we're given.
There was a lot of rehearsal, a lot of preparation.
We're trying to create a situation where being thrown off-balance
can produce something spontaneous,
to make that feel as real as possible.
To make it feel like your heart's beating,
and you're actually in this situation.
It's quite late in the day. There's been a lot of running around.
I'm just going to do some stretches.
Action.
It's been the most physical exercise I've ever done in my entire life.
'Cause I want to cut back to this
and see everything receding and disappearing.
Felicity... I mean, apart from the fact she's a really great actress,
she does make it seem so easy
that you forget what she's going through sometimes.
And as amazing as it is to make Star Wars,
it's also very hard.
Whenever I was thinking,
"I think I've got one of the hardest jobs in the world,"
I'd always stop myself and go,
"Actually, Felicity's got the hardest job, carrying a Star Wars movie."
You couldn't ask someone to do anything harder.
Here we are. Welcome to the set.
There's a little bit when you're walking onto set,
and it's an enormous set with hundreds and hundreds of people,
you sort of have to tell yourself,
"Come on. Right, you can do this, you can do this."
'Cause you're slightly quaking in your boots,
literally in your army boots.
I'm very glad I had the chance to go through this journey with her,
because this is something new for both of us.
You know, the size of this film can be very scary.
And I was very lucky to have her next to me, you know.
Always there to grab my hand and go like,
"Oh, my God. Here we are.
"Let's make sure we stick together."
What happens when you're in it,
you get so involved in what she's doing,
and suddenly you have an out-of-body moment
when you're just thinking, "This is amazing."
By the end of the film,
Jyn actually forges true connections with the people around her,
and even at the end of the film, when they are facing their death,
there's a bravery in that
because it's come through a connection with the people around her,
and they've achieved what they achieved
because they achieve it together.
There's no need for super powers.
It's just conviction and honesty and passion.
That can drive you really far.
I've been in this fight since I was 6 years old.
You're not the only one who lost everything.
Some of us just decided to do something about it.
Cassian's also equally complicated.
He proves to be a very, very important intelligence officer.
He clearly has lost family members, so he's damaged in some way.
He's following orders initially when we meet him.
Everything I did, I did for the Rebellion.
What's fascinating about Cassian
is that he embodies that type of storytelling element
of being an intelligence agent,
who often has to make those really hard calls.
I mean, that's what spies do.
Spies are on their own, in the field, without support,
and occasionally they'll be pushed into that corner
where they have to make those grim choices.
- It will be all right.
He represents the people.
He's just a regular guy,
like there's nothing heroic about him but that.
Which is, we can all be heroes, you know.
It's that kind of idea.
And every time I walked away from something I wanted to forget,
I told myself it was for a cause that I believed in.
And I always thought about Cassian like that, you know,
like he could be one of my friends
that suddenly you turn and you go,
"Oh, my God, he decided to do something."
These are two people
that are defined by their loss and by grief surrounding family.
I mean, you really feel that
when you watch Felicity and you watch Diego
and you watch that relationship,
you can tell neither one of them has trusted much in their lives.
And what is so wonderful is the naturalism
and the modesty that Diego brings to that character.
We can't leave him.
Jyn, he's gone.
Come on!
I grew up in Mexico.
All my cousins were big fans of Star Wars, you know.
And I'm the young one.
And I remember they used Vader's character,
an idea to just scare me, you know.
But then he became my favorite character, you know.
I was really looking for someone
who had something else to offer
rather than the default, "This is what a leading guy is,"
you know, in terms of the cliche', especially in tough action roles.
I'm not a fan of heroes that stand in the corner and just brood
and that makes them cool.
And Diego gets high score for likeability.
You just want to be his mate the second you see him.
Gareth was always, since pretty early in the process,
he said, "You are my choice."
It felt fantastic.
I was the happiest man in Mexico probably.
I gotta admit, I mean, Cassian, I will always have a soft spot
to have someone of his particular heritage on the screen.
You know, my name's Pablo Hidalgo.
Having someone like Diego Luna embody a Star Wars character is like,
"Hey, we haven't really had that much before."
So that's kinda great.
I know we have a lot of fans in Mexico who do appreciate that.
Diego Luna, he's been in over 50 movies,
he's produced twenty-some-odd films.
He's directed a half a dozen movies.
You know, how many actors do you find
that really have that kind of experience to offer
in a movie, any movie, let alone Star Wars?
So we're very lucky to have him.
And there's a fresh one if you mouth off again.
Congratulations. You are being rescued.
K-2SO was in the original story pitch that I did.
I actually described him as kind of the anti-C-3PO.
C-3PO is a beloved character,
but he's always used as the bumbling comic relief.
But he's got amazing capabilities.
They shut down the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure.
This is madness.
What I wanted to do was take all those things that were implied as
cool things that K-2 could do that a human being can't do,
and make that what K-2 is about.
Let's roll, please.
When you're putting together
a team of experts with complementary skills,
you want people with diverse talents.
And so having a droid
that can do these amazing things that a human can't do,
that adds to the strength of your team.
I'm K-2SO.
I'm a reprogrammed Imperial droid.
Jyn expects K-2 to be a normal droid, and he's not.
He doesn't follow orders so well.
Uh... He listens to Cassian.
We need to blend in.
I can blend in.
I'm surprised you're so concerned with my safety.
I'm not.
I'm just worried they might miss you and hit me.
Not only does he speak his mind at times when he shouldn't...
Doesn't sound so bad to me.
...he also has free will.
He's a lot of different things. He's many things.
He can be violent.
Cold.
We will make it no more than 33% of the way before we are killed.
He's funny.
I find that answer vague and unconvincing.
He's helpful.
There were a lot of explosions...
- for two people blending in. - Freeze!
I mean, he's supposed to be a spy.
He's a terrible spy. Terrible, terrible.
Now, K-2SO was a huge challenge.
We knew that he was going to be a very iconic character.
And we thought, maybe it's a more serious version of C-3PO.
John's brief for K-2SO was that
he literally wanted a black protocol droid,
or a kind of a black C-3PO.
Some of our earliest designs were just simply variations on C-3PO.
And they weren't quite hitting the look.
So we went back to sort of our safety net, Ralph McQuarrie.
We went back to his sketch books.
And he had drawn many versions of these very elegant robots,
um, almost stylized, where they had very thin limbs.
We explored many versions of that,
using Ralph as a foundation for updating it.
And I think the final version is a really unique take on it
because it adds something very bold and very fresh.
And I think in terms of designing for Star Wars, you need that.
You need that boldness, you need that freshness.
I've got a bad feeling about...
- K! - Quiet!
What?
It was important that, for synthetic characters,
we still have high-quality acting there.
Good bye.
The choices that Alan made as an actor, in terms of the voice that he gave it,
really fit well with K-2's design.
A lot of Empire guys are English.
Your behavior, Jyn Erso, is continually unexpected.
It just works better with an English accent.
It has...
You know, it's more proper and sort of robotic.
Not that the English people are robotic, but they're robots.
One of the biggest physical differences between Alan and K-2 is that
K-2 is about a foot to 14 inches taller than Alan.
So, you want the eye line to be in the right place.
So most of the time Alan is wearing these really wonderfully made stilts.
And that puts his knees at the right place,
puts his shoulder at the right place, puts his head in the right place.
And it always worked better,
and it transferred better if there was more of a personality in his movement.
K-2 walks down a hallway
and is passed by another K-2 model that's in the Empire,
and hasn't been freed by a reprogram like K-2 was.
He's like a soldier,
and he's walking very perfectly, and very straight, and upright.
And then K-2 is kind of loping along a little bit.
I think that's what makes K-2 a little bit more accessible,
and, gosh, I'm going to say it, lovable.
There are times when what Alan needs to do
are just a little too awkward or dangerous to do with the stilts.
So, in order to have his eye line at the right place,
there's a backpack that's been rigged with a couple little poles,
and a cut-out photo of K-2's head.
If there's ever a time where I have to put that thing on...
Oh God, no.
Here it comes.
It's so awful.
And then this telescoping head that comes out of the top.
And it's true, it's just a piece of poster board
with a really rudimentary K-2 face.
I mean, this has come from ILM.
Diego said, "Alan, it's amazing
"how little respect you have on this set right now."
Because there's no way to respect this.
It's like we were just witnessing the first science fiction film done in...
- In elementary school. - Exactly.
Where Alan ends and K-2 begins
is sometimes a blur for me
because Alan's a really funny guy,
and he gets high score on set for cracking jokes.
My God.
He kept us laughing and enjoying the process.
Alan would always be throwing in
completely random lines that would always make us laugh.
Oh, sorry, that was the fuel. Prepare for crash landing.
I was asked to go scout out in this big town square.
And then as the stormtroopers go by,
"Clive, nice to see you.
"Darren, hello, hello.
"Gail, looking good. You've lost a little."
I remember, there was one particular occasion,
I knew a funny line was coming, and to the point where I was crying.
And I'd have to bite...
I actually bit my lip to keep the camera still
because I was giggling,
and I knew I couldn't use the shot if the camera moved like that.
And genuinely, there's two takes we can't use
'cause it's rocking 'cause I'm laughing so much.
He was very inappropriate sometimes.
But that's kind of K-2 as well, so...
Don't do this to me, Cassian.
Levity is good in a movie like this, which is very heroic and very serious.
The world of Star Wars has a lot of... It's a very serious world.
Although, in the first three that I was introduced to the Star Wars world with,
there was humor in it, definitely from Han Solo.
Does he have to shoot this?
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, kid.
Without precise calculations, we'd fly too close to a store
or bounce into a supermarket, and then...
C-3PO and R2-D2, the way that they played against one another...
I'm glad to be one of those elements in this.
Clear of hostiles.
- One hostile. - He's with us.
They're all right.
Even when we talked about putting Chirrut and Baze into Rogue,
we were very cognizant of looking at
what those characters certainly represented in the team,
but giving them a character arc and a meaning to the story.
And we're incredibly fortunate to have Donnie Yen and Jiang Wen.
Good luck, little sister.
And these characters become an important part of this team.
Jiang and Donnie,
they're superstars in China, massive superstars.
- Baze! - What?
Run!
Those guys were the clear choices.
And I think it really helped that both of them have children
who love, love Star Wars.
I remember watching the very first one, back in 1977.
It swept me off my feet. It was amazing.
I didn't expect, many years later,
I would be invited to be part of this world.
Not to mention that, when I told my children,
they were more excited than I am.
And I asked them, "Do you want Baba to be away from home
"for five months to do this movie?"
And they said, "Do it. You're finally cool."
The first time they give me a script that's in English,
of course, hard for me to reading that.
But my son can read that.
And after my biggest son read
and said, "Go, Dad, you have to go.
"You have to go for us."
I asked them, "Why?"
And my two sons said, "This is hero."
We've come too far.
Patience, my friend.
The friendship between Baze and Chirrut,
I don't think anybody could have anticipated
just how much they bring to this film.
An Imperial pilot.
Pilot?
- No, no. No, wait! - Let me kill him.
- No. No. - Let me kill him.
Back off! Back off!
With all the Chinese audience,
he's known as a very powerful dramatic actor.
I worked with him several years ago.
So, I felt there would be a great chemistry between he and I.
Go, go, go!
Yes, yes.
- I told you... You have to have faith. - Just go.
The coolest thing about our interaction is
you feel that sense of humor between the lines.
You almost shot me.
You're welcome.
Silence.
He has at least two sides, maybe.
That is very interesting.
Baze Malbus is a very violent, emotionally charged character.
And Chirrut Imwe holds out this kind of hope
that Baze Malbus will redeem himself.
The Force is with me.
And I am with the Force.
And I fear nothing.
When I read about George Lucas making the original Star Wars,
originally the Force was called "the Force of Others."
And that meant a lot to me when I read it.
The idea that you gain this kind of spiritual energy
from your connection to other people.
There is more than one sort of prison.
I sense that you carry yours wherever you go.
In really dark times, it's often faith that sustains people.
So, if we're going to take the Force out of this movie,
there would have to be this question of
whether anyone is ever going to believe in it again,
and whether it mattered at all.
We understood that for people who don't have physical evidence of magic
or their religion in the universe,
you find it in other people
and in what you're willing to do for them
and what they're willing to do for you.
Where are you going?
I'm gonna follow Jyn.
Good luck!
I don't need luck. I have you!
It wasn't particularly written as a blind warrior.
It was a warrior monk.
But I suggested to Gareth,
I said, "Can you make him a blind swordsman?"
I would say that the thing about Rogue One
is it has a tremendous amount of soul.
I mean, you really feel that when you watch Baze and Chirrut,
and just the natural energy of Donnie and Jiang Wen.
Hey, stop right there.
He's blind.
Is he deaf?
Ready and action.
Donnie's martial art has a sense of artistry and performance
that tells you so much about this character.
Is your foot all right?
There's an elegance.
There is a heroicism, a nobility,
to the way that that man moves
and the way that he knocks out stormtroopers.
I'm very delighted and thrilled to be part of this family.
Although we all have different languages, different culture,
at the end of the day, storytelling is about people.
And we all share the same emotions.
And to me that's like, Star Wars.
Chirrut! Come! Come with me!
Chirrut.
The Force is with me and I'm one with the Force.
It was important to us to really show that this,
especially given the events of Episode Iv,
the kind of moment before the clarity that we see,
in terms of the really clear divisions
between the good guys and the bad guys.
There's a kind of gray area that Rogue One is trying to capture.
I guess it's like a lot of conflicts that happen,
modern-day conflicts, where the lines are drawn.
There's not just like good and bad.
There's different versions of good and bad.
We have Bodhi, who's a cargo pilot.
Used to be in the Empire, Imperial forces, and he's defected.
He doesn't fit the traditional bill of a Star Wars hero.
But he starts the action by doing one of the most heroic things possible,
which is making the hard choice.
And I think that makes Bodhi really charming and really admirable.
He said I could make it right...
if I was brave enough...
to listen to what was in my heart.
I think when you see people wrestle
with the question of what they're going to do,
and when you see them embrace their own sort of latent heroism,
those things feel true to Star Wars.
That's an impounded Imperial ship.
What's your call sign, pilot?
It's, um... Rogue One.
I loved Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler.
And as we were looking for a character for Bodhi Rook,
I made sure to throw his name in the hat.
He did a few auditions for us.
He kept cranking out different versions of Bodhi.
The security checkpoint is still manned.
You said the alarm would clear them out.
Well, it should have. They shouldn't... If you'd...
Can you just bluff your way through?
Riz filmed himself. He was in New York.
He did a little thing of, like, this is how Bodhi could be.
Ha!
What did I tell you!
And then, obviously, the obsession starts
where you start doing 50,000 takes of some things.
You're left to your own devices.
Can you not just bluff your way through?
What? You cannot be serious.
Well, yeah. I mean, you're a spy. Do your spy thing. Hmm?
And then he was like, "Great, we've got what we need."
But I didn't stop there.
I just carried on recording more takes and just e-mailing him.
I was like, "Screw it, I've got his e-mail address now."
You're a spy. Do your spy thing.
He could be like this. Or he could be like this.
I was like, "Okay, anyway, you've got the part."
And then we got another eight clips,
saying, "Or this, or this, or this, or this, or this."
Okay. What did I tell you? What did I tell you?
I was like, "Okay, I've kind of totally, totally screwed this up now.
"I'm spamming the director."
What I love about Riz is, he embraced everything in that.
He's got his funny moments throughout.
What part of "urgent message" do you guys not understand?
But you also, I think, really feel for him at the end.
This really throws you, 'cause you think,
"They're not going to kill this guy. You can't.
"He's the guy who makes it out.
"If anyone's going to make it out in these films,
"it's always that guy in the lead."
And then when that happens, you just go,
"I don't know how this is going to end now."
I think people know, going into this,
that they're going to get something slightly different,
and I think that just adds to that kind of vibe.
Three, two, one, action.
Something that was quite weird
is that my very first week of filming
was my entire character's end sequence.
So, I think on day two or three, I was filming my death scene,
which is unnerving as an actor.
I really enjoyed it.
I hadn't done a lot of action before.
It was a real learning experience for me.
And it was also just so cool.
It's just like being a kid again and playing barricades,
and playing cops and robbers.
It really is.
He's really an interesting actor.
He seems to have a freshness and a newness to him
that's really alive.
He's got an effervescence about him, and unpredictability,
sort of slightly urban quality.
I have to speak to Saw Gerrera.
I have to speak to him before it's too...
I liked working With him.
But we didn't have a lot of other conversations outside,
because I guess I was kind of pretty much in character
most of the time.
Saw Gerrera was a character that was in Clone Wars.
Saw is a longstanding Star Wars character,
who's inhabited the periphery of Star Wars storytelling for a while.
He was an idea that came from George.
Because we came into Lucasfilm
and found that George had already left some ideas behind,
we thought, "Well, God, what else could we do?"
It was Kiri's idea actually that it be Saw Gerrera,
and that would further legitimize
the story inside the stories that had already been told.
Saw Gerrera came to the Rebellion early.
He was an activist. He's frustrated.
The Republic is in disarray and chaos.
The Rebel Alliance hasn't really come together
in the way that he thought it would.
We see him as a broken person.
And you realize this is what a lifetime of fighting the Empire
can turn you into.
There's not much of me left.
He's trained in many different
types of warfare, guerrilla warfare,
as well as practices of the Jedi, with Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker.
And so, he started to branch off, to start to fight in different ways.
He becomes ostracized from the other Rebel Alliance.
They see him as someone who is too extreme.
It was interesting for me to try to explore this character.
To understand how you can have good reasons for what you're doing,
but how that can be twisted and turned
when you lose the sight of your humanity.
What's always important in Star Wars is that struggle
that exists with so many characters between the dark and the light,
and that moral ambiguity
is something that I think Forest was attracted to.
My character, in a way, represents that sort of gray area.
And I think they try to play around with it even in my suit,
and everything like that.
Because in my suit, you have a breathing apparatus,
and when I breathe into it, it sounds quite like Darth Vader.
And so, since I was trained by Darth Vader,
or Anakin Skywalker, and then I'm breathing in this apparatus,
you have to think about
what is the movement of where I'm going.
And am I stepping into the line of darkness?
I always wanted him to play Saw Gerrera,
to the point where I met with him in Los Angeles.
And we were showing some artwork,
and there was some artwork in there from like six months earlier.
And it was him.
And normally you'd have to fake that.
But I was like, "Yeah, this proves it,
"that we've always been wanting Forest,
"'cause there you are, look."
I started my work on the character
by going back and looking at the Clone Wars
and watching, seeing the character.
I talked to Gareth.
He had references of modern-day guerrilla fighters.
And I had made a pretty bold choice about the character,
the way he speaks and the way he moves.
Are we not still friends?
This sort of very extreme voice and extreme behaviors.
And I was doing that with Felicity, trying to connect.
Not a day goes by...
that I don't think of you.
It's an important scene.
They didn't leave on the best terms.
But there's a huge affection
and there's a huge fondness that they have for each other.
But there's a bit of business,
there's a bit of housekeeping that they have to sort out.
You care not about the cause?
The cause?
All it's ever brought me is pain.
Forest, he brings such humanity to everything he does.
And it was very, very special working with him.
I really, really enjoyed it.
You must save yourself!
Save the Rebellion!
Save the dream!
I think that Jyn's character does represent
finding your own sense of purpose in life
and following it through.
I hope that people believe in the empowerment of themselves.
I think people will recognize
through the diversity of the casting of the film,
with people from all colors and cultures,
if they come together with one common goal
to help humanity,
amazing things can happen through this inclusion and connection.
We wanted a more gray world
where it wasn't so black and white...
We have good people and evil people and nothing in between.
I wanted to sort of show that transition of ideology,
and I like that contrast.
People aren't that simple. You're not just bad or good.
There's complexity to everyone.
I made myself indispensable...
and all the while, I laid the groundwork of my revenge.
We call it the Death Star.
Finding a way to care about the characters is really important.
And so, Jyn's personal connection through her father to the Death Star,
I think, is the thing that emotionally kind of anchors the entire film.
Jyn, if you're listening, my beloved...
so much of my life has been wasted.
He plays a very important part in her arc.
He is a man who is a scientist.
I think if you have an equivalent, it would be Oppenheimer.
A man who invents something extremely powerful
that can save the human species,
but at the same time can do the exact opposite as well.
It's a heartbreaking idea of the father saying,
"I've been forced to do this terrible thing,
"and I can't do anything else.
"But now it falls to you,
"my only daughter, my only child, to put this right."
It must be destroyed.
I know. We will.
So, for that reason, I thought
it was a beautiful character by itself,
and then it was slung into a Star Wars universe.
So, who could ask for anything else?
All right.
So, just be careful of that lovely grate, sir.
And then if you want to move over that way a little.
Just so your head's away from the grate, sir.
Mads is absolutely tremendous.
He's a father himself and actually has so many paternal qualities.
It was so playful working with him.
Every time I would see him, I would just shout, "Dad,"
which I think was a little bit disconcerting,
but it was the fact that he was on Jyn's side,
he's truly in her camp.
He abandoned his project
because the Death Star will create peace,
but at what cost?
That's the thing you have to weigh.
Krennic doesn't weigh it.
You're confusing peace with terror.
You have to start somewhere.
There's a lot of truth about the banality of evil in that statement.
For the truly evil mindset, the dictatorial mindset,
the road to peace begins with scaring people.
Ideally, you want to worry about the heroes
and whether they're going to make it or not.
And if you have Darth Vader as the central enemy
or foe of our heroes, it means we know he can't die.
We know he makes it.
It meant inventing a character,
the fate of which is unknown to the audience.
So when there's conflict in those scenes,
you don't know necessarily who's going to make it out alive.
All Imperial forces have been evacuated...
and I stand ready to destroy the entire moon.
Krennic is incredibly ambitious, ruthless,
and kind of dangerously violent.
I like to think of him as an entrepreneur within the Empire.
He's got a very big-science, high-tech project
that he is driving towards ruthlessly.
When Gareth was talking to me about Krennic,
one of the things that he talked a lot about was the passion
and the investment that the Death Star project has for him.
Essentially, he had been the initiator and the driving force of that.
It's his life, really.
It's his project, it's his everything.
What you will see today is only a fraction of our full power.
Ben recognized that
he had to find a way to differentiate himself
between he and Vader.
And I think he did.
He actually captured a sense of a character
who is intelligent, seemingly has heart,
but is very, very ruthless.
Oh, it's beautiful.
The problems arise for him once it actually becomes complete.
We stand here amidst my achievement.
Not yours!
Since you are reluctant to provide us
with the location of the rebel base,
I have chosen to test this station's destructive power
on your home planet of Alderaan.
No, Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons.
You can't possibly...
You would prefer another target? A military target?
Then name the system.
Once you have the Death Star in the film,
it's really hard to bolt directly to A New Hope and not see Tarkin.
'Cause he pretty much feels like the main guy on the Death Star
when we start the original Star Wars.
There. You see, Lord Vader? She can be reasonable.
You see, Lord Vader, she can be reasonable.
She can be reasonable.
I'm gleaning everything I can from Cushing's portrayal of him.
I'm not a mimic, I'm not an impressionist.
It'll be an essence,
the way I think Peter Cushing might have approached it.
I want to feel I can get within a spitting distance, at least,
of the task ahead.
It's very daunting actually,
to try to be a famous character in the original film
and also to emulate an actor that I myself admire.
I believe I owe you an apology, Director Krennic.
It's been bloody frightening, I can tell you.
I mean, it's Star Wars.
My first goosebump moment
was actually in the camera tests.
And then you hear...
And you come around the corner, and he's there.
If you had to reduce Star Wars down to one single image,
it's the outline of Vader's helmet.
That's the dark essence, if you like, of the Empire.
It's kind of like the most iconic character in the history of cinema.
Pretty hard to have a bad time when you're with Vader.
I mean, let me clarify that.
It's really easy to have a bad time when you're with Vader.
Director Krennic.
Lord Vader.
As soon as you put him in a scene,
that's all you want to see.
It's really hard to come back from that.
You have to be really careful how you use him
'cause if you bring him in too early in the film,
you sort of just want Vader for the rest of the movie.
The rebel flagship is disabled, my lord...
but has received transmissions from the surface.
Prepare a boarding party.
Suddenly your brain is exploding with not only our film,
but the other film which is about to come to life.
Open fire!
The door that Darth Vader comes through
in A New Hope, I got to film.
As a fan, that was an incredible experience.
Launch!
I can describe it in one word.
Goosebumps.
Coming up with designs that feel like
they live within the original trilogy,
but you haven't seen them before,
is really, really, really hard.
We're all sort of living in the shadow of Ralph McQuarrie,
who designed the original films.
He came up with so many great things.
We were both very passionate about
keeping it as Ralph McQuarrie as possible.
I mean, I grew up with Ralph McQuarrie. So did Gareth.
And basically, Ralph became the foundation for all of our design work.
Okay.
We had a lot of amazing things to pull up and look at
and say, "Oh, wow. This is something
"that is really going to enrich what we're doing."
And it's from George and Ralph McQuarrie and other designers
that worked on the original films.
And to be able to take those and update them or realize them,
I think was a very, very special part of this process
that I think will keep us connected to the original movies in a way
that we couldn't possibly do without that sort of reference to work from.
The Star Wars design by Ralph is so meaningful
because Ralph created shapes that became Star Wars.
Things like domes and circles.
The Empire is black and gray, with accents of red.
All their forms are geometric shapes, hard angles.
And the Rebels were all about earth tones,
compound shapes, complex shapes.
And when you do that,
you're basically creating a very distinct visual palette.
So this is the final frame from A New Hope
with a matte painting on the top.
So what we're trying to emulate with our set
is that long, narrow slot.
So we're going to go inside the same hangar,
and we're going to replicate part of the exterior,
which they never did back in 1976.
But we are. We're going to build a physical set outside there.
We've had a lot of wiggle room regarding legacy sets.
How can we make those legacy sets feel the same?
But we had that chance to just go on and push really hard.
And we need to be able to feel that we can watch
Rogue One and Episode IV back to back
and feel like they're from the same period.
We're being mindful and respectful
to what was originally designed in 1976 for the original Star Wars.
Part of that was to pay homage to the graphic designer, John Whitney,
which is those kind of classic spirographic visual imagery.
Background, background. Go. Go to work, team.
In an ideal world, every set we would build would be 360 degrees.
You can shoot on probably 90% of it,
but I think if we're clever in our shooting,
you can shoot in most directions.
This film was something that allowed us to push everything to its limits.
The technology, the story, the costumes, the production design,
everything was pushed.
And when you have that opportunity, why wouldn't you take that?
Gareth likes to use this kind of, "I want the raw emotion to come through.
"I don't want to over-practice this and feel like I'm a rehearsed...
"Somebody's just delivering me a rehearsed line.
"I want to kind of feel that, like,
"you trip, I catch it on camera,
"you stumble your line, I catch it on camera."
He wants to feel like you're really in it.
I think that he has really great instincts
about how to make this feel like Star Wars,
but at the same time, be bold and take a fresh visual approach to it
in a lot of respects,
and certainly, in terms of the cinematography
and the sort of visceral feeling of it, the immersiveness of it.
- Yes! - Aw!
I'm drawing up the occupied city,
which is where a big battle sequence takes place.
We had to think about what it would have looked like originally.
Then we had to add
a few hundred years of aging 'cause we're saying it's quite an ancient city.
And then, this more recent layer of destruction.
Stormtroopers in my set.
Ready, and action!
Hey. You just watch yourself.
Wait. No, no. Sorry, sir.
We don't want any trouble. Sorry.
Come on. Come on.
When you actually go back and you look at the films,
or the actual things that were built, the designs,
they're not quite as good as you remember them.
A good example is there's a little grill on the side of a stormtrooper
that's got these blue notches in.
On the original trilogy, that's a sticker, and it can peel off.
And when you get close, it looks like a sticker.
And so, on ours, we made them actually a grill,
and it's got like a proper embossed gap in it.
So you can watch it on an HD... In an HD world.
And, um...
It's nice. Everything's sharper.
For the beginning of the film,
we wanted everyone to be genuinely scared.
We wanted to come up with something more menacing.
Gareth saw some paintings of Ralph McQuarrie
where he stylized the stormtroopers
and made them very tall and very elegant.
And we thought, "Okay, well, this could become
"our SEAL Team 6 version of the stormtroopers."
I love those challenges where you're trying to create something new,
but then it has to fit within the universe of Star Wars.
So we just took a stormtrooper,
thinned it up, painted it black, to see if it would work.
And it was actually really cool.
There's an incredibly difficult fine line
that you have to navigate the entire way of making the film,
which is, if you go a little bit to the left,
it's not Star Wars.
If you go a little bit to the right,
you're just copying Star Wars and not doing anything new.
And to try and find this new ground was really tricky.
Let's go!
Star Wars needs to feel epic.
On this film, we've shot in four countries.
We have seven sound stages,
two backlots, three enormous UK locations.
When anyone sees this film, it's a huge film.
It's a huge, beautifully rich film.
You just want everything to feel like it fitted in,
it wasn't just for another movie.
Ready, and action.
Secure the air lock.
And prepare the escape pods.
Your highness.
The transmission we received.
What is it they've sent us?
Close-up digital human work is
one of the hardest problems in computer graphics.
You don't want to be sitting there in the theater saying,
"Yeah, something doesn't look right. What do you think that is?"
I don't know. It could be any one of 100 things.
There wouldn't have been any decision
to have a character reappear like this
unless John Knoll could assure us
that it was going to be completely believable.
And John felt very strongly that he could do that.
We have made a lot of big advances in the last few years
in facial motion capture and skin rendering and hair
that I felt like we were ready for that challenge.
What is it they've sent us?
Hope.
To do a human
where absolutely no one would ever guess
that it wasn't fully CG,
it's a really difficult task.
We haven't got a plan B.
They put dots on my face.
It takes a lot of preparation to get into this character
because everyone remembers Leia very well.
So it needs to look exactly right.
And so they spent a lot of time on my hair, obviously.
They dyed it twice,
and then they added some more extra hair here in the front
because her hairline is a bit lower than mine.
And also, a big chunk of hair to make the buns.
And then, all these dots was put on right before we started shooting
so that they could put Carrie Fisher's face on top of mine,
and transform me into her, which is a great honor.
We had so many takes. We were like, "No. No."
And the smile, she does kind of this...
There's this hopeful smile at the end.
Getting that right was just... Oh, it was such a journey.
This one word, which took a long time to get to work,
ties this whole movie together, this whole theme,
straight into A New Hope, the actual title of the next episode.
So it's really exciting.
What is it they've sent us?
Hope.
Prepare for the jump to hyperspace and inform Lord Vader.
Tarkin's importance to the whole Death Star project
and how big a presence he is in New Hope,
it would only seem natural that he should be in this film, too.
And we talked about, well, could we do
a substantial amount of close-up dialogue shots of Tarkin
and have that be completely believable?
And it's exactly the kind of challenge that we love to do here.
The original plans for this station are kept there, are they not?
So what you're seeing here
is the performance that Guy Henry gave on the day,
including his whole head gear and the dual camera setup.
And then, all of that performance is targeted
to our computer graphics version of Guy Henry.
We just wanted to say, "Okay, we're going to make a digital human.
"We're going to do it the best we can. Here it is."
When has become now, Director Krennic.
The Emperor will tolerate no further delay.
You have made time an ally of the Rebellion.
This project was very, very special.
It's because of, it was not a linear sort of work process.
So every department were involved at the same time
and worked together in conjunction.
Comp artist and modeling artist,
animation and texture,
we all gather and we talk about it,
what we can improve, and how we can make the character look alive.
Guy Henry solve, Guy snap, Tarkin snap. So, the snap-solve, if you think...
It was a very difficult process
because there's no way to really go back in time
and capture the appearances of these actors.
So, we had to really bring every single possible skill set to bear,
to try to recreate the details of their facial appearance
and skin likeness and performance.
But that was just the starting point,
because as we compared our model
to actual photographic archival reference of Cushing
as he appeared in Episode IV,
we found that there was lots of little things we had to do
to bring him more and more and more in model,
especially in the kind of lighting situations.
Doing digital humans is...
I see it as a long series of failures resulting in victory.
That's basically what it is.
Getting 99% there is hard,
but is only half the work.
And that last 1% is like
the same amount of work all over again.
There were many dark days... Many sleepless nights,
laying awake, worrying about these shots.
We are at the LA premiere of Rogue One
after two and a half or so years of work. It's finally, finally the night.
Oh! It's pretty surreal, it's awesome.
Yeah, it's a bit surreal that this has now, four years later,
turned into this gigantic phenomenon.
I hope this is the film that
the 15-year-old me would have just freaked out about.
Well, it's amazing.
The fact that so many people love this franchise
and have followed it for so many years.
When the films arrived on the scene in the '70s,
they had impacted people so much.
Star Wars has become kind of a living myth for a lot of people.
And we have the responsibility and the incredible challenge
to keep alive what George Lucas created.
I raised her on it. Her nursery was Star Wars.
When I was a kid, I actually wrote to George Lucas and said,
"I want to see more strong females in Star Wars."
Star Wars is bringing that to the girls of the world.
It's great. Finally seeing a bunch of movies with that theme.
It's amazing. More international characters.
Diego Luna is one of my favorite actors,
and he's finally going to be part of Star Wars.
I think this is the first time we've seen Asian characters.
And I get to cosplay as Baze, so nothing gets better than that.
Just to see everyone come together
for such a beautiful movie and franchise is amazing.
I do sometimes wonder if this is all really happening.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if I just woke up
and I was twelve years old and it's all been a dream.
I just carry on playing with my Star Wars figures.
We can go through a period of nostalgia,
but what are we going to do with future generations
who want to step into their own era
of this vast mythology and universe called Star Wars?
And that's what I think these original stand-alone stories
are going to give us an opportunity to explore.
There's just endless possibilities.
Rogue One, pulling away.
Pulling away.
They've no idea we're coming.
They've no reason to expect us.
If we can make it to the ground, we'll take the next chance.
And the next.
On and on until we win...
or the chances are spent.
May the Force be with us.
Transmitting.