National Post (National Edition)
Star Wars tidbits a bonus on DVD
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is available on DVD and Blu-ray on April 4. Here are five things we learned from the bonus materials on the disc.
1. Director Gareth Edwards is a real Star Wars fan.
Interviewed by producer Kiri Hart for the job of directing Rogue One, Edwards’ first words to her were: “I’ve always wanted to join the Rebel Alliance.” We also see photos taken in 2005, when Edwards for his 30th birthday visited the Tunisia set that served as Luke Skywalker’s childhood home in the 1977 movie. And he gets a cameo in Rogue One as a rebel soldier in one of the final scenes. (Also among the cameos: Episode VIII director Rian Johnson and producer Ram Bergman as a Death Star weapons crew, cowering in a tunnel as a laser blast rockets past them.)
2. Alan Tudyk is a real cutup.
Despite being born and raised in Texas, the actor who performs as a reprogrammed Imperial Droid (K-2SO) in Rogue One gave his character an English accent because “a lot of Empire guys are English.” He also messed up at least a few supposed Steadicam shots because the director was shaking too much with laughter. Among his ad libs was talking to passing stormtroopers as though he knew them: “Clive, nice to see you. Darren, hello, hello. Gail, looking good; you’ve lost a little.”
3. Ralph McQuarrie is a real inspiration.
The designer of many of the iconic sets and costumes in the original Star Wars trilogy, McQuarrie died in 2012 at the age of 82. But the crew of Rogue One continued to reference his material, including unused sketches that influenced the look of K-2SO and the elite, black-clad stormtroopers seen in some scenes. And some sets that existed only as matte paintings in the early movies were designed as practical sets in this one. Says Edwards: “We were all sort of living in the shadow of Ralph McQuarrie.”
4. The budgets are really bigger.
A New Hope was made for about $11 million — a fair bit of change in 1977, but dwarfed by the $20 million spent that year on Close Encounters of the Third Kind or even the $14 million on The Spy Who Loved Me. And the producers of Rogue One note that “nothing looks quite as good as you remember.” Stormtrooper helmets in 1977 featured a grill on the side that was in fact just a sticker, and sometimes peeled away from the uniform. The helmets in Rogue One (estimated budget, $200 million) turned that into an actual three-dimensional detail. And yet the new film had to resist improving too much on the old; as co-production designer Neil Lamont notes, you should be able to watch Rogue One and its “sequel,” the original Star Wars, back to back without a jolt.
5. There are a lot of references to other Star Wars movies.
In addition to cameos from directors and producers, there are a lot of nods to the other movies in the series. The death of a character referred to as Red Five reminds us that this would become Luke’s fighter-pilot callsign. Look closely and you can see an Imperial probe droid (from The Empire Strikes Back) in one scene, and characters playing Dejarik (hologrammatic chess) in another. And that grumpy pair of aliens that start an ill-advised bar fight with Luke and Obi-Wan in the original Star Wars movie are seen in this one, already looking for trouble. Some things never change.