Tony Gilroy Used A Clerks Joke As Inspiration For Andor's Prison
One of the things that really hit home for so many of us when "Clerks" first hit the scene in 1994 was that the lead characters were just as nerdy about movies as we were. It's so commonplace these days, but back then it was shocking that characters in a movie acknowledged that other movies existed.
One of the most memorable examples of this is when Dante and Randall have an in-depth debate about the collateral damage whenever Luke and the rebel alliance blew up the Death Star in "Star Wars." That rang true for so many of us. I mean, we didn't have a new, cool "Star Wars" movie or TV show to look forward to every year. In the early '90s, we kinda thought that "Return of the Jedi" was the last movie we were ever going to get, so our only options were to get obsessed with the Expanded Universe novels or compulsively rewatch the trilogy over and over again.
Kevin Smith clearly had the same late-night geeky conversations as my friends and I did and he put one of these topics into "Clerks." What about all the workers on the Death Star? That thing was big enough to be a small planet. No way were the workers all bad guy Stormtroopers, there certainly had to be laborers and contractors and plumbers and whatnot, so does that mean the Rebel alliance killed a ton of innocent people when they blew up? Probably!
Funnily enough, the most serious "Star Wars" story we've ever gotten took a cue from this joking question.
A silly conversation turns into a serious storyline
Tony Gilroy's "Andor" sees the title character imprisoned and working day and night building these odd x-shaped pieces of ... something. Turns out the Empire was using prison labor to build all the individual pieces that would eventually make the Death Star. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gilroy admitted that his very adult "Star Wars" show took inspiration from this admittedly silly line of questioning. There is merit to thinking about the details of this galaxy far, far away and Gilroy was intrigued enough to work it into "Andor." Here's what he said:
"In 'Clerks' they talk about who's cleaning up the Death Star, right? Like, who's building all these ships? The amount of material that the Empire has is just epic. Where does it come from? Where does all that stuff come from? So we're trying to say, Man, it's a massive effort to build all these ships and build all these weapons, and build all these buildings [...] All this stuff needs to be built and I don't think everybody was getting $15 an hour to do it."
One of the joys of "Andor" is how evil the Empire is in straight bureaucratic terms. It's not just big bad Darth Vader using his space magic to slaughter people, it's the institution itself that is set up to conquer the galaxy and enslave as many of them as they can get away with without prompting open revolt. There are innocent people helping build up this grand Empire, but they have no choice in the matter.
The fact that such a dramatic look at "Star Wars" took direct inspiration from such a silly conversation and made it into a deep, resonant storyline within "Andor" should put a smile on all of our "Star Wars" obsessed faces.