20 Things We Learned From The New 'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' Commentary: 'Inglourious Basterds' References, Alternate Titles, Cassian's Backstory, And More

Gary Whitta: "The way that the movie opens is really one of the first interesting conversations that Gareth [Edwards] and I had – should there be an opening crawl? I did write one. You'll never see it, but I did. I wrote more than one, back when we were still experimenting with the idea of doing one. But one of the things that we arrived at fairly early on in the process was that it was OK to liberate ourselves from the traditional storytelling language of Star Wars. A lot of the visual tropes – the iris wipes, the opening crawl, things like that – we felt like these standalone movies had more license than the saga films to try to do something a little bit different.

"One of the other conversations we had was, 'Can we do a time jump?' What you see here takes place twenty or so years before the rest of the movie. Star Wars has never done that in the saga films. Once we realized it was OK to do that, we felt a lot more creative freedom to tell the story the way we wanted to tell it."

Gary Whitta: "I don't know if that's ever been talked about. The kyber crystal is the last tiny piece of that that's left, but the original idea was that she was a Jedi in hiding. It was one of the first things that got killed, and rightly so. That was kind of a vestige of me as a fanboy wanting to feel like we were checking all the Star Wars boxes. As much as I love the whole military angle of Star Wars, the Rebellion and the Empire, I remember saying to Gareth and to [Lucasfilm executive creative director] Doug Chiang, who was in the room as well, 'This is going to be the very first Star Wars movie that doesn't have a lightsaber in it. How does that make you feel?' And they were like 'It makes us feel great! We want to try these different things.' Of course, it ended up not being true. We had an amazing lightsaber sequence at the end of the movie.

Chris Weitz: "Something interesting that Gareth eventually was keen on was to imagine a world where there was no direct evidence of the Force. So what was the period like before Luke Skywalker came along and met Obi-Wan and there was this new hope. It's a period of possible despair."

Gary Whitta: "Gareth was interested in the idea of it not being black and white. That there be shades of grey on both sides...we very quickly honed in on the idea of an extremist, militant rebel. Someone who had legitimately crossed over from being a freedom fighter into just being a terrorist...[We said] 'Who's our Colonel Kurtz? We want the guy at the end of the river, Marlon Brando, Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now type of character who's gone off the deep end.' And [former Lucasfilm Story Group head] Kiri Hart said, 'Well, George actually created a character for The Clone Wars that might fit that really well.'"

Chris Weitz: "For a while, we had Ord Mantell, but then it shifted a bit to the notion of an occupied territory, like in Casablanca."

Gary Whitta: "In the original draft, Jyn went to Ord Mantell, which is a planet that's referenced in The Empire Strikes Back, to find an arms dealer who could help her find Saw Gerrera. There was a bunch of action that happened on Ord Mantell, and then she went to another planet where Saw Gerrera was living on a hidden moon. His splinter group, his militant faction, was on a moon called Yarid, I believe. It was a separate planet, and as the story consolidated down...Jedha filled in for both of those planets."

Chris Weitz: "You do sit in a meeting where they tell you to lose a planet because there's a budget shortfall. It's amazing to think that Star Wars actually has a budget, but it does."

Gary Whitta: "Originally, the rebel base is actually on Dantooine. And you see the rebels evacuate Dantooine and move to Yavin 4. But it didn't really accomplish anything in the story, other than to nod to the Star Wars fans, like, 'Hey, remember Dantooine? There was an evacuated rebel base there? Well, now you get to see them evacuate it.' But it didn't move the story forward and it would have cost a ton of money, so all of the action takes place on Yavin 4."

Chris Weitz: "This was one of the things John Knoll said they could do, and they sort of built the parachute as they were falling. One interesting thing about it is that obviously you can't scan Peter Cushing, but what John explained to me that they were able to do was take shots from the original Star Wars and unused takes and treat when he would turn in a shot as though it were their version of a 3D scan."

Gary Whitta: "When I first wrote Tarkin into the movie, I wrote him like he was always in shadow. I was trying to give ILM as much wiggle room as possible. He didn't have a lot of dialogue. He wasn't in the movie a lot. They eventually wrote him into the movie way more and gave him much more dialogue because ILM were confident that they could really do it...Peter Cushing was in a movie called Top Secret, the Val Kilmer movie from the 1980s. For that movie, Peter Cushing had to be fitted with a prosthetic, because there's a visual gag where he has a huge eye. So they took a mold of his face, a 3D sculpture of his head. John found that sculpt, sitting on someone's shelf in a prop workshop for decades. He found it, brought it to ILM, 3D scanned it, and that ended up being part of how they recreated Peter Cushing's face for Tarkin."

Gary Whitta: "I don't know how many people ever really pick up on it, but the guys in Saw's hideout are playing an old wooden version of Djarik, the Star Wars chess game. No holographic characters, just like original wooden pieces."

Gary Whitta: "They originally went to Eadu very early. [That's where the Empire was] building this laser ray, the dish. Then when it was built, it was shipped to the Death Star construction site, and that was the first hint that Jyn had that the Empire was building something terrible. As the movie got jiggled around and restructured, it got pushed back and became less the place where the dish was built and more the place where they were harvesting and refining the kyber crystals, which are the energy source for the Death Star."

Chris Weitz: "There was one point where we were kicking around titles for this. Rogue One was a good choice eventually, but one of them was Dark Times."

Gary Whitta: "We had a lot. At one point, John Schwartz, who is one of the creative executives of the film, had a list, and we all voted on the ones we liked. I contributed two: one was Rogue One, [and the other was] Shadow of the Death Star, all these fancy titles. I went back and looked at all the previous films – and this continues to be true even with the sequel trilogy now being completed – the titles of Star Wars saga films are always either three or four words long. They just all are. So it occurred to me that one of the ways we could differentiate this movie from the rest was if we had a title that was only one or two words long. So Star Wars: Rebellion, Star Wars: Rogue One, things like that. I wanted to do a title that was shorter so even from the title of the movie, you know this is something that doesn't necessarily conform to the unwritten rules of the saga films."

Gary Whitta: "We went back and looked at the ending of Gladiator when Maximus dies. The idea that you can have a righteous death, you can be triumphant even in death because you've accomplished your greater goal, was something that was really important to us. But we thought Disney would never let us do it. We'll fall in love with killing all the characters, Disney won't let us do it, and we'll have our hearts broken. So we didn't follow through on our initial creative instinct, and I wish we had because it turns out that Disney and Kathy and all those guys were fully supportive of it. When I left the movie and Chris came on, the first thing he said was, 'I feel like these characters need to die' and Gareth was like, 'Oh yes! I'm so glad you said because that's what Gary and I talked about.' We got there in the end, but I guess the moral is, trust your instincts and write the version of the movie that you believe, not the version you believe people will say yes to...In my version, K-2 always died, but Jyn and the others survived. I think that would have been a far inferior version of the film. I'm so glad that Chris came along and had that same instinct to kill the characters because it ended up, I think, being some of the most powerful stuff in the film."

Gary Whitta: "Those aren't actually shots from A New Hope. Those are alternate takes that never got used. But they found them, digitally cleaned them up, matched them with the extra footage, and even tracked down the original actors and had them re-record new dialogue."