General Rogue One News/Speculation/SPOILER Thread - Part 6

"Money, dear boy." Gilroy was reportedly paid as much as $5 million for his work on Rogue One.

 

Arguably, he did a good job.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rogue_one_a_star_wars_story/

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars2016.htm

 

Arguably, he's also a ****.

 

A **** that saved Rogue One and helped make it successful.

 

Doesn't make him any less of ****.

 

Yeah, I'm glad he was brought in to course-correct, I like both Gilroys.

That can be the case and he's still a pr*ck.

 

Eh, I give Gareth Edwards most of the credit for making Rogue One good. If the other guy helped sort things out and put it together, that's fine, but I don't think he "saved it" by any means. I still maintain that Edwards knew what he was doing, I think all the stuff about him making an 'incoherent mess' and reshooting half the movie or whatever is 110% clickbait nonsense.

 

It was never said to be an "incoherent mess" like the original version of Solo. It was more just a script punch-up, they felt there wasn't enough emotional weight to the thing. That and Gilroy re-worked the third act pretty seriously.

All of Edward's tonal vision is still there in-tact though, so yeah, he does get a bad rap. Sounds like it was just some general inexperience with the scale of such a project, and that he's not much of a writer.

It's for the best that Gilroy lifted the original version into the really solid movie we got in the final product. That doesn't excuse him being a smug d*ckbag over the whole thing though, this guy isn't some Scorsese.

 

Sounds like a lot of revisionist history. It's clear from the movie they did a lot more than rework just the third act. They added new material at the front end as well.

Him getting a writing credit plus a check means he did some extensive rewrites. You don't get a union mandated credit for just punch-ups. That's what Alvin Sargent did for the 2002 Spider-Man movie and he didn't receive a writing credit.

Those opening scenes with Cassian and Rook were added in. All the material with Saw Gerrera was also reshot with Saw Gerrera's new look.

 

Well, sure, that's not to say Gilroy did nothing to the earlier parts of the movie, he obviously did. But the big broader mechanics of the story we got in the final version seem to come from Edwards. Sure there was some re-organizing going on in the edit room with Gilroy, and even some new bits written here and there, of course.

I guess what I'm getting at is, it's a punched-up and improved version of Edward's movie, but it's still basically Edward's movie. He seems happy with it, and agreed to accept some help to make it better than it was. We have him on-record as agreeing that Gilroy was right about "needing to get Vader on that ship" in the third act, stuff like that. Gilroy was brought in for a reason, and he did legitimately improve the movie.

The tone and feel though, is pretty much all as originally pitched.

That...seems different to what we know of Solo. Not just Lord & Miller being all defiant about the notion they needed help on crafting the thing, but in that they were constantly deviating from the written script in favor of just throwing the actors into a broad situation and having them improvise.

Gareth isn't all that much of a writer, but it's pretty clear the "feel" of the finished movie is still like 80% of what he pitched initially. Whereas Kasdan and Lord/Miller just seemed polar opposites, and Ron once aboard leaned very much in the direction of Kasdan's approach as the right way to go.

 

I'm not sure I believe any of that regarding Lord and Miller. I've heard conflicting things.

 

From everything I've read about them on Solo, they were shooting scenes multiple times with much it being improvised to the point that it was pissing off both Kasdans for being tonally all over the place and deviating from their script too much and the crew for making them work extra hours to shoot a bunch of pointless stuff everyone knew wasn't likely to make the final cut.

 

The actors have spoken out against them too in not-so-subtle ways. Basically saying they're nice guys, but that the cast had no idea what they were going for half the time.

There was nothing like that with Edwards, that always came off more as "the movie's okay as-is, but we don't want to release something just okay - we want to bring in a script doctor to help steer this." And Gareth, while probably a little disappointed, was cool with it.

 

Watching Rogue One again on Netflix right now reminds me how much I love it. This is such a fun film. The score is all I really have an issue with. This is literally in my top 3 SW films and I wish we had more like it. I’m an old timer. Saw the original trilogy in theaters and this is by far the closest feel I get to it. I really want more SW films with new characters like this.

 

The more time goes on, the more I appreciate Rogue One.

 

So what? The Kasdans vouched for them and Kennedy hired them. They knew their filmography and what they had done. If they didn't want that, they shouldn't have hired them.

Also, here's another question. How do you know Kasdans and Kennedy were 100% in the right in all those situations?

 

Dude. L&M wrote the Lego movie, and I'm pretty sure their other stuff. Improvising with your own work is one thing, but taking it to that same make-it-up-as-you-go-along extent with someone else's script that Lucasfilm was happy with, on a $150 million (at the time) movie is something else entirely.

Especially Larry friggin' Kasdan's script, on a Star Wars film.

Seriously: you get a Star Wars directing job, dream gig, and they're willing to let you add some of your own flavor to it. It's written by the guy that wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and Return Of The Jedi. It's blockbuster money, you have no personal experience doing something of that size in live-action.

Do you really not reign yourself in a little, be a team player?

Of course you do. Kathleen & Larry would have been fine with them improvising a little, probably more than a little. But you've gotta be efficient with the shoot too, not burn through huge amounts of cash and put the crew into overtime constantly. And at least stick to the spirit of what's on the page.

This was more than dialogue being different alone. We know the actors were confused too, we've heard it from at least a few of them.

 

Kasdan's also the guy that wrote Dreamcatcher and Darling Companion. Just sayin'.

 

It's especially interesting to think about for me now considering the biggest flaw of "Solo" for me is the script. There was just not much on its bones to me on a character level.

 

I don't mean to take anything away from what he accomplished in the past, but his heyday was literally decades ago. I'm not sure what he brought to TFA from a script perspective, but I think pretty much anyone could've cowritten it with Abrams and it still would've been a success.

I think it's also telling that on Solo his son got the billed first in the writing credit.

 

OK, and what's your point? The LEGO Movie, is it not a beloved modern classic? After that movie came out, everyone was raving about it.

So they do all that...and yet they still hired them. The time to vet them over such things is before you hire them on for a movie. Why were they not on the same page on such things before filming started?

Lawrence Kasdan, so what? He's not the director. It's not really his movie. The script is a blueprint.

I have no idea. I wasn't on set and I didn't see the arguments or divides that took place. I'm not going to condemn Lord and Miller for things I didn't see, when it seems that Lucasfilm constructed a narrative against them. Not to mention, Lucasfilm's own plans for the film after they replaced Lord and Miller backfired and didn't fix the movie.

To me Kathleen Kennedy deserves a significant portion of this blame. She gave them the job. She called them "perfect" for the job. She literally said they were the "perfect directors" for Han Solo. Lawrence Kasdan wanted them for the movie as well. So if they are unhappy with that decision, then they deserve a significant portion of that blame as well.

 

Don't get me wrong, he's written some of the best films ever, but he's still the co-writer. He's not the president of the studio. He's not Bob Iger. He's not George Lucas. If you are Lord and Miller, it's not really their job to do everything Lawrence Kasdan says just because he's Lawrence Kasdan.

 

No argument here.

 

I disagree with that. I felt like Solo had a kind of charm and classic Star Wars humor that was distinctly Kasdan, and TFA had some of that as well. It's largely in the writing of Han himself, who Kasdan just gets on an instinctual level.

 

edit. Double.