rogue one

Rogue One’s Editors Talk About the Infamous Reshoots and Debunk the ‘Mythical 4-Hour Cut’

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Photo: Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm Ltd

Even if a Rogue One supercut — including the reshoots and deleted scenes from the original script — existed, two of the movie’s editors say it wouldn’t make a lot of sense. John Gilroy and Colin Goudie, two of Rogue One’s editors, told Yahoo UK about postproduction labor on the stand-alone Star Wars movie, and clarified some of the scenes and story lines that took shape during the reshoots. “There’s no mythical four-hour cut,” Goudie said. “It doesn’t exist.”

Cassian and Bodhi
According to Gilroy, the new footage beefed up the arcs for Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Bohdi Rook (Riz Ahmed). “The scene with Cassian’s introduction with the spy, Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw, these are things that were added,” Gilroy told Yahoo UK. In December, Ahmed told Vulture much of the same: “[Bohdi] had a different name and a different relationship to the rest of the team, and he really evolved once I signed on and once I started shooting, even. They decided to start expanding the role and introducing him earlier and he became more integral to the story and the rest of the team.”

Jyn Erso’s Entrance
Jyn Erso’s introduction underwent a dramatic transformation, according to the editors. “Jyn, how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better,” Gilroy said. Initially, Goudie told Yahoo UK, Jyn’s introduction went from the prologue where she’s a child escaping Orson Krennic to the rebel meeting as an adult. The reshoots smoothed out her transition. “[At the beginning] Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting. That’s not a nice introduction,” Gouldie said. “So having her in prison and then a prison break out, with Cassian on a mission… everybody was a bit more ballsy, or a bit more exciting, and a bit more interesting. They got there eventually in the film, but this way we came in on the ground running, which was better.”

The Third Act
The editors declined to go into a lot of detail about Rogue One’s infamous ending, but did confirm that the last half of the movie changed substantially during the reshoots. “The third act has a lot going on,” Gilroy said. “You have like seven different action venues, the mechanics of the act changed quite a bit in terms of the characters, and I don’t want to go into too much detail about what had been there before, but it was different. We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived.”

Star Wars Easter Eggs
Two of Rogue One’s biggest Easter Eggs come during the climactic star battle, when the pilots Red Leader and Gold Leader are shown battling for the rebels. Gilroy said this sequence was possible after going through the 40-year-old dailies from A New Hope. “Gold Leader, that actor [Angus MacInnes] is still alive, so we [rerecorded new dialogue to dub over his footage] and I think it was a really heady experience for him to be looping himself 40 years later, but that was a lot of fun.” Gouldie said the idea came from a visit to Skywalker ranch, when he and director Gareth Edwards came across the first film’s footage. “We went through those cans of film and looked at them and it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we can integrate the pilots in somehow.’”

The Deleted Scenes
There’s a handful [of scenes] that if people see them they’ll be like, ‘Oh that’s interesting’,” Goudie said. “but I don’t think there’s anything whereby you’d be like, ‘Why did they cut that out?’”

Rogue One’s Editors Discuss Infamous Reshoots