Gareth Edwards: The Last Detail

Let’s get the love-in out of the way ear­ly – British effects whiz-turned-expert block­buster builder Gareth Edwards is one of our favourites. Every­thing was right there in his 2010 debut fea­ture, Mon­sters, which fus­es togeth­er a rough-hewn, semi-impro­vised real­ism with gor­geous, com­put­er gen­er­at­ed, hov­er­ing glow-in-the-dark squids. It was a low-bud­get labour of love which looked like it cost at least 50 times its minus­cule $500,000 budget.

Hol­ly­wood was watch­ing, and it wasn’t long before Edwards was over at Warn­er Broth­ers and hand­ed the keys to a Godzil­la reboot. The result remains one of the most majes­tic, awe-inspir­ing block­busters of the mod­ern age, an exem­plary fusion of the clas­si­cal dis­as­ter movie con­ven­tions with action sequences which often take on a near-exper­i­men­tal qual­i­ty. Here was a direc­tor with the abil­i­ty to per­son­alise the imper­son­al, to stamp his imprint on a giant, loom­ing edifice.

And now, Edwards has some­how tramped even high­er up the moun­tain. Rogue One is the first of what is set to be a series of Star Wars ​“sto­ries”, spin­ning out from the orig­i­nal, canon­i­cal saga. The film con­cerns a gang of rebel fight­ers, which includes Felic­i­ty Jones’ Jyn Erso, who are out to nab the blue­prints for an under-con­struc­tion Death Star. We spoke to Edwards about how he goes about mak­ing films on such a grand scale, and how he was able to pay lip ser­vice to George Lucas’s vision while adding some­thing new and vital to the mix.

LWLies: Godzil­la and Mon­sters were both slow-burn films which teased the audi­ence with effects and a grad­ual crescen­do. Have you done the same with Rogue One?

Edwards: You’d have to tell me. When we filmed Mon­sters, it was very organ­ic, or what­ev­er words you wan­na use. It was oppor­tunis­tic. It was a bit of a freeform thing: this is kind of the scene; this is kind of the idea. Just do what you want to do, and we’ll try and find the beau­ty in it. Godzil­la was the polar oppo­site of that, so it was set­ting every sin­gle shot up, then putting marks on the floor and every­one has to hit them. It feels very con­trived in my mind. And so, on this, I want­ed to find that hap­py bal­ance between the Hol­ly­wood approach to things and a more inde­pen­dent, free­wheel­ing vibe.

What do you mean when you say ​‘Hol­ly­wood?’

The idea of sto­ry­board­ing every­thing. You stand there, you say that line, you walk to that cor­ner, you look out there. It’s very con­trolled and struc­tured. It’s great, in a sense, as near­ly all of the clas­sic block­buster films are born out of that style. When I was doing visu­al effects, I learned that the thing that’s most excit­ing is when you find the thing you weren’t think­ing of. Oth­er­wise, all a film can ever be is what you’ve pic­tured in your head. As great as any­one might think they are, there’s a lim­it to what that pic­ture can real­ly be. The more you can add some of your own DNA to the mix the bet­ter. Frac­ture it. Try and cre­ate hap­py acci­dents. Sud­den­ly you get things that are way bet­ter than you pic­tured. We tried to inject that approach into this film.

How do you cre­ate a hap­py accident?

Let me give you an exam­ple: there’s an area in the film called Jedah. We had a set that was 360 degrees. You nor­mal­ly have a bunch of back­ground artists, and when you say action they walk from left to right. And when you say cut, every­thing is reset and you start over again. On this, we want­ed it to feel like a real mar­ket. So instead of walk­ing left to right, every­one had to learn what they did for a liv­ing. Like, they sold fruit on a stall, or they were an inspector…

Read more inside our Rogue One print edition

So every­one had there own lit­tle imag­i­nary things that I had no idea about. These thoughts were theirs. It meant that they could keep going for­ev­er. So we could lm and not have to cut. We could look in every direc­tion. The assis­tant direc­tors are the ones who are run­ning around in the back­ground and if they’re not care­ful they get into shot – they wore cos­tumes so they could walk into shot and not be seen. As a result, we end­ed up in this sit­u­a­tion where the actors could go in and do their scene, but we could also find the beau­ty in it.

It feels more like the approach of an art­house direc­tor than some­one mak­ing a Star Wars movie.

It would’ve been impos­si­ble to do this for the whole lm. There were scenes inside space­ships and we had 180 degree LED screens. The flight path of the ship was pre-ani­mat­ed, and the whole thing was on hydraulics. We’d get locked inside, not come out for an hour and get very sweaty and hot. But we could just go again and again and again. I think that effect of being held hostage inside a tin can like that added to the per­for­mance. I don’t know… It’s much more for peo­ple like you to say. We were just try­ing to do it when­ev­er we could. There’s def­i­nite­ly lots and lots of shots in the lm where I could say to you, ​‘We nev­er con­trived that at all. That is just Diego [Luna] exhaust­ed and on his knees and we sud­den­ly ran around with the cam­era and got this shot.’ I nev­er asked for that, but I’m so glad it hap­pened. It’s a moment by moment thing.

You’ve talked about Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu as being an inspi­ra­tion on how you approached this. Is it pos­si­ble to achieve that lev­el of real­ism in the Star Wars universe?

I think if we weren’t doing this as a stand-alone movie, then prob­a­bly not. But, what was good about being a spin-off was that we had a licence – if not a man­date – to be dif­fer­ent. What is that dif­fer­ence? I just want­ed things to be more nat­ur­al. There’s no part of me that doesn’t watch those orig­i­nal films in total awe. Every one is a mas­ter­piece. It’s not like there’s some­thing you can do that’s bet­ter than that. I want peo­ple to feel when they’re watch­ing Rogue One that they are real­ly going to these places.

What about the orig­i­nal, clas­si­cal fan­ta­sy style forged by George Lucas?

We are doing that too – the very clas­si­cal, epic, con­sid­ered and con­trolled ​’70s Spiel­ber­gian old school style. We tried our best to mix and match things. And that’s one of the things I like about the film – that there’s the con­trast between those two styles. That quick gear change keeps every­thing fresh. And it’s not as sim­ple as Rebels are hand­held and Empire is sta­ble. There’s only beau­ty in con­trast. You need the dark to feel the light, and vice versa.

From when you got the job to direct Rogue One, what was it then like to going and re-watch­ing the orig­i­nal films?

I was ter­ri­fied that it was going to ruin them for me. Star Wars has always been some­thing that I could just put on. It always gives me goose bumps and it always reminds me why I love cin­e­ma. Then I think, what if I could nev­er look at them again in the same way? As of today, it hasn’t changed any of that.

When you went back and watched the orig­i­nal films did you take copi­ous notes?

On day one, we were in Lucas­film in San Fran­cis­co with Indus­tri­al Light and Mag­ic and John Knoll, our super­vi­sor, he said that they’ve got a brand new 4K restora­tion print of A New Hope – it had lit­er­al­ly just been fin­ished. He sug­gest­ed we sit and watch it. Obvi­ous­ly, I was up for that. Me, the writer, lots of the sto­ry peo­ple and John all sat down, we all had our lit­tle notepads, we were all ready for this. I’ll add that I’ve seen A New Hope hun­dreds of times. So I was sat there, ready to take notes and real­ly delve under the sur­face of the film. You have the Fox fan­fare, then scrolling text with ​‘A long time ago…’, and then the main music begins. Next thing we knew it had end­ed, and we looked around to one anoth­er and just thought – shit, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it with­out get­ting car­ried away. It’s real­ly hard to get into an ana­lyt­i­cal film­mak­er head­space with this film. It just turns you into a child.

One thing that Star Wars does amaz­ing­ly well is the char­ac­ter entrance. As a direc­tor, how do you chore­o­graph a great entrance?

You can film a char­ac­ter entrance, but you can get to the edit and find that you can’t use it. It might take too much screen time to show that per­son in the way that you had planned. You have to cut and they’re on screen. There’s a par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter entrance in the film that I’m very proud of. It had to be spe­cial. And it’s prob­a­bly obvi­ous who it is.

How do you build those sequences?

It’s… a bit like the stops on a Tube map. Or con­nect­ing dots. You know what the sto­ry is, and you try and come up with visu­als that are mem­o­rable and feel right. You come up with loads of them. An insane amount. And then you try to con­nect them in a scene. How can we get from this point to this des­ti­na­tion, and go via here, here and here? Mak­ing a movie is about find­ing a path. What can hap­pen is that, because you’re being visu­al­ly led through a sto­ry, it’s not always the right approach. A film is like a child that you’ve raised to be a lawyer, but the child turns around and says it wants to be a fight­er pilot. At a cer­tain point, a film tells you what it needs to be. You just try and feed it ideas. And even though it will reject some of them, it’s noth­ing per­son­al. It’s like a reflex reaction.

Is it always you who can see when some­thing doesn’t work or do you have oth­er peo­ple to look out for that?

Peo­ple tend to be the ones look out for that. But there’s stuff that I’ll reject because I just won’t want it in the film. It doesn’t feel right. There were occa­sions where peo­ple said you don’t need this or that, and I held on to it. The down­side is, if you have an object and every­one takes away every­thing they don’t like, if there’s enough peo­ple, you end up with a sphere every time – no edges, noth­ing of inter­est. I always try and take every­thing with a pinch of salt. Stay open mind­ed and hon­est, but don’t lose the dri­ve to make some­thing unique. Hon­est­ly, it’s such a mind­fuck. Right there, in those details, is the dif­fer­ence between mak­ing a good film or a bad one.

From the way you’re talk­ing, those micro deci­sions would seem to be crip­pling­ly stressful.

On Star Wars they are, because they last for­ev­er. For instance, the toys that get made. Say you’re design­ing a gun, and you come to a but­ton on the gun and you’re think­ing about the way it clicks. If you get into the detail of that stuff with the props peo­ple, you just think, stop being such an idiot, no one is going to see or care about this. But as soon as you say that, you remem­ber: this is Star Wars, of course they’re going to see it and care about it. If you’ve done your job prop­er­ly, peo­ple are going to be look­ing at that hel­met for long time, not just for a split sec­ond on screen. It might end up on a t‑shirt. You’ve got to be hard on it.

How dif­fi­cult a task is it to always keep one eye on the big­ger picture?

There’s two modes: you have the macro mode where you’re look­ing at struc­tur­al stuff and pure sto­ry, then once you’ve got that right, you can zoom in to the micro mode. But it’s always pos­si­ble that you zoom in too ear­ly – you can spend ages iron­ing out a scene, mak­ing it per­fect, and then you zoom back out and realise you don’t even need it. You’ve just wast­ed a week. I think I’m a lit­tle autis­tic about visu­als. I find it hard to let go.

Could you have spent an infi­nite amount of time mak­ing this movie?

Yeah. I real­ly don’t know when you would reach the point on a Star Wars movie and think, ​‘Done! Fin­ished! Noth­ing left to do here.’ Even George couldn’t let go. I think the orig­i­nals are mas­ter­pieces, so why do you need the spe­cial edi­tions? You did it. You achieved the Holy Grail. And yet, he doesn’t feel that way about it because they’re his babies. He was pic­tur­ing some­thing slight­ly bet­ter. That’s the curse of mak­ing films. It’s real­ly hard to have feel­ings about them the same way you do for oth­er people’s films, because you’re too close. We def­i­nite­ly aimed real­ly high on this. But thank god there’s a release date, oth­er­wise I’d still be there, doing it, forever.