Posted in: Movies | Tagged: colin goudie, john gilroy, rogue one, rogue one: a star wars story, star wars

Sorry Star Wars Fans; There Is No Extended Cut For 'Rogue One'

Published Tue, 03 Jan 2017 14:15:49 -0600

If there is one thing everyone who watched the marketing for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, whether they liked the final film or not, is that there were a lot of scenes cut. This could be from the extensive reshoots or just marketing picking scenes they thought would sell the movie. Yahoo! UK recently did an extensive interview with two of the three editors of the film, John Gilroy and Colin Goudie, about what ended up on the cutting room floor and whether we're going to get an extended cut (spoiler alert: we aren't).

Gilroy shed some light on what scenes were added in the reshoots and how they changed the film overall.

They gave you the film that you see today. I think they were incredibly helpful. The story was reconceptualised to some degree, there were scenes that were added at the beginning and fleshed out. We wanted to make more of the other characters, like Cassian's character [Cassian Andor, the Rebel spy played by Diego Luna], and Bodhi's character [Bodhi Rook, the defected Imperial pilot played by 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. Also Jyn [Jyn Erso, the reluctant leader of the film, played by Felicity Jones], how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better.

Goudie elaborated on it further by saying how the movie originally would have started with the prologue and jumped straight to Jyn meeting the Rebellion.

The point with the opening scenes that John was just describing was that the introductions in the opening scene, in the prologue, was always the same. 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.

Perhaps these were the scenes of Jyn in binders that we saw during the original teaser? If the beginning is where some of the reshoots happened it would make sense that Jyn meeting the Rebels would change as well.

The interviewer also asks about the third act where a lot of the missing scenes from the trailers appear to take place. Gilroy said that there was "a lot going on … like seven different action venues" which is very true. It would make sense that if one thing changed here then it would direct effected something else here.

We moved some of the things that our heroes did, they were different in the original then they were as it was conceived.

Because you needed to figure that out, and everything else changes. Everything was connected to everything so doing something to one venue would change all the other venues, so really we had to… we were working on that until the last minute, because we working closely with ILM, they were giving us temporary shots and we'd put them in, we'd work them, we'd reconceive again.

As for an extended cut? It appears there isn't one in the cards because the one we got isn't that far off from the first cut according to Goudie.

It was not much longer than the finished film. I think the first assembly was not far off actual release length. Maybe 10 minutes longer? I genuinely can't remember because that was nearly a year ago now. There's no mythical four hour cut, it doesn't exist.

Does this mean those scenes won't be included on home release extras? No one is confirming anything at the moment but Gilroy and Goudie are happy with the film that is on screen. When asked if there were any scenes that they were disappointed had to get cut neither of them could think of anything.

John Gilroy: I don't know. For me, no. I can't think of anything.

Colin Goudie: There's a handful that if people see them they'll be like 'oh that's interesting', but I don't think there's anything whereby you'd be like 'why did they cut that out?'

The entire interview is over at Yahoo! UK and worth a look. They go into detail about the editing process and how this was being worked on until the last possible second. It seems that all the work was well worth it because Rogue One ended up in the top ten for the worldwide box office, number three domestic, despite being open just over two weeks.

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