Director Krennic
Lord Vader
As soon as you put him in a scene, that's all you want to see.
It's like really hard to come back from that.
You have to be really careful how you use him
because if you bring him into early in the film
you sort of just want Vader for the rest of the movie.
The rebel flagship is disabled, my Lord,
but has received transmissions from the surface.
Prepare boarding party.
Suddenly your brain is exploding with not only our film,
but the other film which is about to come to life.
Open fire!
The door that Darth Vader comes through in A New Hope
I got to film.
You know, as a fan, that was an incredible experience.
I can describe it in one word:
goosebumps.
For the beginning of the film
we wanted everyone to be genuinely scared.
We wanted something, to come up with something more menacing.
Gareth saw some paintings of Ralph McQuarrie
where he stylized the stormtroopers and made them
very tall and very elegant.
And then we thought, okay, well this could become our
Seal Team Six version of the stormtroopers.
I love those challenges
where you're trying to create something new
but then it has to fit within
universe of Star Wars.
So we just took a stormtrooper, cleaned it up, painted it black
to see if would work,
and it was actually really cool.
Jyn, if you're listening, my beloved,
so much of my life has been wasted.
He plays a very important part in her arc.
He is a man who is a scientist, I think
if you have an equivalent, it would be
Oppenheimer, a man who invented something
extremely powerful, that can save the
human species, but at the same time
can do the exact opposite as well.
It's a heartbreaking idea of the father
saying I've been forced to do this terrible thing,
and I can't do anything else,
but now it falls to you, my only daughter,
my only child, to put this right.
It must be destroyed.
I know. We will.
So for that reason I thought it was a beautiful
character by itself, and then it was
slung into a Star Wars universe.
So who can ask for anything else?
All right. So just be careful of that lovely grater. But if you want to
move over that way a little bit. So your head's away from the grater.
Mads is absolutely tremendous.
He's a father himself and
actually has so many paternal qualities.
It was so playful working with him.
Every time I would see him, I would just shout,
Dad! which I think was a little bit disconcerting.
But it was the, it was the fact that he,
he was on Jyn's side.
He's truly in her camp.
Saw Gerrera was a character that was in Clone Wars.
Saw is a long-standing Star Wars character
who's inhabited the periphery of Star Wars story-telling
for a while. He was an idea that came from George.
Because we came into it with this film and found that George had already
left some ideas behind, we thought,
well, God what else could we do?
It was Carrie's idea, actually, that it be Saw Guerrera,
and that would further legitimize the story
inside the stories that had already been told.
Saw Gerrera came to the rebellion early.
He was an activist. He's frustrated.
The Republic is in disarray and chaos.
The Rebel Alliance hasn't really come
together in the way that he thought it would.
We see him as a broken person.
Then you realize this is what a lifetime of
fighting the Empire can turn you into.
I grew up in Mexico. All my cousins were
big fans of Star Wars, you know, and I'm the young one.
And I remember they use Vader's
character and idea to just scare me.
You know [breathes like Darth Vader]
But then he became my favorite character, you know.
I was really looking for someone
who had something else to offer rather
than the default, this is what a leading guy is,
you know in terms of the cliche,
especially in tough action roles.
I'm not a fan of heroes that stand in the corner
and just brood, and that makes them cool.
And Diego gets high score for likeability.
You just want to be his mate the second you see him.
Gareth was always, since pretty early
in the process he said, you are my choice.
Felt fantastic. I was the happiest man in
Mexico probably.
Then I met, I mean Cassie and I will always
have a soft spot to have someone of his
particular heritage on the screen.
You know, my name's Pablo Hidalgo, having
someone like Diego Luna embody
a Star Wars character, it's like hey, we haven't really
had that much before. So that's kind of great.
I know we have a lot of fans in Mexico
who do appreciate that.
Now K-2SO was a huge challenge.
We knew that he was going to be a very iconic character.
We thought, maybe it's a
more serious version of C-3PO.
John's brief for K-2SO was that he,
he literally wanted a black protocol droid, or a
you know, kind of a black C-3PO.
Some of our earliest designs were just simply
variations on C-3PO. And they weren't quite hitting the look.
So we went back to sort of our safety net, Ralph McQuarrie.
We went back to his sketchbooks.
And he had drawn many versions of these very
elegant robots, almost stylized, where
they have very thin limbs.
We explored many versions of that using Ralph
as a foundation for updating it,
and I think the final version is a really unique
take on it because it adds something
very bold and very fresh, and I think,
in terms of designing for Star Wars
you need that. You need that boldness. You need that freshness.
I've got a bad feeling about it.
Quiet!
What?
There are times when what Alan needs to do
are just a little too awkward
or dangerous to do with the stilts.
So, in order to have his eye line at the right place,
there's a backpack that's been
rigged with a couple little poles,
and a cutout photo of K-2's head.
If there's ever a time where I have to put that thing on,
oh, God, no.
Here it comes. It's so awful.
And then this telescoping head that comes
out of the top. And it's just, truly it's
just a piece of poster board with a
really rudimentary K-2 face.
And this has come from ILM!
Diego said, Alan, it's amazing how
little respect you have on this set right now.
There's no way to respect this.
you know. It's like if we were just
witnessing the first science-fiction
film done in...
In elementary school.
Exactly.
One of the biggest physical differences
between Alan and K-2 is that K-2 is about
a foot, 14 inches taller than Alan.
So you want the eye line to be in the right place.
So most of the time Alan is
wearing these really wonderfully made stilts.
And that puts his knees at the right place,
puts his shoulder at the right place,
puts his head in the right place.
And it always worked better and it
transferred better if there was more of
a personality in his movement.
K-2 walks down a hallway and is passed by another
K-2 model. It's in the Empire and
hasn't been freed by a reprogram like
K-2 was. He's like a soldier, and he's
walking very perfectly and very straight and upright.
And then K-2 is kind of sort of
loping along a little bit. I think that's
what makes K-2 a little bit more
accessible, and, gosh I'm gonna say it,
lovable.
I loved Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler.
And as we were looking for a character for
Bodhi Rook, we made sure to throw his name in the hat.
He did a few auditions for us.
He kept cranking out different versions of Bodhi.
The security checkpoint is still met. You said the alarm would clear them out!
Well it should have! They shouldn't! If you would!
Can you just bluff your way through?
Riz filmed himself, he was in New York.
Like, he did a little thing of, like,
this is how Bodhi could be.
Ha! What did I tell you!
And then, obviously, then I started, kind of,
the obsession starts.
So you start sending, like, doing 50,000 takes of
some things your left to your own devices.
Can you not just bluff your way through?
What? You cannot be serious.
Well, yeah, I mean you're a spy, a spy thief?
And he was like great, we've got all we need.
But I didn't stop there. I just carried on
and recorded more takes, and just emailing him.
I was like, screw it, I've got his email address now.
You're a spy, do you spy? Think!
He could be like this.
Or he could be like this.
It was like, okay, anyway you've got the part.
And then got another, like, eight clips saying,
or this or this or this or this or this.
Okay. What did I tell you? What did I tell you.
Okay, I've totally, totally screwed this up now.
I'm like spamming the director.
I love the kale! I love it!
To the fitness nothing compared to doing Rogue One.
Every day there's some kind of so course obstacle.
There was a lot of rehearsal, a lot of preparation.
We're trying to create a situation where being thrown
off balance can produce something spontaneous.
To make that feel as real as possible,
to make it feel like, you know,
your heart's beating, and you're
actually in this situation.
Quite late in the day there's been a lot of running around.
Just gonna do some stretches.
Action!
It has been the most physical exercise
I've ever done in my entire life.
The Star Wars universe is connected in many ways.
Explore the deeper connections
hidden in Rogue One.
May the Force be with us.
This droid is a practical puppet
operated by the same team that brought BB-8 to life
in Episode 7 The Force Awakens.
The turbo tank designed by Joe Johnston
is one of the rare Star Wars vehicles
with wheels. It was first used by the
Clone Army in Episode 3 Revenge of the Sith.
Congratulations. You are being rescued.
K-2SO was originally designed
to be a black protocol droid.
Are you talkng about me?
The first appearance of a TIE reaper designed by co-production designer Doug Chiang.