Two weeks after the premiere of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, fans are still wondering what parts of the movie were lost or changed because of the reshoots the film needed.
Two of the film’s editors, John Gilroy and Colin Goudie, spoke to Yahoo! Movies about some of the bigger changes brought upon by the reshoots. From the way Jyn Erso is introduced to the importance of characters like Captain Cassian Andor and Bodhi Rook, even the most minor change in direction had a rippling effect.
[Spoilers: This will contain minor spoilers for Rogue One.]
The largest changes happened in the third act, Gilroy said. What members of the Rebel Alliance did and how their heroic actions played out all had to be changed because of events that occurred earlier — which both editors reiterated they couldn’t talk about.
“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.”
Most of that, like Gilroy said, was the result of a ripple effect. Director Gareth Edwards decided he wanted to change how Erso was introduced after the prologue. In the final version, Erso wakes up in a jail cell and manages to break out of the transporter carrying her to another facility. Gilroy said deciding to make that the intro meant they had to change a couple of other moments to make sure it remained cohesive.
“Jyn, how we set her up and her escape from the transporter, that was all done to set up the story better,” Gilroy said. “Of course, things like that have a ripple effect all through the movie so there was a lot of work to do.”
Scenes like “Cassian’s introduction with the spy, [and] Bodhi traipsing through Jedha on his way to see Saw,” were all added after the first version of the film was shot. Goudie said the main reason the introductory scenes were changed was to make it more exciting. Otherwise, he said, it was less interesting to watch.
“Jyn’s just a little girl, so when you see her as an adult what you saw initially was her in a meeting,” Goudie said. “That’s not a nice introduction. 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.”
The editors also reiterated what members of the cast and Edwards have said since before the film was released; the reshoots were planned from the very beginning. Ben Mendelsohn, who plays Director Orson Krennic, told Collider when they were filming, they would have to tackle a scene three or four different ways so Edwards and the editing team had plenty to choose from.
“We did have multiple, multiple ways of going at any given scenario, we had multiple readings of it,” Mendelsohn said. “So should they ever decide to, there would be a wealth of ways of approaching these different things. And I know from having seen sort of the crucial kind of scenes throughout it, I know there’s vastly different readings of at least four of those scenes.”
When asked about the controversy surrounding the reshoots, Edwards told Vulture the scope of the film became larger than he thought, which led to a “divide-and-conquer” mentality.
“I think the results are really good and that's all that matters, is the movie,” Edwards said.
Neither Gilroy or Goudie mentioned whether there are plans to do something with footage left over, but implied there wasn’t enough for an alternate cut.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was the second biggest movie of 2016 in the U.S., coming in just under Pixar’s Finding Dory. It is currently playing worldwide.