It’s Star Wars week over at Entertainment Weekly, where all kinds of tasty tidbits and sonorous stories have rolled out ahead of the new, all-Star Wars issue. Darth Vader has been confirmed to make an appearance, though his influence will be felt long before he appears onscreen. In addition to providing sneak peeks at all the cool new stuff—mostly, capes—the filmmakers are also dispelling rumors that production on the standalone film has been rocky enough to require reshoots.
Earlier this summer, there were reports that Rogue One was in trouble over the “darker turn” Edwards was making with the material. The movie was described as having the “feel of a war movie,” which is definitely not in the Star Wars oeuvre. But in an interview with EW, the director waved off those concerns: “It’s funny, making a film stops you believing anything you’ve ever read on the Internet.” Edwards also said the reshoots were part of his plan all along:
“I mean it was always part of the plan to do reshoots. We always knew we were coming back somewhere to do stuff. We just didn’t know what it would be until we started sculpting the film in the edit.”
Lucasfilm president and Rogue One producer Kathleen Kennedy echoed Edwards’ sentiments, clarifying that “there’s nothing about the story that’s changing, with a few things that we’re picking up in additional photography.” But because she knows how much the kids love their wars of stars, she noted that “the most important thing” is to “reassure fans that it’s the movie we intended to make.”
But it sounds like that could still be the “war film” earlier reports hinted at—and that visual effects supervisor John Knoll pitched—as Kennedy goes on to say that “one of the things we’re doing with these Star Wars stories is embracing the uniqueness of the different genres, and we’re very deliberately leaning into the various styles of directors that we’re approaching so that each of these movies will very intentionally have a very different tone and style from the saga films.”
The reshoots are now underway, Edwards tells EW, but they involve all of the “little things within the preexisting footage.” The process is being slowed down a bit by the film’s large cast, whose schedules are proving harder to wrangle than a bunch of drunken bantha.