The Death Star plans are an extremely important part of the Star Wars universe, and a huge chunk of the first movie revolves around the Rebel Alliance making sure it holds onto them so Luke Skywalker can eventually toss a few proton torpedoes into a convenient exhaust port and save the galaxy. The upcoming Rogue One: A Star Wars Story spin-off is finally going to show just how the Rebels got them in the first place, but it seems like they’ve once again ended up in unexpected hands—specifically the ones belonging to Rogue One director Gareth Edwards.
During a recent Facebook panel with the cast, Edwards teased that he really had his eye on the actual Death Star plans used in the movie, and he repeatedly asked people where they might be kept and wether or not he’d be able to take them home when they were done filming. They (meaning Lucasfilm, presumably) told them he couldn’t keep the plans, as they are “part of history” and will be “archived,” but he hints in the video that may have actually taken them anyway. This prompts Ben Mendelsohn to chime in that they’ll probably get stolen back from him, and Riz Ahmed adds that he and the rest of the cast are “good at that.”
You can see that specific part around the 17-minute mark, but there’s some good stuff about Darth Vader before that:
One interesting thing about this is that the Death Star plans are usually just depicted as digital data (even in 1977, which is pretty crazy), so it’s unclear what Edwards is talking about here. The plans pop up as a sci-fi flash drive in the prequels, but beyond that they’re usually just shown as a holographic representation of the Death Star itself. Edwards couldn’t have stolen the hologram, since it’s not real, so that either means Rogue One will have some physical prop that represents that Death Star plans, or he was just joking in the Facebook video (and possibly stole some other prop).
[Note: Gizmodo, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications]