During an interview with Comic Book Resources to promote the home entertainment release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, ILM’s John Knoll has revealed that he originally conceived the idea as a potential pitch for an episode of Star Wars: Underworld, the live-action Star Wars TV project that was in development at Lucasfilm following the release of the Prequel Trilogy.
“The first inklings of trying to tell that story happened in Summer 2003 when we were shooting on Episode III in Sydney. I had heard that Lucasfilm was developing stories for a potential live action TV series, and they were active in story development at the time. That was kind of intriguing, and I started thinking about, ‘What would be a fun thing to do as a one-hour episode as a live action Star Wars TV show?’ One thought was, ‘What about a Mission Impossible-style break-in into the most secure facility in the Empire to steal the Death Star plans? There could be a lot of tension of potentially being discovered and overcoming security measures. That could be a lot of fun!’ I started tinkering with this idea internally. Then a day or two later, I asked Rick McCallum, ‘I heard you were developing this TV show’. He started telling me about the era that it takes place in, and the themes of the show. As soon as he started going into that, I realized, actually, that idea has no place in that show, so I just dropped it completely.”
Knoll revisited his idea when it was announced that Lucasfilm were looking to develop a slate of spinoff Anthology movies, and he went on to discuss his pitch to Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy, and the subsequent genesis of his concept:
“So I made the appointment, and I did the pitch to Kathy and Kiri Hart, who’s head of story [at Lucasfilm]. At the end — they listened to the whole thing very politely, and at the end, Kathy said, ‘All right, well, thank you.’ So I got up and left. I didn’t hear anything for a little while. I thought, ‘All right, well, okay, I did it. I’m not going to wonder.’ About a week after, I got an email from Kiri: ‘We talked about this a lot, and we may want to do something with this.’ Then it snowballed into this. Inevitably, things change a bit. I feel like about 50% of what I wrote survived, which is not terrible. A lot of the major characters are still the major characters that were in that first pitch. Jyn Erso was in the first thing I wrote, as was K-2, and Krennic, and even the character that got renamed but eventually became Cassian. So those were all in what I pitched originally. It still ended [the same]: the very last thing in the movie was with Princess Leia on the Blockade Runner as she gets the plans, and has to decide what they’re going to do.”
From Lucasfilm comes the first of the Star Wars standalone films, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an all-new epic adventure. In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story sees Gareth Edwards (Monsters) directing a cast that includes Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Diego Luna (Milk), Ben Mendelsohn (The Dark Knight Rises), Donnie Yen (Ip Man), Jiang Wen (Let the Bullets Fly), Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland), Alan Tudyk (Con Man), Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler), Genevieve O’Reilly (Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith), Jimmy Smits (Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), James Earl Jones (Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope), Valene Kane (The Fall), Alistair Petrie (The Night Manager), Warwick Davis (Star Wars: Episode IV – Return of the Jedi), Ian McElhinney (Game of Thrones) and Jonathan Aris (Sherlock).
Originally published April 9, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
