'Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' Writer Gary Whitta on Alternate Endings, Discarded Characters, and How He Came Up With the Title
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (on Digital HD this Friday and Blu-ray April 4) was such a massive hit that it’s hard to recall how risky the idea seemed. But Gary Whitta remembers. A screenwriter with several sci-fi films (The Book of Eli, After Earth) and Star Wars: Rebels episodes under his belt, Whitta was hired to turn the events that preceded 1977’s A New Hope — specifically, the theft of the Death Star plans — into a screenplay that would feel simultaneously like Star Wars and something entirely new.
It was a tall order, even for a lifelong Star Wars fan like Whitta. “You learn that in order to do service to the films, you kind of have to check your fandom at the door a little bit and resist that urge to just repeat things that you’ve seen before that feel familiar,” he recently told Yahoo Movies. Though the final script is credited to two writers who were brought on later, Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy, it was Whitta who first broke the story with director Gareth Edwards and Industrial Light and Magic’s chief creative officer, John Knoll (who conceived of the idea for the film). Not surprisingly, Whitta’s early drafts and outlines included all kinds of ideas that didn’t make it into the final film, including an appearance by Jabba the Hutt and a different ending for heroine Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones). Yahoo Movies talked to Whitta about his original story, the coffee cup that inspired the planet name Scarif, how he came up with the movie’s title, and the heartbreaking death that was in the script from the very beginning.
Yahoo Movies: You were the first screenwriter brought on for Rogue One. A few details have been released about the early drafts: Jyn’s mother was originally a Jedi, there were nerf herders somewhere in there. What can you tell me about the story and characters you originally conceived?
Whitta: Just so that everyone’s totally clear on the history here, John Knoll was the guy that originally conceived the idea. He’s the guy that said, “Hey, let’s make a movie about stealing the Death Star plans.” He proposed it to Kathy [Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm] and he came up with a very basic story structure — an early version of Jyn was in there — but it needed a lot of fleshing out. They needed a full-time writer to come in and develop it. So that’s how I got involved.
And yeah, every version of the script that we’d write had different versions of the characters. Especially in the early stages, you try almost everything; you experiment and throw things at the wall and see what sticks. We had different versions of Jyn’s parents, and little touches like nerf herders that don’t really mean much for the movie, but it’s nice to say, “Hey, you actually get to see nerf herders now!”
But there was a lot of evolution. One of the things I did when I first started working was I went back and devoured all of the Jonathan Rinzler making-of books for the original trilogy. And you go back and look at that concept art, and you see how things looked vastly different to the finished film that was made. In Return of the Jedi, originally they didn’t consider Ewoks because that was the Wookiee planet. Yoda was originally in that final battle with Vader and Luke. So there are all kinds of permutations, and you stick with the ideas that stick to the wall and you discard the others.
We got left with a lot of things that didn’t get used. And it’s interesting: In most films you have all this stuff left over that you didn’t use. And in those films people don’t care. But when it’s Star Wars, people care more about the stuff that ended up on the floor than what’s actually in most of the films.
I can tell this story now because Gareth told it at South by Southwest the other day. I was waiting for him to tell it first. But there came a time when we needed to name the planets — did you hear this story?
Is this story about how the name Scarif came from a coffee cup?
Yes! I remember Gareth came back with this coffee cup, saying, “Look how they spelled my name!” They spelled it wrong every day. And he said, “Look at how they spelled it this time: Scarif!” And one of us said, “That’s got to be the name of a planet.” And I remember saying to Gareth, because this is the kind of thing that you’re aware of when you work on a Star Wars film, I said, “Take a picture. Take a picture with your phone of that coffee cup, because that’s going to be in the making-of book one day.” We saved everything because we knew there was going to be this level of interest down the road in every little discarded idea.
It must be strange making the movie knowing how much scrutiny everything will be under.
Yeah, and I saved everything. I took pictures of everything, and when it was done I turned it all over to Lucasfilm so they could use it for making-of books and documentaries. Some of the stuff I gave them is in the Blu-ray. You learn to conserve everything.
Not long after Rogue One was announced, it was being described as a war movie. Was that something that shaped your idea of the story? Did that come from you?
A little bit from me and a little bit from the foundation that John gave us. It was always a men-on-a-mission movie: They were commandos, in a way; they were behind enemy lines; it felt very much like a classic Dirty Dozen, Guns of Navarone type movie. You always knew there would be a big battle at the end because that’s in the opening crawl of A New Hope. There were certain things we knew we couldn’t not do.
What we said was, it’s called Star Wars for a reason. We always felt this was going to be this grittier kind of war film. And I think what allowed us the freedom to do that was Lucasfilm always said, “We really want these films to be different.” And in fact, any time we even pitched them an element that felt like it was maybe too cribbed from the original films, they would say “No, no, do something else, create a new character, show us something new.” And that’s how we ended up with a movie that is 90 percent new stuff.
Do you remember any of those ideas that you pitched that were just a little too close to the original trilogy?
Jabba the Hutt was in there, at one point; he was never in a script, but he was in a story outline that I wrote. And again, they would say, “Don’t show us Jabba, we’ve already seen him! Show us something new!” That was Lucasfilm always saying, “We don’t want to just keep relying on the same old characters. We love those characters but we also want to create new characters for people to love.”
And J.J. [Abrams, director of The Force Awakens] obviously did that very successfully. I remember the first time I saw BB-8, thinking, “Holy crap, he’s created a droid that’s instantly as iconic as R2-D2! That’s incredible!” And now BB-8 is a beloved character, so he created something new that a new generation of kids grows up loving. I think if people just kept mining the same characters and going back to the same stories, Star Wars would not have endured 40 years. But because we keep trying new things and opening up the universe and experimenting with different characters and different ways of telling the story, that’s what keeps it fresh and keeps people interested.
One of the most exciting things about both Force Awakens and Rogue One is that they’re new stories that still feel like Star Wars films, and I’d imagine that’s a tricky balance.
Absolutely. One of the things that Gareth and I learned early on — and we are both huge, just insane Star Wars fans — but you learn that in order to do service to the films, you kind of have to check your fandom at the door a little bit and resist that urge to just repeat things that you’ve seen before that feel familiar. You don’t want it to feel like a fan film.
Gareth has mentioned that at one point, there was a “happier” ending, where a couple of the characters did escape from Scarif. What was your original conception of how that battle would end and who would make it out?
The original conception was that everybody should die. I remember very well, the very, very first meeting that I had with Gareth. He was still in post-production on Godzilla at the time, and Warner Bros. and Disney are right next door to each other, so he would kind of sneak out on his lunch break and come sit with me, and we would start breaking the story for Rogue One. And I can’t remember, but one of us said, “I think everyone has to die!” Like, isn’t this a story about martyrdom and the ultimate sacrifice? We knew it was a standalone film, and we weren’t going to carry these characters forward — I mean, they’re not in Star Wars [A New Hope], right? So they have to go somewhere.
In John’s original version, they did get away. I think they got away in an escape pod or something like that. But I was thinking, isn’t it more meaningful if they make the ultimate sacrifice here? And I remember thinking — because this was so new, Force Awakens hadn’t even started shooting yet, and we didn’t quite yet know how long of a leash we were on — and I remember thinking, “Disney is never going to let us do it. They’re never going to let us kill everyone.” And so we didn’t just do it, because I said, “Let’s not write that version and have it taken away from us — we’ll be heartbroken.” We just didn’t think that the studio would let us get away with it.
And so in the version of it that I wrote — K-2S0, he always dies, he was sort of the expendable one. But Jyn survived. And I remember thinking, always thinking like an itch I couldn’t stop scratching: This is not the right ending. She should die.
And then after I left and [screenwriter] Chris Weitz came on, that seed that we had planted back then was still there with Gareth; he obviously is the one constant all the way through the film. And he said to Chris, “Maybe they should die.” God bless Kathy and Disney, everyone was really supportive of that ending, and it’s the right ending. I’m so glad that we went back to that original instinct.
You came up with the title Rogue One. I’m wondering if you remember any alternative title ideas that you had?
I came up with about a dozen and Rogue One was one of them. I didn’t say, “The movie should be called Rogue One,” I said, “Here are 12 titles,” and Rogue One was one of them. I think Bob Iger [Walt Disney CEO] picked it, or Kathy, or someone higher up there on the food chain than me. But I was the one who suggested it. In terms of the titles, I’m not sure I can reveal any of those without violating my NDA, but there were a bunch of them.
And one of the ideas was always to find ways that we can make this film feel different from the franchise films. You think about the seven films that have come before us, they’re all three or four word titles: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, The Force Awakens. Every title is either three or four words long. So my idea was, let’s do one that’s just one or two words, so right off the bat we’ve kind of broken that formula and done something different. If we come up with a title that’s just one word or two words, maybe that tells the audience, this is not like the other Star Wars films.
Were all of those dozen titles you came up with just one or two words?
No. Some of them did fit that more kind of classically Star Wars feel, but I never liked them for that reason. The ones that I always liked were the ones that were one or two words long, like the one they eventually picked.
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