While familiar with the saga, Danish director Janus Metz was far from a fanboy of the Star Wars story when he was asked to come onboard for season two of Andor, and after packing his bags and bringing his family across to the UK for a year to work on episodes 7, 8 and 9 – the Ghorman Massacre episodes – he quickly grew to very much appreciate just how special this show is, adding his own unforgettable trilogy to the legend of the saga.
TP: How did you land those specific Ghorman episodes? They’re meaty, killer episodes.
JM: It was very exciting. episode nine, when I was in prep, was still being written — there was a great outline, and I don’t know what draft they were on, but it wasn’t finished yet. episode eight was pretty finished, but the battle sequence had a lot of descriptions. When you write action, it’s hard — “runs across the plaza; blam, blam, blam” — so you have to take those pages and make them come alive.
It’s all shot on a backlot at Pinewood Studios. It was a huge location build — probably three football fields or something. I remember standing there with my DP and my first AD, looking at the place they were building and thinking, “How the f*** are we going to fill this up with people?”
TP: Because that whole plaza is real?
JM: We built it up to the first floor. The second floor is a digital set extension. But the whole plaza — the ground floor, the hotel, the ISB office, the café — all that is real. And all the side streets are built. It was a huge operation. The collaboration with the VFX/CGI guys was amazing. We needed 5,000 people, and we had three or four days with about 400 extras, then about 150 extras a day. We had to make that look like 5,000 people. So we came up with tricks — how to stack people, how to use a lot of smoke, how to shoot in specific ways — to sell the illusion.
TP: And after one shot, everybody comes over and goes into the back?
JM: Everyone comes over, changes position, and someone puts a new hat on. It was really collaborative. Tony has a lot of trust in his people. He gives his directors a lot of trust. I was able to fill in how I saw it, present it to him, and he was happy. The strike happened, so once he delivered his scripts, we were kind of on our own — but mostly it was a very trust-based working relationship. Looking back, I think we saw eye to eye about a lot. It felt effortless.
On the plaza, Mark Patten (the DP), the first AD, and I went there and blocked everything out — live-storyboarded it with iPhones, running around and pretending to be Cassian, Dedra, and K-2SO. We set all the shots. The stunt department made their stunt-viz videos, and we cut that together. We almost had a full cut of the battle sequence — just us running around in orange security jackets — so when the day came, we knew exactly what we needed.
TP: Something that big and expensive — you kind of need to do that, right?
JM: There are a lot of ways to do it. Some people storyboard the shit out of it. We had the location, the place, the time — we prepped four months — and a lot of that was spent making sure the Ghorman massacre would be every bit as spectacular as it needed to be.
TP: It’s immense, epic, and pretty horrific — as it’s meant to be.
JM: When I read Tony’s script, it resonated with my experience of being in a war zone on “Armadillo,” and my firsthand experience of combat. It’s really a fall-from-grace incident — how the horror of the situation weighs in on everybody, whichever side you’re on: if you’re Cassian, if you’re Mon, if you’re Dedra, if you’re Syril.
