With the first season of Star Wars: Andor only a few weeks away, Tony Gilroy speaks with Variety about the show and the original intention to do five seasons, a task Gilroy believes would have been even beyond their undoubted skills. Initially, Gilroy planned to get the show up and running, then step back.
‘I’ll build the first season, get it up and rolling, and then someone else can take it over and they can go do it. That wasn’t really feasible.”
“There were many times along the way where it just was like, ‘Man, what have I done to my life?’ ‘Why did I do this? This just can’t be worth it.’ That’s a hard conversation to have with yourself when you’re in it.”
Things got particularly dire when Gilroy realized he’d created an outwardly impossible dilemma for himself: “Andor” starts five years before the events of “Rogue One,” and Gilroy’s plan was always to end the series right before the events of the movie. But Season 1, which spans a year of Cassian’s life, took just about two years to make. Maintaining the show’s expansive scope for four more seasons felt overwhelming.
“You just couldn’t possibly physically make five years of the show. I mean, Diego would be, like, 65. I’d be in a nursing home. We were panicked. We can’t sign on to this forever.”
At this point, the idea to create smaller arcs within the larger season began to formulate in what he calls “an amazingly elegant solution”. With shooting on the second season kicking off in November, that elegant solution will be put on film.
“When we come back, it’s a year later, and it’s a Friday, Saturday and a Sunday. And then we go away for a year. And then we come back for, I think, eight days. And then we go away for a year. And we come back, and it’s four days.”
Gentle Giant: Star Wars: Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Bust: Bo-Katan from Star Wars: The Clone Wars @ ForbiddenPlanet.com – UK and Worldwide Cult Entertainment Megastore
