It seems we here in the GFFA may well have had the very best, most invested version of Tony Gilroy as speaking with The Hollywood Reporter about the long road to the completion of Andor he not only delves into the gruelling demands of making such a monumental undertaking, fully investing himself into every nook and cranny of the production, but also that he can’t concieve attempting such a mammoth project ever again.
THR: Did you appreciate how big of an undertaking you were signing up for? At some point the plan shifted from devoting one season to each of the five years, to having the first season cover one year and the second cover four.
TG: I had no clue what I was stepping into. I’d been on House of Cards for a couple of years as a consultant for Beau [Willimon]. I’ve made some big movies. But my naivete and idiocy about what this was going to take was staggering to me just six months later. I was going to try to direct, rewrite all the scripts, to do all this stuff — it was ridiculous. Then COVID came. The only thing I saw positively about COVID was that it would kill the show, I thought. But eventually they started to build back up. It was obvious I couldn’t go back to London [where the show was to shoot], so we were going to have to get British directors. I wouldn’t be able to direct, but I would be able to keep writing and run the show. I got into rewriting the scripts and figured out how to run the show from here. By the time dailies started to come in, I was getting very excited about what we were doing. When I got out of quarantine, I went over there [to the U.K.], trying to come up with what we were going to do going forward. By then we knew what the scope of the work was, and Diego Luna [Cassian Andor] and I sat down, and it wasn’t a “choice,” even; we simply would not be able to make a show like this in the way we initially planned. It would go on too long. He’d be too old. People would die. But the solve presented itself very elegantly: the structure that we ended up with the second season.
THR: What made Andor “the seminal creative experience” of your life? Would you ever do this kind of thing again?
TG: I could see doing a limited series or something, but I can’t see doing anything like this again. For five and a half years, every single day of my life, I had a maximally imaginative involvement that was never complete — writing, designing, music, casting, all of it. Every demand on your imagination that could ever be asked was screaming for your attention. That’s a pretty heady place to live. I grew to love it. But I can’t imagine that I would ever be that fully engaged again.
