As the first season of Star Wars: Andor approaches its final two episodes, Tony Gilroy once again chats with The Hollywood Reporter to delve into the ten episodes so far and eleborate on some oft-asked questions, including what exactly are the prisoners on Narkina 5 building?
THR: People continue to speculate about what they’re building in Narkina 5, and until I spoke with Andy Serkis recently, I thought the answer didn’t really matter. So what can you say about those building blocks?
TG: They’re building season two. (Laughs.) It’s the spine of season two. I’ve heard all kinds of things; it’s great. All of the material that the Empire has, I look at everything like, “Economically, how does this work? Who built Scarif? How do you build that? How do you build Eadu? How do you build The Death Star and this armada of ships?” There’s a lot of things that need to be built, and there’s an incredible amount of material. So, to me, what they’re building is not as important as the scale of it. When you go to the Imperial Bureau of Standards where Syril works, you go, “Oh my God,” and he’s just working at the Fuel Purity desk. But that’s what it takes to run this Empire. So the scale of it is really what we’re trying to suggest here.
THR: For the look and feel of Narkina 5, was [production designer] Luke Hull actually inspired by THX 1138 as so many have theorized?
TG: That’s fascinating because when we got into the room, I knew that Cassian goes to prison. But everyone was like, “Oh my God, a f****** prison. How do you do anything new?” Because we were not going to do what anybody had done before. We were just absolutely adamant about that. That’s the rule. So I honestly don’t know who said electric floors first in the flurry of all the s*** happening, but someone said electric floors. And all of a sudden, we were like, “Oh my God, what does that mean?” And so we spent the whole day building the prison, and Luke was there with us, building the prison.
We got so crazy about this stuff. A lot of people think the prison is just white, but there’s a billion kinds of white. When we were doing the ISB conference room, we also had to figure out our whites and how much gray was in it. But I think there were pictures up from THX 1138. I know we had pictures up from The Conformist, so I’m sure there were pictures up from THX, of those whites. So it’s a happy convergence, and it’s really pleasing and cool that it’s George Lucas’ first movie. But we definitely went back and looked at it afterwards, and were like, “Oh my God, look at those whites.”
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