Details About Alternate 'Rogue One' Prologue Emerge

By: Dominic Jones

One of the things that sets Rogue One: A Star Wars Story apart from the rest of the Star Wars films is that the first scene takes place fifteen years before the rest of the film.  In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Rogue One director Gareth Edwards and the film's first writer Gary Whitta revealed that, while the plan was always to open with a prologue, the specifics of the scene were very different in the first draft.  The main difference, Krennic wasn't there for Galen.  He was after Lyra, who was secretly a Jedi knight.

Edwards told EW,

“Our instinct told us that we wanted a scene where Jyn is orphaned because of what Krennic does, which sets her on her path of being a child of war.  The problem was that the second you make her mom a Jedi you spend the entire movie questioning whether Jyn is a Jedi or not. Eventually, we came up with the idea that her father should have designed the Death Star. That became a stronger way into the stealing of the Death Star plans. We let go of the mother being a Jedi, and she became just a rebellious mom.”

Whitta explained that the reason Lyra was to be Jedi was they felt they couldn't do a Star Wars movie without dealing with the Force.  Ultimately, Chirrut Imwe would be added in later drafts to fill that role.  Whitta told EW,

“The movie addressed it in just the right way.  The character that feels the Force is a believer, and he has that faith-based spiritual element but isn’t actually a Jedi knight.”

Another reason it was cut, it would have led to questions about how Lyra could have a family given that the prequels established that attachments like that were forbidden.  Whitta explained,

“You’re talking about ideas that were killed.  I can’t fully defend them because part of the reason why we got rid of the idea was because people would ask questions like that.”

You can read the entire interview with Whitta and Edwards about how the Rogue One prologue evolved over at Entertainment Weekly.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story will be released as a digital download on March 24th, and on blu-ray and DVD on April 4th.

Source: Entertainment Weekly

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