It Took A Full Week To Film Felicity Jones' Final Scene In 'Rogue One'
It’s a pity that J.W. Rinzler never got to write the Making of books for the Star Wars movies of the Disney era. Maybe beside The Last Jedi, every other post-Lucas film had its behind-the-scenes dramas, which would be really be interesting to learn more about. (And I won’t talk about the drama that emerged after the release of Episode VIII here!)
As for Rogue One, when the movie was first announced, Lucasfilm called it a war movie. And maybe this was exactly what director Gareth Edwards had intended to deliver: something in the style of Apocalypse Now or Platoon. And maybe he had already shot big parts of his film that way when Disney/Lucasfilm stepped in, because what they saw was probably not what they had in mind for the first Star Wars spin-off.
Although there is no official behind-the-scenes documentation on the making of Rogue One, some things have leaked out over the years, via interviews from people who had worked on the movie, starting with the screenwriters (Gary Whitta, Chris Weitz, or Tony Gilroy), to Gareth Edwards himself or the actors: major changes happened in the development and production of Rogue One. And some of these changes were made rather late in the game, like adding the legendary scene with Darth Vader slashing the rebel soldiers during the final minutes of the movie.
At the beginning of the writing process, it was not planned to have all the heroes die on their mission. The first drafts had both Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), the reluctant hero who gave the Rebel Alliance hope and Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) escape Scarif in a spaceship with the plans of the Death Star, and there was no radio transmission, but a physical hand-over of the data tapes to the Tantive IV. Vader did attack Erso’s and Andor’s ship and managed to destroy it, but only after the plans had been delivered and Jyn and Andor escaped in a pod, living together happily ever after.
Only when the writers got the go from Lucasfilm to kill off all the heroes did the ending that we ended up seeing take shape.
And there were, of course, major changes during the shooting and editing (just look at the trailer – barely half of what you see there made it into the final film): Initially, the vault with the Death Star plans was not at the same location as the communication tower, and so in the trailer our heroes had to run across the beach, before it was decided that these scenes were too long and the imperial base and the tower were integrated into one big building. Also, the locations (and sometimes even the way) the members of the Rogue One team died changed as the production moved along.
In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Felicity Jones said that the scene where she and Diego Luna stood respectively kneeled on the beach of Scarif, holding each other and staring into the blinding light of the vaporizing ocean, while awaiting their certain doom, took a whole week to shoot. This scene (as most of the scenes on the tropical planet) was shot on the Maldives (not in a studio) and the director wanted to get the light of the sunset sky just right, which seemingly took several attempts and days. But in the end the effort was worth it.
In hindsight, I personally really love the way they ended the movie and every death scene had its own shocking “beauty” (and yes, this sounds kinda morbid). Sometimes I wish that Avengers: Endgame had done something similar (by killing all the main Avengers during the final battle with Thanos). Not that I don’t like the ending of Endgame, but compared to Rogue One, the stakes had never been higher for the Avengers, and more sacrifices than just that of Tony Stark would have given the victory more gravity, IMHO.
But back to Rogue One: Felicity Jones has also said that she would like to return to Star Wars as Jyn Erso, and although this might be difficult given her character’s fate, it’s not impossible that we might actually see her again, maybe in the Andor series, or maybe even in Rogue Squadron, perhaps with a holographic Jyn Erso gives her motivational speech to a bunch of fighter pilots before they go into battle with the Empire (if the timeline matches up).
Source(s): Screen Rant