Rogue One's Mendelsohn Says 'Multiple Readings' Of The Film Were Shot

CBR

By Brett White

Published Dec 29, 2016

Ben Mendelsohn says dozens of scenes in Rogue One played out in enormously different ways during filming.

Now that "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is in theaters, fans can compare the finished film with the footage seen in trailers. And, as many fans have pointed out, there's a lot from those trailers that didn't make it into the final film. That all falls in line with the reports from this past summer of extensive reshoots.

"Rogue One" star Felicity Jones, who plays Jyn Erso, talked about the reshoots before the film came out, as did director Gareth Edwards. But those comments were given before the film came out, when they couldn't really get into spoilery territory. Now that the film is out, the cast is free to talk more about what it was like working on "Rogue One," and Ben Mendelsohn -- who plays the Imperial agent Director Krennic -- did just that with Collider.

Mendelsohn said that not only were there reshoots on "Rogue One," but they actually filmed many scenes in many different ways, thus resulting in totally different interpretations of the story. "We did have multiple, multiple ways of going at any given scenario, we had multiple readings of it," said Mendelsohn. "So should they ever decided to, there would be a wealth of ways of approaching these different things. And I know from having seen sort of the crucial kind of scenes throughout it, I know there’s vastly different readings of at least four of those scenes."

All told, Mendelsohn guesses there are "enormous differences" between different takes of around "20 or 30 of the scenes." You can probably see some of those differences in just the changes made from the initial trailers to the finished film. For example, there's plenty of footage of Jyn Erso -- Death Star plans clipped to her belt -- running along the beach with Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), dodging laser fire from a stomping AT-ACT. In the finished film, that doesn't happen; Jyn and Cassian never leave the data tower where they find and transmit the plans. Overall, Mendelsohn says, there are "enormously different renderings" of "Rogue One" out there, different from what audiences have seen.

Mendelsohn added that he has seen the final film, noticing all the different routes the filmmakers ended up taking. "[T]here were a couple of times I was like, 'Oh wow! He went with that. That one, yeah. Ok, I get it,'" said Mendelsohn. "Because there were some scenes that I had seen as we were constructing and thinking about doing it this way or that way, and I had seen various scenes where we would come in and done something. And I’d seen the scene and it was cut this particular way and so we did the ADR, and then when I saw it the other day I was like, 'Oh wow! That all --Yeah now it goes like this.' So there is a bunch."

It remains to be seen whether or not any alternate cuts of "Rogue One" will be released, but it sounds like there may be more than enough footage out there for one.

Directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by Gary Whitta and Chris Weitz, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” stars Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, Ben Mendelsohn, Donnie Yen, Mads Mikkelsen, Alan Tudyk, Jiang Wen and Forest Whitaker and is now in theaters.