By Michael Idato
The pitch for Rogue One, A Star Wars Story boils down to this: it's Star Wars, but not as you know it. There are no Jedi knights, no lightsabers and therefore – the horror! – no lightsaber duels. And in place of farm-boy-turned-Jedi-knight Luke Skywalker, we get the franchise's first female action hero, the kick-ass Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones).
For inspiration, the 33-year-old British actress turned to trailblazing women of action, such as Sigourney Weaver in Alien and Linda Hamilton in Terminator, but also to Isabelle Huppert in Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher and even the films of Meryl Streep.
The franchise's first female action hero, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones).Credit: Lucasfilm
"They have their own narratives, they're not just feeding the narrative to someone else," Jones says.
She also returned to the original Star Wars heroine: Princess Leia.
The villainous Imperial Director Orson Krennic is played by Ben Mendelsohn.Credit: Lucasfilm
"Carrie Fisher had great strength in that role," Jones says. "She's very modern in the sense that she's quite serious, she's not giggly and superficial. And she's not the foil; she has a very strong sense of herself."
Jones' previous credits include The Theory of Everything and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Before filming Rogue One, she was sent to kickboxing boot camp to master her moves. "We emphasised her speed and we wanted it to feel quite street, quite scrappy," she says. "I trained religiously. I just dedicated myself to it."
Too young to have lived through the theatrical release of the original Star Wars in 1977, the 33-year-old did spend many weekends at her cousin's house as a teenager watching it on a video-cassette player.
"Star Wars was so special because it's got such a strong sense of family – not just family with blood relations, it's family in terms of friendships," she says. "It's these unlikely friendships between Han Solo and Chewbacca, or between droids. That's what makes it so joyous to watch."
Connected: Imperial troopers in Rogue One.Credit: Lucasfilm
An inevitable part of joining the Star Wars family was meeting the Lego version of herself. "I see posters of Jyn and dolls of Jyn, Jyn on merchandise, a Lego figure, and I think, go girl, you're doing really well," Jones says. "I don't see it as me, it's a character that I've created with a group of other people. But I also take great pride seeing costumes that were just discussions, ideas that have taken form, and now they're little dolls. It's quite moving."
Rogue One could be described as Episode 3.5, as it is set just before the first Star Wars written and directed by George Lucas, which is the fourth "episode" of the larger story.
Director Gareth Edwards on set.Credit: Jonathan Olley
It even has a guest appearance by the franchise's heavy-breathing chief bad guy, the Sith lord Darth Vader.
Director Gareth Edwards, also English, was best known for Monsters and Godzilla before being handed the reins on Rogue One. He says the film's "standalone" nature – it doesn't officially sit within the numbered Star Wars "saga" films – allowed him to take risks the larger franchise could not.
Felicity Jones says she trained hard to play Jyn Erso.Credit: Jonathan Olley
"We could be brave," he says. "In terms of Star Wars and tone, the one we were aiming for was something like The Empire Strikes Back. Our movie, even though it's quite serious, there's a lot of fun and humour in it, and hope."
Rogue One goes back to the original Star Wars story for its premise.
"It is a period of civil war," the opening crawl to the 1977 film announced. "Rebel spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire's ultimate weapon, the Death Star, an armoured space station with enough power to destroy an entire planet."
Rogue One is the story of those spies, reinvented as an assortment of misfits and political dissidents, including cargo pilot Bohdi Rook (Riz Ahmed), rebel Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), extremist Clone Wars veteran Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker), assassin Baze Malbus (Jian Weng) and a reprogrammed Imperial droid, K-2SO (Alan Tudyk).
They are set against the villainous Imperial Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn), a sinister figure who is – according to the official spin-off books – the principal rival of another rising political force, Grand Moff Tarkin, played in 1977's Star Wars by Peter Cushing.
Rogue One's rogues gallery of characters all sit a little off kilter on the ethical axis: the good guys aren't that good, and the motives of the bad guys are difficult to divine. If the Star Wars saga writes its villains large and heroes heroic, Rogue One lives in a less certain space, reflecting a more complex real political world.
"You could have looked at the original [Star Wars] as being Cold War-lite," says Mendelsohn. "There are always contemporary reference points. I think probably the most telling thing is we have let a kind of depth into the work. It's not quite so Cold War-era, black-and-white. I think that's all there in Rogue One."
Some of the first visual elements on the film's storyboard were borrowed from existing war photography.
"We took images from Vietnam, World War II, the Gulf, and put rebel helmets on the soldiers and rebel guns, and put X-Wings in the background instead of fighter jets," Edwards says. "Everyone who came and looked, they'd get to these images and go, oh my god, wow, I really want to see that film. The studio loved it. Everybody loved it. And they would say, just go make that."
The original Star Wars had a way of elevating pseudo-religious schtick into something more meaningful, turning knights with glowing laser swords into defenders of a potent mystical power, a story that appealed across generations and continues to find new fans. It's a hard act to follow..
"George Lucas was always really good at mixing the genres together and creating this very emotional sort of mythological story that just happened to have robots and spaceships in it," Edwards says. "There's meat on the bone. It took us a long time to try and crack that code and find all those different ingredients we felt it needed to have. It's not something you do in a week. It's a two-and-a-half year process."
Inhabiting that world, Mendelsohn says, was challenging for an actor who grew up with Star Wars as a pivotal childhood influence.
"The first thing that you have to do is get over the fact that you're doing a scene with Darth Vader," he says. "That took me a little while, because I'm a first-generation fanboy."
Edwards recalls working on a scene involving Krennic and Vader when Mendelsohn took him aside, ostensibly to discuss how it should be played. Edwards, concerned that he was unhappy, asked if everything was OK.
"And he replied, 'Nah, it's Darth f---ing Vader!' And I was like, 'I know!' " says Edwards, laughing at the moment, which reduced actor and director to giggling fanboys. "We had this little moment where we melted and we could just admit it." Then they turned around, "very professionally", and went back to work.
Rogue One opens on December 15