Ever since the film was first announced by Disney, we’ve known that director Gareth Edwards would be taking the first planned Star Wars standalone film in a different direction than we’ve seen in the episodic films. During the press junket for Rogue One, Edwards revealed what materials the production team drew from when coming up with the overall tone for the film.
“When we started this whole process, it was all about ‘how are we going to make this different from the saga?’ We started from the ground and experimenting – we took photographs from Vietnam and WWII and we used Photoshop and put in Rebel helmets and blasters in on the soldiers, and it looked really interesting,” Edwards said at the press junket for Rogue One. “Everyone that came into the building looked at these photos and said, ‘Oh my God, wow, I need to see that film.’ The studio loved it, everybody loved it, and they said, ‘just go make that.’”
“It was also like being in a war,” the director said. “The film crew became characters in a way. We were all literally in the trenches together trying to achieve an impossible task.”
