We all suffer from false memories, recalling something especially from our childhood that didn’t actually occur or appear quite how we recall. So remembering quite how a forty-year old film like A New Hope looked, versus the actual reality of its design has its issues. These issues were actually considered by ILM in there design work on Rogue One as John Knoll explains:
We had [A New _Hope] online so we could immediately jump to that part of the film and, ‘Ok, this was how this was shown before.’ But there was an overriding philosophy on this film, which was we wanted to match how you remembered things more than necessarily how they actually were… So, when you see some of the things that are familiar, like the X-Wings and the Star Destroyers and the TIE fighters, those all kind of look pretty authentic — like, ‘Boy, they matched them exactly.’ We matched your memory of them more than the reality of them.
Knoll used the example of the Star Destroyer as an example of this:
There were two models that were built for the original series. There was a 3-foot long model that was built for New Hope, and then there was an 8-foot model that was built for Empire Strikes Back. The 8-foot model and the 3-foot model are kind of different. A lot of the details are different between the two of them. But because of the events of the film and when it takes place, I felt like, ‘Well, we should be matching the 3-footer conceptually.’ But the problem is the 3-footer has no real detail on the upper surface. So we cribbed details from the upper surface of the 8-footer. And then the 3-footer has no lights in it – and I think everybody remembers that the Star Destroyer has a whole bunch of port holes on it, midline lights in the trenches, and the hanger bays. But that’s not present in the 3-footer. The one we built was kind of a hybrid of the two, using the best of both, and putting in even more details than the 3-footer had to hold up to some of the closer views that we had, but I think that when you see in the film, it matches everybody’s memory of what, matches just as I remember it.
