In a recent interview, Tony Gilroy details how he ended up writing Andor for Lucasfilm. It’s actually a pretty interesting story to read. It turns out that Gilroy was given access to previous pitches for the show. Probably because he wrote Rogue One, or parts of it. Lucasfilm wanted something which dealt with Cassian’s earlier years and invited pitches.
Gilroy wrote a criticism of one pitch and said what he would have done in it’s place. Lucasfilm liked the idea so much, they asked him to make it. The rest as they say, is history, and Gilroy crafted one of the best pieces of Star Wars media in 40 years.
Here is what Gilroy had to say when he spoke to Deadline recently.
“The success of Rogue [One] made everyone excited. They wanted to do a lot of different things,” Gilroy revealed. “There are always possibilities. How can they open up the Star Wars franchise? What can they do to change lanes? They wanted to do a show about Diego Luna’s character, Cassian Andor, in Rogue One. Could they do a prequel of the years leading up to that? And they tried it a couple different times, but it was a combination of not being kind of wild enough and also the fact that the economics of streaming hadn’t really quite arrived as they were doing it.”
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“You can’t do this show inexpensively. There’s no way to do Star Wars inexpensively. So that sort of, you know, that Venn diagram when the moment meets the economy meets the right idea, and they came back, and I had sent a sort of manifesto critique of one of the other versions in a year earlier as a friend in court just as a thing, and they came back and said, ‘You know, this crazy idea that you gave us that you talked about what you would do, and it seems so insane that we would actually like to try that. And we would like to spend the money to do that’, and we began tip-toeing forward with that three and a half years ago, and it will be five years by the time I’m done. So I have another year and a half or two years to go.”
I would love to think Lucasfilm are currently trying to get Gilroy to pitch them another idea, maybe even for a series of movies. However, so far, Gilroy seems to indicate that he’ll be going in another direction when he finishes Andor Season 2. If so, I hope he will consider coming back to the GFFA one day.
When we first heard Andor was getting made, I had zero interest. I think what I imagined, is likely the kind of show other writers had pitched. In Gilroy’s hands though, Andor became one of the the very best TV series in any category of the last year. I’m glad they shared those pitches with Gilroy. Please feel free to do this in future with other stories as well Lucasfilm. When you’ve been mining for years an only found coal, then a diamond shows up, you don’t leave it where you found it to come back later.
What do you think of his comments as Tony Gilroy details how he ended up writing Andor for Lucasfilm? Thoughts below as always.
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