"Андор"

[KDS]

https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsLeaks/comments/1gpgy6a

 

[KDS]

Помимо K-2SO ожидается возвращение директора Кренника. Не понятно как это будет связано с похищением TIE Avenger, но видимо проект "Звездочка" не первый провал директора.

Гилрой в интервью обещает много новых локаций и отдельно отмечает Явин. Встреча с дроидом судя по его словам состоится где-то в начале сезона.

Маркетинговая кампания очевидно началась. Как ни странно заметно раньше, чем у "Основного экипажа".

 

[Morichika]

Похоже, что дизайнеры/костюмеры были вдохновлены образом Нико Окарра.

 

[KDS]

Вся команда выгорела бы.

Тони Гилрой признается, что не потянул бы пять сезонов сериала.

 

[KDS]

Tony Gilroy was, as he puts it, "fucked”. His original grand concept for Andor had been sold to Disney as five sprawling seasons, each consisting of 12 episodes. During production of its first season, though, Gilroy realised he had no realistic way of pulling this off. “Oh my God, we are going to have to come up with another 12 hours of story?” he remembers thinking, back when he needed to start work on the second season. "So I was already panicked. We already said we were going to do five years [of timeline], that was the concept. How do you get out of that?”
While still filming the first season in Scotland, over a glass of Scotch with star Diego Luna, an idea was hatched. “We were figuring out how fucked we were with the concept that we’d ever be able to do this for five years,” says Gilroy. “Out of that desperation came... it’s a life raft, right?”
We first met Cassian Andor in 2016’s Rogue One, directed by Gareth Edwards and co-written by Gilroy. Cassian was a Rebel intelligence officer, part of a team of Rebels responsible for stealing the plans for the Death Star; Andor picked up five years before those events, as we saw Cassian go from, let’s say, down on his luck with not much hope for his future, to someone with an important purpose. But there’s still a lot of story to tell.
After Gilroy and Luna’s Scotch revelation, the idea of five seasons was scrapped. The second season, which will pick up a year after the events of the first, consists of four three-episode “blocks". Each block will cover a concentrated period of just a few days in the life of Cassian Andor and the formation of the Rebel Alliance. The next block will jump then ahead a full year, allowing the season to span four full years, finally ending literally right before the events of Rogue One. “There’s no mystery about where we are going,” says Gilroy. “We are going to end up on that walk out to the ship with [droid] K-2 and go to the Rings of Kafrcnc and start Rogue One. But why is Cassian going? He’s going because there’s been some intel."
The first season of Andor achieved what has become a rare feat for Star Wars in recent years: it was just about universally loved by both critics and fans. Andor had room to breathe. Nothing felt forced. Characters were meticulously established, then we’d see them in fights for their life, like the ferocious heist at the Imperial base on Aldhani. Or Cassian’s daring escape from an Imperial prison on Narkina 5. Or the secret, dangerous partnership between Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) and Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgard). (Says Gilroy of Luthcn’s role in forming the Rebel Alliance: "I think of him as a founder of a startup. You have a great idea in your garage.”) And the acclaim gives the series a lot of momentum and key benefits going into this second season, the kind it may not have been afforded otherwise.
“The critical appreciation of the show was really helpful, if not essential, in helping Disney choke down the price of what this is,” says Gilroy, who experienced something increasingly rare these days in the world of franchise intellectual properties: “I never got any notes on this show.” But. he adds. “I’m not an arsonist." Meaning, there’s a trust there that he’s not in this to burn the whole thing down. The extensive notes he got on Rogue One — things like “no- mirrors, paper, or knives” — are now gone. *Tn terms of creative notes, no-one has come to me and said. ‘No, they shouldn't say that.'" Which does amplify the notion that Andor is one person's vision of what Star Wars should be and can be.
And Gilroy is about to make things really intense for our heroes... and villains.

It’s the dluck’s guts, as we Isay in Australia,” says Ben Mendelsohn (who returns as Rogue One’s Director Orson Krennic — we’ll get to him) about Andor’s second season. When asked what on earth docs that even mean, he says, “That basically means it’s the best thing. You may not want to use that. I don’t think that was in the ’key talking points’ sheet."
Ah, yes, the “key talking points" sheet that, in some form another, was brought up more than once during these interviews. What actually happens, plot-wise, in Andor's second season? Yes. this is a show created by an Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter that has been nominated for eight Emmys and received mass critical acclaim — but its still Star Wars and... let's just say. “I can’t answer that." was said in some form or another many times. (A few times in exactly that form.)
"Here’s one thing the second season has,” teases Luna. "We move in space more than ever - the amount of planets and sets you’re going to get to see. There arc some familiar and new locations. I don’t have to spoil anything. You can just think about the possibility this narrative arc will give us."
“1 mean, we have to end up in Yavin, right?" says Gilroy of the giant, orange gas planet, one of whose moons the Rebels use as a hidden base in Hogue One and the original Star Wars. “So. we’ll tell the story of Yavin. No-one has quite dealt with Yavin the way we will be doing it."
When we last saw Mon Mothma. she was entering her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) into a pre-arranged marriage to secure financing for the Rebellion. “It’s very much an agreement which has the Rebellion as its driving force.” says O’Reilly. “And, yes. it is her daughter. There’s a wedding that takes place. The consequences and the complexities of that wedding are what will be revealed.”
And then we have Dedra Мeerо, the dastardly and ambitious Imperial Security Bureau supervisor who very much does not like Cassian Andor. But what about Krennic? “I definitely do not marry Orson Krennic,” jokes Denise Gough about what Dedra's relationship will be with Mendelsohn's returning character, the Imperial in charge of building the Death Star in Rogue One (well, until he’s not), hinting they don’t always see eye to eye on policy.
“If they didn’t see eye to eye, to me, it's cute,” says Mendelsohn. “Dedra versus Krennic? I think it's a bit of a mismatch. They’re all underlings to Krennic. You know, stuff like that doesn’t happen to the Rebel Alliance. They’re all going in one direction. The Empire, if you speak your mind, there are differences of opinion." Gough laughs. “You’ll have to wait and see. Maybe that’s where the romance is? Don’t print that, because that's not where it's going."
Krennic is quite dashing, again sporting Rogue One’s bright white outfit and cape. "You do not have your lunch in the Krennic costume. No lunch, no drink, no nothing," says Mendelsohn of keeping it clean. "The cape, people celebrate,” he continues. "Because it’s the cape you see. But performing it. it’s the boots. The cape doesn’t do you any harm, but the boots really give you they? ne sais quoi.” Gilroy compares Krennic to New York’s acclaimed and controversial urban planner Robert Moses. Adding to Krennic’s woes this coming season, he’s in charge of raising money to build the Death Star, but he’s behind schedule and over budget. And we know from the Original Trilogy how his bosses feel about delays.
In Rogue One. Krennic didn’t just have the Rebels to worry about, but also the ambitions of one Grand Moff Tarkin. played by Peter Cushing in the original film and digitally recreated in Rogue One. Will we see Tarkin in the second season of Andor? Mendelsohn laughs. “You know I can’t answer that. And I delight in not being able to answer your question. It’s a beautiful thing.”

 

[KDS]

“I’m not answering that,” echoes Gilroy. And yet... “What’s interesting is. all of the technology that went into Tarkin [in Rogue One], that was like a Manhattan Project. All of that technology has been discarded. The moment machine-learning came in. they don’t do it that way at all [now|. It was like building steam-cars and building the best steam-car you could possibly ever do — then someone comes along and says, *We have gasoline that works a little bit better.’ Now it’s completely upended.”
Oh. and what of Cassian Andor himself? “He’s a man fully committed to the Rebellion." says Luna about how we find him when the second season starts. “It’s someone who has to ascend. There’s a huge mountain for him to climb in order to [become] the guy we meet in Rogue One.” And Cassian has two big reunions, of a sort.
First, with his lifelong confidant, Rebel contact Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), who, having been captured and tortured, is rescued at the end of the first season and is. presumably, flown away to safety. “They’ve known each other their whole lives," says
Gilroy on the Cassian and Bix relationship. “They’re probably their first kiss. They’re probably their first sex. I hope people are really curious about what happens with the two of them.”
“They definitely do reunite.” says Arjona. "When you imagine what these two characters can go through, just remember that Tony Gilroy wrote it. So. it’s way more complex than my personal imagination - knowing this character and knowing the story — could have ever comprehended. She’s incredibly fucked up by Doctor Gorst,” an Imperial (played by Joshua James) who, in Season 1, tortured Bix with the sounds of dying Dizonites. which seems rather unpleasant. “The fact that she survived that is a huge triumph. She’s definitely not perfect, but she’s definitely not as fucked up as we saw her at the end of Season 1.”
Cassian will also meet his droid pal from Rogue One, .Alan Tudyk's K-2SO. That may not quite go how you expect. As Luna explains. “From an audience perspective, they’ve probably made their own story about how Cassian and K-2 got to work together,right? Well, we are going to challenge that. After knowing how important this relationship is and the chemistry they have, where does all that humour come out? It tells you a lot about Cassian that his best friend is a droid. And a droid he had to reprogramme. But how did that actually happen and who was he before? Those questions are going to be answered."
Andor had a mountain to climb, then. And behind the scenes, so did the cast and crew. A much bigger one than they’d expected.

Our guardrails were economic,” says Gilroy of Season 2.
“Our limitations were economic and availability and production issues and Covid... and a strike.”
During the filming of this logistically complicated second season, first the Writers Guild went on strike, then the Screen Actors Guild followed suit. Ironically, the challenges of Covid would go on to limit the amount of time lost to the strikes. During the pandemic. Gilroy and his team of writers would hammer down each script — Gilroy uses the phrase "beat the shit out of it” — until it was perfect. By the time the scripts were being filmed, they were done. “I finished the last script — not by design, by coincidence — a week before the Writers Guild strike was called. They had as much me as they needed to go forward and continue. Nothing needed to be changed.” Which means production was not halted until the SAG downed tools a couple of months later, and by then, most of what needed to be filmed was already complete.
“We were filming during the writers’ strike and it was a big bummer.” says Arjona. “I rely a lot on Tony as a soundboard and he really is the biggest hype man when it comes to difficult scenes. You'll always get a text message from him being like, ‘You got this. I believe in you.' And I missed that” To that point, Arjona calls herself “the queen of paraphrasing” on other projects, but doesn’t dare change a line or punctual ion in an Andor script.
“Listen, you have to have somebody with a vision,” says Denise Gough, citing chaotic productions where ten people are all in charge, all with different points of view. The rest of the cast all seem to agree that Gilroy was very much the boss, had a plan, and trusted where things were going. Mendelsohn succinctly sums it all up. “The guy made Michael Clayton, come on — it s the best fucking film.”
Andor might have similar aspirations. Remember how this second season will be divided into four “blocks”, or four separate films? Gilroy sees it a little differently. “To me its like we made eight movies in five years.” he says of their work on both seasons. “That’s how / think of it.”


What will Andor’s legacy be? We'll have to wait and see this final season, but it seems like it’s on its way to being something that’s forever special.
“How arc they going to fly us all in to land? They do. They fucking do," says Gough. “If Season 1 was a set-up. Season 2 is a juggernaut — it’s extraordinary, the swings it takes," says O’Reilly, before adding, ominously: “Tony doesn’t let them off the hook.”
“I was like, ‘Tony, can we not do another season?’” says Arjona of her own experience.
Throughout our interviews, Gilroy and the cast point out that viewers don't have to know anything about Star Wars to watch Andor. Gilroy has one regret, though, that he’d love to navigate before this all wraps up. “I was surprised it hasn’t translated exactly into widening the audience for people who are Star Wars-averse,” he says. “That, it hasn’t done. That’s our goal this time.” Because Gilroy felt a real connection to this audience, and he hopes that spreads. “There’s somebody out there listening and you don’t always feel that way. You don’t always know somebody is listening.”
Perhaps Mendelsohn sums it up best. “This season is...” He makes a loud grunt and then performs a chef’s kiss motion. “You'll have a good time transcribing that noise.”
In an era of inconsistent 'content’ surrounding IP, Andor has the chance to be remembered as a true vision with defined storytelling, filmmaking and acting. As we know, it’s a dark time for the Rebellion — but it's a pretty terrific time for Andor.