The Season 1 finale of “Andor” — the prequel series that presages the events of the 2016 film “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” — proved to be a tough one for its team to ideate and execute. The episode revolves around the funeral of Maarva Andor (Fiona Shaw), the adoptive mother of the show’s central character, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna). Earlier in the season, Cassian finds himself — and his home planet of Ferrix — in the crosshairs of the Empire, and the oppression that follows for the people of Ferrix radicalizes Maarva against the empire.
So for her funeral, which becomes a gathering for most of the people of Ferrix, Maarva pre-records a holographic message that was going to be the first time someone dropped an “f-bomb” in “Star Wars” history.
At the end of Maarva’s message to the people of Ferrix, she exclaims, “Fight the empire!” But director Benjamin Caron reveals that the “Andor” team — including executive producer and showrunner Tony Gilroy — wanted her to say “fuck the empire!”
“But Disney wouldn’t let us use it,” Caron told Variety. “So we changed it to ‘fight the empire.’ I remember having a call with Tony Gilroy saying, ‘Are we gonna get away with this?’”
Gilroy urged Disney to allow him to throw in the curse word, so much so that he “wrote a legal brief for it,” Gilroy explained to Variety on April 13. “I wrote a memo on it and said, ‘Here’s why I think it’s economically prudent, and here’s why I think it’s good.’”
The funeral procession in itself was an extremely difficult scene to capture, in part because all of the various storylines of the 12-episode season converged around Maarva’s speech, including leaders of the Empire and the Rebellion both hunting for Cassian as he tries to sort out how rescue his friend Bix (Adria Arjona) from an Imperial facility..
“We have all these different balls in here,” Gilroy said. “We have Cassian’s journey in the middle of it. He has to find out what’s going on, he has to go through tunnels, he has to come up to the side, he has to save Bix; he has to do all these various things.”
At the same time, the people of Ferrix are traveling through the city behind a band playing a funeral dirge, which composer Nicholas Britell had written for the actor-musicians to play live on the set during filming. So Caron and his directing team had to figure out how to pace the sequence to incorporate the music.
“We had this eight-minute piece of music,” Caron said. “The way that Tony had written this story, the rhythm of the action, was very interconnected with the music and many players on the set.”
Added Gilroy, “What’s really complicated in making this sequence is that we have a lot of protein that we have to hit on camera, and now it turns into a math issue.” Maintaining a suitable pace full of action that would “bring the audience on that journey” was important for Caron.
Variety’s “Making a Scene” is presented by HBO. Watch all of our episodes here.
