The Watch - 'Andor' Creator Tony Gilroy on the 'Star Wars' Show We’ve Been Waiting For

Episode Date: September 21, 2022

Chris and Andy talk about the first few episodes of 'Andor' and what makes it stand apart from other 'Star Wars' shows created thus far (1:00). Then, they are joined by series creator Tony Gilroy to talk about how working on 'Rogue One' prepared him for 'Andor' (21:06), and how he decided to structure the show (38:21). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Tony Gilroy Producers: Kaya McMullen and Steve Ahlman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimfaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphia, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interest that inspires a run crew,

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I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. He's what a reckoning sounds like. It's Andy Greenwald. This is a great day for us, Chris. Woo! Young Fiona Shaw on the mic. What's up, baby? This is really good.

It's a really good day for two, like, really foundational reasons on the Watch podcast. You know, I feel like for people who have been listening, even from the Hollywood Perspectus Days, they know that we like. like three things, right? Yeah. We like talking chicken, chicken recipes, cooking the bird, whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Nervous bird.

We like the films and writing of Tony Gilroy. Mm-hmm. Who has written, who wrote the Bourne movies, wrote and directed Born Legacy, the movie that inspired, we have a dialogue from it. Our title music, yeah, yeah. Michael Clayton, one of our all-time favorites. and we love talking about Star Wars in a very specific way that creates a straw Jedi, if you will,

saying if only this multi-billion dollar franchise with stakeholders in every corner of the planet could do something that we specifically two men in their middle 40s want. And we didn't talk about chicken today, Chris, but everything else we got. We finally got, and I can't believe it. So we're talking about Andor today, which goes up.

Its first three episodes are being released on Wednesday, late Tuesday, early Wednesday, or however you want to look at it, Wednesday night. We hope that everybody gets a chance to listen to those episodes. Andy and I are going to talk a little bit generally about Andor for about 20 minutes. And then we have an interview with Tony Gilroy, who is the creator of Andor. and he talked about more generally, I think, so there's not a lot of spoilers, although there is some talk about details of the episodes.

I would highly recommend everybody watch these episodes. Also, I would highly recommend you watch all three. They are essentially one big story. One of the sort of amazing little flourishes of this series, I think, is going to be the way that they structure blocks of episodes to be micro stories that connect with one another.

For anybody who doesn't know, Andor is a prequel to Rogue One. It's set about five years, before the action of that movie. And Orr itself is planned out at least to go for 24 episodes. There's a 12 episode first season. And as has been reported, Tony Gilroy and the whole team are going back into production in November

on the second season of 12 episodes. So it's basically a 24 episode story leading up to the moments of Rogue One, which itself led up to the beginning of a new hope, the first Star Wars film. I think Annie and I both loved Rogue One. I think we really loved the teaser trailer. we were like, the teaser trailer is everything we've ever wanted. And I think Rogue One is probably my favorite of the more recent iteration of Star Wars in terms of the movies.

I think that between that and the Ryan Johnson movie, it's like kind of equal for me. But Rogue One was like in terms of seeing the world of Star Wars as this dirty place, as this run down place, as this place on the precipice of rebellion was just like I think I had always been curious about what precipitated the events that led to the original trilogy. not in the political sort of Senate way that happens in the in the prequel movies but in like the on on the ground among the real people out there if there were some I was always curious what did it take to do this you know if you were going to actually tell this story for a long time you know you and me have been kind of I think butting our heads up against a reality which is that we are getting older right and that a lot of the content that we talk about whether it's TV or movies is pitched towards an audience that at least could theoretically be of seven-year-olds,

if not 10, 12, 13-year-olds. And that, you know, I don't think it's a fair criticism of the shows that we talk about because we're like, God, this was kind of like the sort of need to have something happen every 10 minutes feels like it's like to keep people from, like, switching over to their phones or something like that. But a lot of the sort of ticks that have been coming up in a lot of like franchise IP storytelling, I think that some of the reason. why we've butted up against it is because

it's not really made for us. Even if we claim fandom of it from our childhood or from our adulthood even, it's not really made for older people to enjoy. And I don't know whether it's going to be the kind of thing that they want to put on the poster,

but Tony Gilroy's made a Star Wars show for adults. It is complicated. It is dense. It is dark. It is written to within an inch of its life. It is honestly one of the best written pieces of TV that I've seen in quite some time. And it is about people on the margins of society deciding that enough

is enough and that they're going to do something about it. But the way that they do something about it, it might turn some people off. It might turn some stomachs. It might not be the kind of shit that you're used to seeing in Star Wars stories where it is a very moral universe for the most part. And I can't really comment on the animated series because I haven't seen them. But at least the shows that we watch, the movies that we watch is even though they're about bounty hunters and, you know, essentially samurai's out there. Like there's a lot of like sweetness. Yeah. Well, I think it's something that is that really, not to cut you off, I apologize, but that like that separates Star Wars from some of the other large IP stories is that it's a mythology.

And at its best, it leans into that. It's the hero's journey. It's the Joseph Campbell stuff, right? It's about the boy in the edge of the universe becomes the superhero that saves it all. It's also about a royal family of wizards to paraphrasing City of Gilroy. Exactly. But there's always been other stuff on the margins.

And we've always been curious, and I didn't think we had much, we didn't have new hope, we didn't have hope at all, that storytellers would be allowed to fully explore those margins. and I just want to, when you say the first show for adults, I agree, but I don't, that doesn't mean it's like an NC-17 series. Like I think that kids of like a certain age, like 8, 9, 10, 11 can watch this show. You know, I know, Chris, you spent a lot of time listening and maybe even relistening to the solo pod I did about Bluey. But like kids programming doesn't need to just be dumb.

It doesn't need to be repetitive. I know you weren't saying that, but I just mean that this is thoughtful, it is creative, and also funny in a way that I didn't know but always secretly hoped Star Wars could be. And it is thrilling to watch. This is one of the best new shows of the year easily, at least through we've seen four. It does things that maybe only a veteran screenwriter could do, which is say, well, what has this always been about? Well, it's always been a story about political rebellion. but mostly focused on magic wizards.

You know? And okay, so what is a rebellion? What causes people to do that? What jobs do they do? What do they come home to at night? You know, and this kind of specificity in storytelling is so important, and it's so rare, particularly in a lot of the IP stuff that we talk about. And what's beautiful and thrilling about the show is that that specificity is shot through the entire thing.

one of my favorite things about our conversation my two favorite things about our conversation with Tony, not to spoil any of it, is one, how much attention he gives to the show's production designer. Because when you watch this, you'll be like, wait, they could have been doing this the whole time. Yeah, I know. Not just spending

money, but go. And also it's like, did they spend three billion dollars on this? But it is essentially like everything you see for the most part is something that they built. And with thought, if you work, you know, when you see these like all white security rooms or you think about things that we've seen before visually with the empire. Okay, well, what does the rest of the building look like? Who are the rest of the people who work there? What's life like for them

when they work there? And that's the kind of thing that you can only come up with if you're fully enmeshed with a team who's creatively building something from the ground up. The second thing that I love about our interview, and you'll hear us realize it as it's happening in real time, is that Tony's in his late 60s. He has fucking seen it all and done it all, right? Like, he has been so jaded about stuff. He's worked with great things. Great filmmakers had great experiences and also just been kicked in the teeth again and again. He's thrilled. He's excited and overjoyed,

and that's also here in this show, right? Like, you realize they're doing things story-wise with, and we didn't even mention Diego Luna as the star of the show as Cashin Andor. He's a fucking great. It's like, oh, they're really going to do this type of story. Oh, they're really going to give us a Western or a heist movie or a character-based origin story.

They're going to give it not just give it to us, but give us A plus versions of it. And oh, by the way, it's Star Wars 2. Cool. Right. Right. There is probably a lot in this show to sort of glean if you are really steeped in the lore of, if you've watched Clone Wars,

if you've watched some of the animated series, if you've read the books, if you've spent a lot of time on Wikipedia, which I am now, I count myself among the people who did it. I realized, you know, like I had never really felt compelled to do that when I was watching Mandalorian. I was kind of like, the way that they're telling the story,

it's not glacial by any means, but it is very like, I think that it's trying to strip away everything and get it down to like what is the bare bones of like a father figure protecting a child and what happens as like these different obstacles present themselves. And then I think to the Mandalorian's great commercial benefit, but possibly to its detriment in terms of like its independent storytelling identity, it has now become a little bit more about the Force. It's become a little bit more about its relationship to characters on the animated series and everything. But

we don't even have to... I'm not really... I'm not really trying to compare and or to Mandalorian as much as I am like, you can watch Andor and I honestly think that if you like the wire, you will like this show. Yeah, this is so bold. And I think the people at Lucasfilm

should be commended for it, honestly. Like, we ding them a lot. when it's, you know, and I think that's deserved. And I think that this is worth, this is what we keep saying we want from these companies. It is. There are no kids. There are no Jedi. It's not that.

And yet somehow it's still Star Wars. Does that mean it's for everyone? No. But I think you need that kind of diversity to sustain something for years or decades. I mean, it's a bold marker, you know, and one that I would be excited to hopefully support, you know, that's why we were excited about it before we saw anything. And then you realize, they filmed this in the UK because of COVID stuff. And then, oh, that means they have access to the best stage actors in the world,

all of whom we were going to fill these parts on the margins and make me believe in every random character on a shuttle bus as someone who's lived a full life. Oh, cool. Okay, so we're going to be on another planet. Does that mean that someone just flies in and there's a squid guy there and they fly somewhere else? No. On this planet, do they tell time by a dude with hands? hammer is ringing a giant anvil.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a decision. That's culturally something new. Okay. And also on this planet, like, you know, when you land your ship, it might be like two miles from where you need to be. Yeah. And you got to schlep. Yeah. And if you got to get off this planet, you may have to negotiate with a guy who will give you a higher price because he can tell that you need off the planet faster and all those things that kind of go along with like the urgency of the moment. We don't have to get too deeply into the plot. I did want to, you know, you were talking. You were talking. talking about some of what Tony talked to us about. And I just wanted to point out, like, so I think if you're like, oh, you got to watch the first three and people might just be like,

well, then why isn't it just one long episode? And that's a perfectly fine question. I think if you could say anything about the episodes that we watched, it's that the episode cuts, like the way that they are structured within themselves, while very digestible, because they're between 30 and 40 minutes, aren't necessarily like cliffhanger moments. They're more just like commas, you know, before the rest of this statement. Well, one of the things that's been bugging us over the last couple of years, I think, is we've watched, obviously, this deluge of stuff come into streaming television and the ways in which people seem to sometimes feel the need to pad story to get to 55 minutes or 10 episodes or even if it's six episodes, you're like,

did it? Could this have been three? You know, it's essentially like we're always asking, like, what was needed and what was sort of added for for sort of like purposelessness if that's a word Tony Gilroy in the interview we did with him talked a lot about his training as somebody who is stuck in the

prison cell of 128 pages because that's what a feature script generally is sort of around and I would imagine that the first three episodes of this show are about 120 pages somewhere around there and in that they are a fucking masterpiece. The thing

that happens at the end of three which he has been building towards in such an idiosyncratic somewhat unique way where essentially these flashbacks that are happening in another language that we are not privy to what people are saying but the broad strokes

of the relationships that get developed and the action that you see builds up to a relationship that really is only on screen in the present moment for about a minute and that's the one between Fiona Shaw's Marva character and Diego Luna as Cassian. But the emotional payoff at the end of three is as significant as anyone that I've

seen in Star Wars. Straight up. Yes. I totally agree. I totally agree. And you're pointing about movies. I mean, he's still a movie maker. Like, as far as we understand it, these two seasons basically have three episode arcs and then it jumps forward in time and we meet some new characters or we move to a different location. So they're meant to be digested this way, which I love. I also just really want to say, this show stands on its own, at least so far. We just We love it. We're so excited about it. But I also feel like it, I hope it puts this town, cue the quotation marks, this town on notice. It's super hard to like manage IP and to deliver deliverables and keep all this shareholders, stakeholders happy.

And I don't minimize the effort that every person who's writing stuff and making stuff puts into doing that. It's just, it's hard. It's hard. But you watch the show and I feel like everyone should have a fire lid under their ass to do better. It's not enough to have suits of armor and dragons. It's just not. It's not enough to have people be like, you remember me from the movie? I was played by Cape Blanchette then,

and now I'm spunky. That's not enough. It's not enough. You know, time and time again, we're introduced to characters on the show the way people used to be introduced in movies where you have to be told something interesting about them to care,

and then you fucking would take a bullet for them, even though they might not make it 20 more minutes. Every time we're introduced to a villain in the show or a hero or we don't know, Tony zags. It's surprising. You forget how important that feeling is. And you'll hear us talk about it with Tony. You've probably watched the episodes by now.

But we meet Kassian's main antagonist in the series early on in the first episode, and it's funny. It's as funny as anything else on TV this week. And that matters. It just matters in terms of someone who cares about a creative art form. It's just really exciting to see that point. made in major, hundreds of millions of dollars Star Wars Entertainment.

And it makes me, I'm bringing it up, not to ding the other stuff because I did that on the last podcast, and I'm sure I'll do it again on the next one. I'm doing it to be like, look, it's possible. That's the thing is that

I think it's hard to talk about and or without comparing it to other things, obviously because it's within the Star Wars universe. It's a Disney Plus show. But all the things that we have like sort of heard about, say, actors going to Atlanta and not really knowing what movie they're in

and just shooting some stuff because it could be used here or could be used there. Or the copious amounts of green screen work where they're just like, I guess I'll just stand in front of this thing and pretend like, I guess that's a monster coming at me. Or I'm on the volume and they've just sort of dialed up this setting. And I don't mean to say that that's fly by night. Obviously, like I'm sure like a ton of work goes into that in a very specific way.

And I'm sure there are all sorts of challenges that go into like managing 15 different shows and movies in the Marvel universe or the Disney universe or whatever. But the idea that this guy and his collaborators have been working on this for three years is on screen. Yes. Building everything. Everything from the precision of the tempo, the precision of the dialogue, the fact that no scene is dead.

The fact that in every single scene, when someone is talking, they're also doing something because with the exception of podcasting and even during podcasting, that's how life works is like, you're having a conversation with your wife, but you're also looking for something in the drunk drawer.

You're having a conversation with your boss, but you're also kind of fidgeting with a pen. or like you're tapping your shoe or maybe you're trying to get them to go get coffee with you so that you can change the environment. Like the movement, the activity is intrinsic to the character

and it's intrinsic to the dialogue and everything that he does has like a momentum. So if you like Michael Clayton and you like Jason Bourne and you like the idea that conversations are what push story forward because of their energy rather than their exposition,

I think you'll really respond to this. The industry that we cover and we talk about and that we love is fractured. And so we end up often talking about two things that are just apples and oranges that actually have nothing to do with each other. And I just bring this up to say that we're recording this early in the week. And I saw some headlines today about how the mid-credit scene in Thor, Love and Thunder, no one was in the same room. That Tyca was in L.A. directing on monitors Russell Crow in one place and Brett Gold,

seen in another place with a bunch of other people on the screen trying to make sure the lines would line up when they integrated it all in post. And my takeaway from that is, holy shit, bravo. That's hard. So many people, so many craftsmen and technicians and good actors worked really hard to pull that off. And that is amazing. That's really good work.

That's a completely different species of work than what we're seeing here. You know, that was also the conditions and whatever. I only bring it up to say that like this is just, it's old-fashioned. Yeah, this is like when you read about like people making movies, I don't know, like kind of like in the 60s and 70s. And I don't want to overstate it. I'm not trying to be super hyperbolic. I want people to watch it.

But like the investment and immersion into not only like the world and the war and the myth and the whatever and the vocabulary and the jargon, which there is copious amounts of we'll talk about that in a later episode, but just also like how should this feel? for the viewer. Nicholas Bertels music, the cinematography, the production design, the performances, all of which seem to be happening on the same show. It's like so, it's so well executed. We're like, we're out of our minds for this show. We're going to be talking about it a lot over the coming weeks. Both because it's good on its own and because where it slots into the conversation we've been having for 10 years is vital. And I just also want to say before we get into our talk

with Tony, obviously, Chris and I really just want to do a born legacy legacy podcast. This didn't feel like the time, although clearly we talk about it a lot. So I hope that Tony will come back and do that with us. But this is purely, we're talking Star Wars, we're talking Andor with him. Yeah. So please check this conversation out we had with the creator of Andor, Tony Gilroy, and we will be back with you next week. This is the man who wrote Stand Up and Walk.

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and one of our favorite screenwriters, one of our favorite storytellers. He is the writer of a long list of beloved movies and I'm sure some more that he isn't credited for. And he is the writer and director of one of my favorite movies, Full Stop, The Born Legacy, although I hear Michael Clayton isn't bad either, Tony.

Thank you for joining the watch. It's a pleasure to be here. anybody who's going to get behind Born Legacy, I want to be there. It's, that's very pleasing to hear. This is the Internet's number one source of Born Legacy propaganda. You are very welcome here, Tony. You guys are not doing a good enough job. I'm going to tell you that right now.

Listen, we're 10 years into our campaign. The rebellion takes time, as Andrew suggests. Rebellions are built on hope, so I'll just keep going. Tony, I wanted to start with, you know, we obviously, we read the variety piece that you did. going leading into the release of Andor next week or this week when this is released. And I was very struck by your own private resistance that you were kind of having to the idea of doing the show that initially you would sort of written this manifesto to Kathy Kennedy saying

here's why we shouldn't do it. But if we were going to do it, here's what we should do. And then that became the series that we get. This astonishing work. So can you tell me a little bit about your reluctance to do the show? Well, I mean, part of it was, you know, having coming off Rogan just not, it wasn't, just didn't seem like it had been a really great experience, but it didn't seem like it was my thing exactly. But more, I think there were practical reasons that the money really wasn't there to make these kind of shows at that point.

I mean, it's not that long ago. Things have changed so incredibly rapidly. But even six years ago, five, six years ago, there was no, the idea that you would do a spend. That idea of someone would spend $450 million on a show, not our show, but a show, was inconceivable at that point. So the economics didn't really line up. And the idea of how you would do an economical Star Wars show was sort of like, how do you do a, you know, how do you do a cheap bond, you know, how do you do it? So it didn't really seem feasible. And I didn't really know what they had in mind.

I feel like one of the reasons why we're so excited and thrilled about this show is because for 10 years now, I should say, you know, since Born Legacy, really. We should just really only use that as our, like, there's before. And there's after. That was when we got our first dose of chems. Oh, my God. We're going to take so much shit for this, but go ahead. It's great. We've been basically talking on this podcast about maybe it was a straw man argument being like, why can't there be. a show in a pre-existing IP universe that also is just good in its own right.

And I feel like you have delivered on that. And I guess the question is, how did you navigate that terrain? Not in a sense of opposition to the larger construct that exists here, but in the conversations you had with Kathy Kennedy or the historians of Lucasfilm like Pablo, the people who are the custodians of this legacy, how did you interact with them and end up with something that is respectful of their patch, but also very much a Tony Gilroy story that you were interested in telling. I mean, the easy answer is I came with a lot of credibility after Roe.

You know, I had a lot of, there was a lot of goodwill for me after Roeb. And my relationship with Pablo is interesting because that's sort of a shotgun marriage. And, you know, I'm not sure Pablo, I'm not sure what Pablo thought of me when he, in the first, our first bunch of encounters. And we should say Pablo Hidalgo is like the, the Jedi. I master? Yeah, if you think of, if you think of, the easiest way to think of Lucasfilm as, is the Vatican, really, and it really is the Vatican. And then there's the Curia, you know, and Pablo really is the, you know, the cardinal of the, of the crypt there. And so, but it came

with a lot of goodwill from Rogue. And I had this manifesto that I had sort of sent off, you know, four years earlier about why I thought, it was sort of, it was sort of, it was. It was, it was, in a job application or anything. It was kind of just a friend in court. Here's what you should do. Here's what you shouldn't do. Here's why what you might be thinking about doing is not working for you. Here's what a show would have to be like. I had that document and it was a very radical idea. It's very much the show we're making. And I think also, I mean, I think people, if they get in business with me, they kind of know what it kind of is. I mean, I know all the people that are there, so they kind of knew what my expectations would be about what we would try to do.

So there was a lot of, and also, let's be really honest, you don't, even though you say yes that you're doing something, there's a long, there's a long foreplay, tiptoe dance into the moment of, you know, we can't turn back. Right. So there was a lot of, there were a lot of stops and starts along the way and feeling out and, you know, not really negotiations, but just really. just that that sort of dance that you go through when you're when you're dealing with something

complicated are we talking about the same thing can we get the same thing you know i was curious you know you talk about your relationship with pablo and this idea of there being a a curio of the vatican of lucas film are you so fluent at when we're coming off of rogue that you kind of have a working idea of like if i want to describe something like this this is the vocabulary that i'm using, or do you go to him and say, hey, like, for instance, something that happens in the first three episodes of Andor is, like, Bix pretends like she needs a piece of equipment, but is in fact sending a signal to the nascent rebellion, you know? And do you ask him, hey, what's a bendin mesh, whatever she's asking for? But, like, how do you find, like, all the sort of necessary plugs

for the machine that you're building when it comes to the vocabulary, the jargon, and also maybe even the history? separate things. I mean, the canonical period of time that we're dealing with is one issue. And the variations and the flexibility within that are, well, you can already see some of the places that you've seen the show. You see how we're manipulating some of that. So you don't want to violate anything that people have grown accustomed to or accept as fact or whatever. But we're playing with that. So there's some issues of that. That's the larger issue. What's happening on the calendar. And that becomes, in more ways, that's more. critical to the second half that we start shooting in November. We're coming the four years now going into rogue. So there's a lot of canonical questions about what events happen where and who's where and what do we have to watch out for. When it comes to the practical things that you're discussing,

I mean, it's sort of a combination. It's the most overwhelming part of the show, which has many overwhelming features to it, is the fact that absolutely every single thing that we do has to be designed. So my first call on everything, my primary collaborator is Luke Hull, who's the production designer. Luke and I, from the very beginning, before there was any other writers or writers' room or anything, Luke and I had spent months designing ferrics and designing different things. Luke was in the writer's room the first time we did it, the first five, six day summit that we had the whole time.

He's my first call because if you want to say I want to do a Zoom call in Star Wars, What does it look like? And how does it work? And what's a can opener look like? And we want to do a hospital or we want to do this or we want to do a library. What's a bodega look like? Before you can do any of it, we have to do it all. Everything. Everything has to be designed first. So there's that. When you get to the other parts that you're talking about, I would say that it's a mixture of decades of jargon bullshit that I have mastered. You know, I'm a I really, you know. I'm a fan. It's okay. Yeah. an x-ray lexicon of my history of jargon bullshit, you know, it would be a big volume. You're the poet laureate of jargon bullshit. Jargon bullshit. And then some of it is, oh, my God, you know, we need to know what is the, you know, what we need to know the details of rhido fuel for, you know, what are the sifting processes and what are the sifting refinery. Then we go and then sometimes there's stuff that they know.

Sometimes it's shocking what they don't know. the rules have changed since rogue the rules on rogue were really Calvinist it was very very you know all we can't do this I got people running up to the set you can't have that you can't do this can't be any of wheels there's no paper there's no knives a lot of stuff has shifted in over time and so and then I mean I think by the time you get to the end of the when I mean I we'll have a follow up on it there's so many people I'm eager to talk to when it's over you know, when you see 12. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it were inventing. We're making canon. We're making vast quantities of IP, that's for sure. Massive quantities. I love the early shout-out to Luke, your production designer, because I wanted to specifically ask you about that, because I think that we're probably all in agreement that the best art comes with a sense of specificity to it.

And there are moments in the first few episodes of Andor that really moved me smaller moments in ways that other I won't name names, but other big IP storytelling hasn't because I felt the care and consideration of every detail. So when Stelan Scarsgaard character appears for the first time and he gets on that shuttle bus to the town, in a moment I felt I understood the way that shuttle bus may have smelled and the history of people on it and the conversations that you overhear. And we're in a real place, even though we're in a heightened universe. And that continues in a future episode when a car pulls up in front of essentially the J. Edgar Hoover building of the empire. Someone thought about that building and what it would be communicating, you know,

and I love that there was, DT or you already say this, such a close marriage early on between the writing and the visual. Yeah, I should also, I mean, also while we're, I mean, Luke is just, look, you're going to be talking about Luke Hull for the next, you know, for the next 30 years as one of the premier, I mean, he's really, he's a Mozart-like character here. I mean, and you can imagine how difficult it was when our producers, O'Donlemberg who's just remarkable. And that was a shotgun marriage. She had been involved with one of the previous things.

And so we were put together. I didn't know her at all. And she was the woman who produced Chernobyl. And we kind of liked each other right away. It's been three years now. We've been together. And we're brother and sister at this time. But you can imagine how it was a test on our part.

We said, oh, we want the guy who was the production. We want the, we want the adolescent production designer from Chernobyl to do our show, to do Star Wars. That's a pretty big, that's a pretty big ass. Luke is remarkable. I don't think people are, I don't, I don't even think you're prepared for what you're going to see, what he's going to do. But the other person to mention is Moen Leo, who's our visual effects supervisor, his producer, T.J. Falls, they were on Rogue. So we knew them really, really well from Rogue. We had a really good mutual respect. But Moen, you know, all of those, you know, those CG shots and the, and the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. The. The. The. The. The. The. The.. The. The. The..... The...... times where we have to let them take over or set extensions and whatever. His taste and the taste of that department is, we never doubt it. I mean, his framing, we never have a shot that a camera couldn't make. We don't have a camera placement that there wouldn't be. We don't ever use lenses that we don't use. We don't show. We don't show off. He's absolutely integrated into our

aesthetic of reality. And it's the Troika with Mowen and. And, and it's the Troika with, with, with, Luke and myself that, um, and the, you know, uh, the obsessive qualities that we all share that make it fun. I want to talk a little bit about the, the tone of the show because it starts in a very interesting place with this guy in a moment of crisis. He's, he's on the run before he's already on the run, you know, and it'll probably define this character for the next couple of years. And I got a text from a friend who watched the episode, the first episode last night. And he said, I knew that when Cassian shot that guy in the face, we were in good hands. This is a pretty gritty show.

It's not something that I maybe even ever thought I would get from the Star Wars universe, and it's so welcome. Not because I've craved more up-close and personal murder in Star Wars, but because I think it just tells a different kind of story. What were the conversations like with Lucasfilm and among your collaborators about, like, where are we pitching this show tone-wise? Look, everybody dies in the end. I mean, what a great place to start.

I mean, that's not me. That was baked in from the beginning. The first time I heard that, I was like, wow, really? Going to have the balls to do that all the way through? Really? All right. I mean, that's baked in. The tone of it, again, I had to say that I just, everybody knew from the start that I wasn't,

I wasn't coming here to cash a check. You know, I wasn't coming. I wasn't here to change my game or anything. thing. I was just going to keep doing what I like to do. And this is about rebellion. This is about a war. This is about, I mean, a really huge war with a thing called the death star that's being built and all these thousands and people that are going to die. And it's just, it's intrinsically tragic and violent. And how could you not? I mean, really, how could you not do that? And so if we're going to go down on the ground with real people and, you know, and a guy who's really a nobody who's going to

become this sort of messianic savior of the galaxy, I mean, to not get as dirty as you possibly can on Disney Plus would be really, it just would be a crime against storytelling to not do that. So speaking of storytelling, I agree, the shooting in the face was very good. But my preferred moment in the pilot was the first time we see Kyle Saller, who's incredible on this show. And he's talking about, the scene is about tailoring. And the scene is about what he's done to his uniform. And it's so, first of all, I was just levitating. I was like, I can't believe there's room for this in this show. This is our villain and this is how we're meeting him, or a villain, and this is how we're meeting him. And we're learning so much in that moment. It's funny,

but we're learning about resentment. We're learning about status. And I just feel like we've been either told directly or implicitly for a lot of years that there just isn't room for scenes like this in IP storytelling, for character, for depth, for text and subtext. And clearly that's not true. Clearly, we've been hungrier for it than we realized. And I just, even just that as a statement, less is a question, like I would just love your thoughts on that. Because every time you do a scene, you introduce characters in this,

you zag in the most delightful way that makes me realize not how much we've missed your voice on our screens, but just voice in general in a lot of entertainment over the last few years. Look, I spent, what, 35 years boxed into 128 pages. You know, I mean, it's a stern mistress, that number. And every screenwriter who spent time in that plot of ground, it's like, well, you got an acre and a half and you better, this is what you get. And so you're watching me try to take, you know, all of the, try to take all the things that I know how to do and compression and all the other things I'm trying to do. But you're also watching me

a little bit luxuriated in the idea that I don't have to, you know, deliver the pizza in an hour and a half every, you know, or die trying. So you're watching somebody really, the risk is that we've, Scott Frank, you know, is a really good friend of mine. And Scott, it's really interesting when Scott had Godless for years, Godlis was around and everybody read it. Yeah. Lovely script and great.

A little bit overstuffed and it didn't really, you know, and then all of a sudden, bang, wow, it wants to be six episodes, man. Wow, look what happens when that happens. And, you know, Scott and I have had conversations about, about, because we're the older, you know, the older beaten down screenwriters who like, you know, we plug that, that hour and a half, that 128, about 130 number for all our lives. And we learned all the tricks that we learned. It'll be interesting to see what happens when a whole new generation of writers come along,

who didn't have the rigor of that. Now they have all this room. Do they get lazy? And does everybody having cups of coffee? and nothing means anything, and you have a lot of wasted space. You're going to have wasted space, but you're watching me just know that I have a little bit more time.

How did you decide to structure not only the way that the episodes were going to be delivered to us? So obviously, we're watching these first three that come out. You've paired yourself with Toby Haynes to write and direct these episodes. And then going forward, I think that you follow that sort of model going forward, where there's a director and a writer sort of paired for, a block of episodes for each one. And then I feel like the three episodes that we've gotten are both delightful individual segments, but also funnily enough, fill out that 128 page script pretty well.

That was the first three episodes. How did you decide to structure both the writing but also the production in terms of who is going to be working on what and how you were going to be working on these episodes? The idea to do, at one point, we shifted around with different numbers of episodes. It was eight, it was this, it was 12. When we got to the 12, when I finally did the, you know, the brakes on it, it broke up in a really, it broke up in a good way. And we had the whole kind of story, had the whole, you know,

the whole season kind of laid out in a way. Oh, we went into the room. And then you divvy out, I mean, how we divvied out the, who did what, was a little bit to taste and a little bit to who raised their hand on who wanted to do what and how much time it would take to do them. and how far they were advanced before we passed them over. I knew where I was going to end up. I knew what the last two episodes were going to be about when we came into the room,

and I knew what the first three were about. There was one big soft spot in the middle where we really had to do some figuring. And I don't know if that really answers your question. I mean, you get very good at, I mean, Andy knows this. I like to know where I'm ending. I'm very big on outlining and very big on organizing. and very big on organizing in a variety of ways. Lots of different lenses.

A really super loose lens. A tighter one. A tighter one. A tighter one. Until finally, at the very end, you get really down in there. So I have a good meter about where we're going to go. And I have big believer in sort of navigational scenes or, you know, oh, my God, I got this scene here. That's got to be here. Where does that go?

And I've got this scene here. That would a great scene. That's got to go here. So I had a bunch of landmarks about things that had to happen. And then it's where do they fit. And they gradually pull into shape. and then part of its production, you know, it's, it's, um, here's a director coming in to do a block of three. And this needs to be this, you know, you'll see when you get to four, five, and six.

I think you've seen episode four, right? So you'll see, you obviously know where what's happened, what's about to happen in four, because you see the beginning of it. So four, five, and six will be that event and, and the background to that event. And then, you know, seven will be the ramifications of that event. And then we'll have a whole new block of things to happen. And it's, I don't know, it has a, it has an organic, it has an organic progression. One of the things that I'm sure you've heard a lot among, like generationally among, especially younger writers, is that part of the job now is you're just figuring out a way to kind of Trojan horse, if you will, the things that interest you creatively or emotionally or humanly as a writer within these things that are going to get made.

So if you have an opinion about free will, can you do it with the Guardians of the Galaxy or whatever? that's the path to doing it. And I am still really struck by the fact that this is you working within the biggest of these universes, but this is absolutely to our eyes, a Tony Gilroy project. You know, your voice is in it, what interests you is consistent. And more than anything else, I'm just really struck done by the fact that we've lived with Star Wars for 45 years now. We've known that there was a rebellion, but never once been given a chance to be curious about why politically, emotionally, on the ground level,

economically, yeah, right. Economically to have that rebellion. And all of a sudden, you've given it to us, you know, within this larger world. I don't know if there's a question within those two points, but I just feels to be like this show is having me, is getting me thinking about both of them so deeply. Like you were successful in this navigation

to give us something that we were really looking for without realizing it. Just making it real when you really get down. What does it cost? I'm always fascinated. know that as well. I'm always fascinated by what people are getting paid and how do they get their, how do they do their rent and what, what does it cost and what, you know, the economics of things usually lead to really good drama. I don't like people to get along, as you know.

I really don't, it's, I don't write a lot of scenes where people are agreeing about things. And I don't know what the deeper question is there. Other than that is, I trying to bring, it's been, it's been interesting on the junk, it's particularly beforehand before people saw anything, to sort of say, well, you know, I didn't change my game to come here. I'm bringing my thing into this. And it's not even that it's much more radical for me that the scale of it and the size of the canvas and the breadth of the opportunity than it is that it's Star Wars. I mean, I'm not trying to make any parallels between war and peace or me and Tolstory and any safe.

But it is like, this is instead of writing a bunch of short stories, I get to write a novel now. And it takes place, you know, with a war that's coming and huge consequences. And the natural untouched place of this is the people on the ground and the regular ordinary people that are about to be buffeted by that. And you got to get down there with them. You know, one of the things I adore about your writing is the density of it. and the idea that you can be watching a scene and know what it's about even if you don't know what people are saying all the time. And that obviously comes across in Andor, the other thing that really jumped out of me, though, is that the characters are always doing something in these

scenes. Like these very dense conversations about history or what a person owes another person financially or what their maybe familial relationship or romantic relationship is or where they're going or what they're doing. It's always happening when someone's like, I got to go to work, I'm coming from work, I want to go to the bar after work, what are you doing? Where are you going? Where's this person? The amount of activity that's going on is almost in itself like a density of its own. How important was it for you to show these people basically alive rather than person walks into room, sits down, has five-minute conversation with other character, and then leaves, thus giving you information? I mean, you're always, I don't know how many scenes I've written in the last

a few decades. I mean, you write, and this really is seen work is what this really is. That's what it's seen work. And you're just, every time you're sitting down, you're going like, okay, how can I make this different than any other scene I ever wrote? So you're always looking for a hook. Even in a, even in the most basic scene, you're always looking for something that's like, wow, how can I, how can I make this do something that I never did before? So you're, and sometimes you get that a lot of times, maybe you won't. But you're always, I mean, in action sequences, that's critical. I mean, that's a place where we really,

every action scene has to have a hook. We can't, we're not going to, there's not going to phone in any sequence like that. There always has to be a hook. But it goes all the way down. Man, I like to keep it moving, I guess. I mean, I want to keep it, but I want to keep it alive and moving, and I want you to, yeah, that's just the way, I guess.

That's just the approach. The Mandalorian. That's the way. I know that shooting the show in London had made things complicated since you're in New York, and this was during like height of pandemic times, but it does seem like it was phenomenal for casting and for locations. You get Fiona Shaw showing up early and just being emotionally devastating in a relatively handful of scenes. And again and again, I find myself pausing and I want to like Google who is this British stage actor who is owning this other way a scene that in anyone else's hands

both acting and writing wise maybe would have been a throwaway. It feels like it was ultimately really a boon for the production. Oh my God. You know, because I was going to, I didn't know what I was doing when I first started. I went over there. I was going to direct the first three episodes. This was all pre-COVID.

I hadn't really, we hadn't tightened up the scripts. We had scripts and we had them all sort of thing, but they really weren't all the, they're not at that place where they, have to get. There's so many places scripts have to get to, by the time they're ready to be actor-proof and director-proof and production-friendly and everything else. But I didn't know. And we started auditioning from my block and people started coming in. I mean, Kyle came in and just, you know, I had this couple of Cyril bits and like Kyle came in. It's just like,

oh my God, all right. Well, let's have that. And then Denise Goff came in. And again, it was like, I'd seen her in this play that she was just extraordinary. And she came in and she did this thing. I go, okay. And the moment you started accumulating these people and then we had Stalin, and you just, you start writing into them. Yeah. Right?

And it's like, wow, they can do anything. So you, it's literally like, we're not playing on an upright piano in the basement. Now you're playing on a Steinway Grant. So maybe I should write more. Maybe I should use more of the keyboard. You know, maybe you really start to go at it. Nina Gold and Martin Ware, who are the casting for us. And like I said, we have 190 plus speaking parts in the full 12 in the first 12 speaking parts.

It's just amazing how many actors we've seen. And we've seen them all. We vet them all. And I had somebody say to me, as we got into the process, said, you're going to be like a pig and shit over there. He goes, because there's all these actors over there, he goes, and all these Brits, they, you know, someone's been on Coronation Street for eight years. Or they were in EastEnders. Or they did this shitty TV cop show for nine years. And the Brits don't take them as, they don't, they don't take them seriously.

They're going to be fresh to you and they're going to come in and they're great. And you're going to love them and they're going to do a great job for you. And you're not going to be biased at all about any of their prior history. So my God. I mean, Nina and Martin, that casting department is almost our biggest special effect in the whole show. You know, we're starting the second to try to do another 12. It's like, I said to Nina a month or two, I'm going like, are there any actors left? Yeah.

Are you the chief employer of Scotland? Yeah, exactly. It's amazing. The talent pool is amazing. And we also started instituting a thing where we would audition a lot of people. And because everything is self-tape now in COVID and whatever, people wouldn't get the parts that they came in from. But if they audition and we really like them,

we made a repertory company of the people that we liked. So we ended up with this huge bank. So a lot of times when we got to the end, it's like, oh, we need someone to do this or we need this person or that. We go, oh, man, we look back to, oh, remember her? Oh, my God, she was great. She'd be great. And then you're writing into people.

And it's just very exciting to write for good actors. I don't want to take up too much of your time. I would be remiss if I didn't ask a question that somewhat connects and or to the Born Legacy. So without giving anything away about the fourth episode, there's a scene where Imperial Security Services officer gives a speech. And he asks everybody, he's like, what do you think we do here? and they think, well, we're intelligence, we're security.

And he's like, nope, we are health inspectors. We are here to make sure that, like, a virus doesn't get in, whether it's from the outside or the inside. And it is very similar to a speech that the Edward Norton character gives in Bourne Legacy, where he's like, maybe you're in the wrong meeting. We are here to find out how much we have to cut to save the patient. Do you find themes recurring over the course of your scripts? You've written so many different beautiful pieces.

You're in all these different worlds. Sure. No, there's, there's, no, I try to, there's times where I've caught myself. There's things I've cut out where I realize I've gone too close to something else before. I think it's amazing, though. I think it's so cool to these ideas like kind of rippling across the works, though. A little careful, though. You don't want to redo completely.

But yeah, no, it's, there is a parallel there. Yeah, yeah. Well, look at Anton Lesser, who plays that part, you know. I mean, oh, God, we did you see what he does along the way. I know, he really wasn't on my radar. are before other than a face. And then you start putting words in their mouth and you're like, can he say all this stuff? And he's like, wow, he's just, and you go, can he say this? And then you start, my God, he can, I can just, you know, you can really, really write in a different way when you know

that the players can play it. One of the great things about having the chance to talk to you now is just, it just seems palpable how excited you are by this and how much this has taken up of your life over the last few years and how engaged you are with it. And I just have to ask just on a professional level because the life of a screenwriter, especially a movie screenwriter, can be solitary, right? You're writing the script, it goes off, it comes back to you for rewrites. You've obviously made films as a director, you've been on sets extensively, but this role of like a showrunner of a massive enterprise is slightly different, and it's, is it, am I reading correct into the Zoom screen that it has kind of engaged you fully in a positive way?

Well, you're saying to somebody this morning, I mean, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you know, 80% of the stuff I've ever written doesn't get made. I mean, just hasn't. And probably the best stuff I ever wrote never got made. And it's frustrating that. And it weighs on you over time. And there's times you fall inert and you don't work a lot or you get into a bad way and you haven't done anything for a while or you're scratching around. And, I mean, God knows, there's been plenty of really fallow, wasted, unhappy years.

really if you added it all together. Every single thing that comes off the desk these days gets made. We're shooting it all. So you end up, you just end up like, that just becomes your assumption. If it's coming out of here and it's final, they're shooting. And it's going to be good actors and good directors. And I know what the set is. And it's, so you get the confidence of that, right?

Plus you also just get in extraordinary shape. I mean, you get really, really in really good shape. And you know, I mean, when you're writing, you're writing and you got the yoke on and you're, you're in the groove. It's just a lot easier to know that the thing is going to be real. It puts a lot of pressure on it to know it's going to be real. I mean, you know when you did your show, I know how you felt the night of the first day of shooting because the first day shooting on your first thing, that freak out the night before. My God, I'm never going to be able to change this again. You're just out of your, you're like, oh my God, I can never change it again.

They're going to do it tomorrow. It's shocking how that feels. Well, I have the opposite feeling now. Now it's like, oh, my God, this is happening. I know it's happening. It has to be perfect from the start or from rewriting or doing those final polishes that things have to go through. You know, it's a very benevolent wind at your back to know that it's going to be happening tomorrow or a month from now. It really helps.

We're the beneficiaries of it. Yeah, seriously. I mean, in a lot of ways, I feel like I've been waiting like 40. years for something like this, but it also feels so fresh and so new. No, because like I, I think the Andy and I always used to joke around, like, as we were getting older and older, and you would think back to scenes in New Hope and Empire, and you're like, why did I, you know what to be cool is if they, like, looked around the corner in that building and found out the guy who has to clean up the hallway after that. And then he winds up being a part of something bigger. And the audience wasn't

asking for that at that moment. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's the audience's appetite. You have to remember how sophisticated the audience has gotten now. I mean, the audience is just so much cooler in a way. I mean, I don't know if people got smarter. It doesn't seem like the world has gotten any smarter over time. But the one place where people are, we're spending too much time trying to understand prestige TV. Well, the one place where people are really smart is when it comes to storytelling now. I mean, they know how to tell, I mean, refracted stories and flashbacks, and they know how to read a scene. And they know when you're vamping. I mean, even people who don't really know anything that's going on,

know when you're faking it. And they know what what you're signifying when you're, mean something. So it's, I think the audience's appetite for, you know, for the scale and for the detail. And I think, I don't think that the ask was there when people were doing the other movies. But you noticed that baked into Chris's question was the implication that at five years old, he wanted the Clifford O'Deth's version of Emperorset Strikes Back. No, exactly. No, I know. 40 years ago, he was like, this is like, are these guys unionizing or what? What's going on? I want the Ozu to Tommy Matt view of the Death Star. Like, that's what I'm looking for. incredible kindergarten,

he was. I always bring up Ken Louch when I talk to these actors when they come on the show. I'm always like, look, because we have these conversations with every single actor when they come on.

Hey, I know you signed an NDA. I don't care about the NDA. I'm asking you personally, as a personal request, because I don't talk about the show. And then I also have to say, look, a lot of great actors come in.

You're a great actor. When you put the clothes on or you have the blaster in your hand or you're looking at a, you know, a creature or you end up something, do what you always do. Pretend you're in a Ken Lodsch.

movie. That's why you're here. Do not act. And it's really hard. And you give that speech because we saw a lot of really great people come in and vamp around for a couple hours while they played the outfit. You know, they lose their center. I mean, it comes across. You can tell you, they just feel so lived in. So thank you so much for making it. We can't wait to watch the rest of this season. Would you consider coming back for the end of the season? places I really, no, I'm sort of pinpointing because, you know, we're going to finish at Thanksgiving. I don't know how it'll go along, whatever, but it's really, and then again, we'll come back in, you know, 17 years from now when we finish the other. But yeah, it's not like selling a movie where you can talk

about it as a whole thing. This is such a tease. Everything is a tease here now. It's like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, and this is what we're really doing. So much of its value is in its abundance and how it gathers as it goes along and how just, stupidly, I mean, we did not know what we were getting into how deep we were going to go. But the result is, it's hard to talk about it as a complete thing until it's really fully ingested. Well, you can, you've given us so much over the years, Tony. You can treat this podcast like sports talk radio. Yeah, just call in.

Ring us up. Whatever. But you guys are available. It's Tony from New York. I will come back. I'll come back. I'll come back. Yeah, if there's a point where, if there's a point along the way, there's it going to be a

couple key things that are going to happen are people just going to like be what the fuck and there's a couple big things that'll appear and there'll be moments that Disney's going to want to underline as we go along and certainly things are going to be willing to talk about that's great and then and then the born legacy podcast we're going to start we'll go off air and we'll plan it I'm going to oh my god we didn't even ask the questions we have them bless you for the legacy love don'tie gilroy thank you so much for joining us today man my god what a gas thank you guys Hey Mama, thanks for making all my favorite recipes. Hi Ma, thanks for your unfiltered advice.

Hi, Mom. Thanks for always being by the phone. Hey, Mom. Happy Mother's Day. When you ship UPS Air at the UPS Store, your items arrive on time or your money back. Guaranteed at no extra cost, exclusively at the UPS store UPS store U.S. retail locations. Visit the UPS Store.com slash air shipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply. Send your Mother's Day gifts at the UPS store and we'll get your gratitude there on time. Thank you.