Now, Star Wars director Gareth Edwards has spoken out about bringing the Sith Lord to life in his own film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Edwards told StarWars.com:
“Even with shots of Vader, we did a little test shoot. Greig [Fraser] would always say that lighting Vader is like doing a car commercial. He’s got more in common with photographing a car than a human because of all the light reflections and things. [Mimics helmet] We kept looking at these tests going, ‘This doesn’t feel like Vader, does it? What are we doing wrong? It just doesn’t feel the same.’ And we started realizing that normally when you do a shot, you do an over-the-shoulder shot, and you film someone and then you do the reverse when you come around for a conversation. You come around. [Mimics camera rotating]”
“In the original trilogy, when they would come around to do the reverse, the person in the foreground would always feel bigger than Vader, which felt wrong. So they always pull the camera back a little bit and then raise it up so that Vader, his eye-line was always the highest thing in the frame. If you didn’t do that, Vader felt small and not powerful. And so it was all these little tricks that we hadn’t thought of…”
In addition to bringing Darth Vader back to the Star Wars galaxy, Edwards’s standalone Star Wars film saw the return of  CGI versions of both Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story takes place just days before the beginning of A New Hope in the Star Wars timeline, and follows the tale of a motley band of early Rebels bent on stopping the Death Star from destroying the galaxy with the help of plans designed by conscripted Imperial engineer Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen).
From Lucasfilm comes the first of the Star Wars stand-alone films — Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. In a time of conflict, a group of unlikely heroes band together to on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the Empire’s ultimate weapon of destruction. This key event in the Star Wars timeline brings together ordinary people who choose to do extraordinary things, and in doing so, become part of something greater than themselves.
The film stars Felicity Jones (Jyn Erso), Diego Luna (Cassian Andor), Ben Mendelsohn (Orson Krennic), Donnie Yen (Chirrut Imwe), Mads Mikkelsen (Galen Erso), Alan Tudyk (K-2SO), Riz Ahmed (Bodhi Rook), Jiang Wen (Baze Malbus), Alistair Petrie (General Draven), and Forest Whitaker (Saw Gerrara).
Are you looking forward to Andor? And, don’t forget Hayden Christensen’s Darth Vader will return in Obi-Wan Kenobi.
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Credit: Lucasfilm
