The Rise of Skywalker's Biggest Sin

Just wanted to follow up for anyone who may have read this and been curious.

I was right about the podcast name.
Here's her podcast interview. It's SUPER interesting and VERY highly suggested. We RARELY get this kind of detail about the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the production...especially in regards to editing. Star Wars has always had above average documentaries and interviews regarding special effects and visual effects.
We're all very familiar with Dennis Muren, Ralph McQuarrie, et. al., but we don't really get much in terms of an inside peak into the world of EDITING Star Wars and what that's like.

So...here you go.

http://theroughcutpod.com/star-wars/

And because such hidden people have a special place in my heart for being so overlooked.
Here's a couple pictures of her to personalize her with.





Cheers,
Jayson

 

Ah, that’s really interesting. I’m trying to remember where I read that she had felt more pressure to get everything done for this film. I know J.J. and Chris had talked pretty extensively about the difficulties of working on this film under a tighter deadline than what was given for the previous two films, and honestly, especially considering that it was the end of the trilogy and they had to start from scratch after Carrie’s passing, I really think Disney should’ve pushed the release date back even more than what they did. Again, I’m saying this as someone who enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker, but I feel like the film would’ve benefitted from it a bit. I wouldn’t want to be J.J. in that situation –– trying to write the finale to the Star Wars saga from scratch after any previously existing ideas for it had to be scratched, and having to work the entire script around the limited footage they had of Carrie, has got to be one of the most daunting tasks any filmmaker could undertake.

I do remember hearing about the editing on set, though. I wonder if part of that was because of the extensive work they had to do with lighting and set design to make the scenes with Leia work? I know it was an extremely tedious process to make the small amount of footage they had of her work, and based on the behind-the-scenes documentary we got with the home release of The Rise of Skywalker, I kind of got the impression that at least some (if not most) of the Leia stuff was filmed pretty early on. It looked like some of the scenes between Rey and Leia were shot within the first few days of filming.

Yeah, I certainly don’t think any “J.J. cut” would be anything like the Snyder Cut for Justice League or anything like that. If anything, there’s probably just deleted scenes and stuff that were removed –– although I wonder how much of it was cut out, and why none of it was included on the home release of the film. But I do recall Daisy mentioning how the ending of the film was changed slightly, and a few of the other cast members (Dominic Monaghan and somebody else –– possibly Greg Grunberg?) talked about how much ended up being cut from the film that they’d hoped would see the light of day at some point.

Honestly, what it comes down to is that I’d gladly take more Star Wars any day, and I think The Rise of Skywalker definitely could’ve benefitted from a 3+ hour runtime –– probably more than Endgame needed its lengthy runtime, to be honest.

 

Yes, there was added pressure - definitely.
I was just meaning to convey that from what Brandon was saying, she was pretty cavalier about it.
She's someone who is better to hear than read. A lot of the value of what she's saying comes off in how she says it much more than what she's saying alone.
For example, yes, it was tight, but she also sees editing as being like that kind of world anyway ... which...to be honest, if you listen to enough editors in the industry talk - and I'm not talking about the epic top end like Walter Murch who get to do whatever they want - chaos, a lack of time, and frustration and impossible asks are totally normal for the job. You should hear what television editors talk about. lol. There's a lot of swearing going on in those cases - especially in the "reality TV" section. Those editors are amaaaazing and piiiiiiissed off a lot. lol

Anyway, yeah. She was short-changed, but she sees it as something which provoked innovation and energy.
From the documentary of the BTS stuff, it looks like everyone took that approach, tbh.

The main reason Brandon was editing on set was so that she could grab Abrams faster and get the footage faster.
Usually there's a lot of delay when you add it all up, just in file transfers from set to editor, and then there's the delay in getting meetings between editor and director and showing volumes of scenes and taking notes, and then going back and editing, and then reshowing, then getting more footage at the same time and etc... It's a bit of a zoo tbh.

But with being on set, Brandon was piped directly into the footage coming out right away, and Abrams was RIGHT there and as soon as she had a cut of the shots, she could grab him between reset and he could say "Yes, that's good. Let's change that to this." etc.... and then run back to shooting while she edited the changes.

So there's a ton of dropped footage, but it's something like imagine a wood chipper on set just rapidly chewing through the footage right then and just getting a near final cut right on set.
That's what was going on.
Let's not forget Stefan was also editing, so they were double-teaming this thing on set. If I recall correctly, they were also doing this in the second unit as well a bit (I believe mostly Stefan would jump on that, but sometimes Brandon would and Stefan would be with Abrams).

From the sound of it, to be honest...it sounded friggen awesome.

So the main reason for the move was speed, originally, and it was Brandon's idea.

As to the timeline...I don't think they could afford to change it more.
Studios have a conveyor belt of titles going on. You can delay a bit, but not much.
If you do, then you throw everything off and you have a vacuum on one quarterly, and a traffic jam on another that you now have to shuffle around.
Then there's all of the deals that get lined up in prep that cost tons of money. For example, back in the ROTJ days, right? Lucas lined up a 350 thousand dollar deal with United Airlines for free travel for the production in exchange for being included in the credits and having a United promotional on the screening - such things are very often time sensitive.
There's just a ton of business stuff that's not easily dismissed that go along with a movie far beyond just the basic mechanics of making a film, and it's not all just "money grubbing" evil mentality type stuff. Sure, there's always that part of any business, but a vast majority of it isn't that at all. It's perfectly reasonable motives that to ignore would be quite unreasonable and kind of a**h**e to dismiss as validly required to attend to.

Film making is, after all, actually a job.

Yeah, again...there's a pile of extra footage and it will likely eventually come out.
We all know there's going to be 50 billion releases of these films as time goes by. That's always the case with Star Wars films anyway.

And yeah, things definitely got swung around several different ways, but it's more like switching out Lego blocks than changing the trajectory of a spacecraft.
The set up they had in play with how Brandon set things up is just jaw dropping.
The digital piling and filing of footage is just amazeballs. I would LOVE to see her Avid project for this ... not even the footage in it; just the structure and workflow.
From how she's talked about things, it sounds friggen amazingly genius the way she was carouseling and flowing.

I think she accidentally invented something like the film equivalent of free-style-rapping on this film, and it's Bad A##.

I hope it catches on in the future because her style of doing this in this way (this on-set modular model) is going to be SUPER compatible with the new unreal vfx system that Mandalorian is currently using.

Once that catches on to being more mainstream, if Brandon, or someone who adopts her approach, runs into that set...holy s***balls. Buckle up.
Like...good god man - the modularity of film making will just explode.

Honestly, I think the challenge that TROS probably faced in production is what more will start to face as this more on-set modular mode of film making takes over (in both vfx and editing), and that's coping with having too many options compared to what you're used to. Kind of like when the industry had to get used to vfx back when it first settled into mainstream at full speed and we had an overload of pointless vfx everywhere for a bit.

I think we're going to have an overload of films that have weird arrangements to their story's for a bit while everyone plays with on-the-fly spin-n-shoot & slice-n-dice modality.

We're actually finally just about to reach Lucas' vision from the early 80's of what film could become, and it's going to be a wild ride with many messes until folks relearn how to go about things.

Anyway - rambleoff.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Oof. When you look at it that way, yeah, I really can't blame J.J. for how Rise of Skywalker turned out. That would indeed be a steep mountain for anyone to climb. I also say this as someone who enjoyed the film, but yeah, it's a shame that Disney didn't give them more time to polish things up, even if it had just been a few more months.

 

Maybe this has changed now that George Lucas is no longer in charge.

 

And yet we never got anything to R1 or Solo. I wouldn't hope for anything.

 

I wish they'd make an exception for Rise of Skywalker given the circumstances, as I think that's the film that could benefit from an extended/alternate cut the most. Although it won't surprise me if it doesn't happen. And even if it does, I doubt it would be anything as grandiose as the Snyder cut of Justice League, but it would still be pretty cool if they did release something along those lines.

 

My absence was such an unnecessary loss.

My clones were SNOKE, or at least they should have been. That is all.​

 

Disney will likely release anniversary versions as time goes on, just as the originals did.

It took quite a few years before we started to see alterations in the special editions and subsequent styled releases.

However, I think it's worth noting that Disney has already started making changes to the films/shows, but they just do it silently.
For example, they made a change to ANH when it was moved to Disney+ (granted, it was a pretty minor and weird change "maclunkey"), and they've made quick edits and alterations to Mando a couple times to fix mistakes that were caught after it aired.

So if they do make changes, they may (I don't know) just silently slide them in without mentioning it. That so far has been the Disney M.O. with changes.
It's not even just Star Wars, actually.

They've censored and altered a wide range of films on Disney+ without telling anyone, apparently not even the creators it would seem - as Gravity Falls got an alteration that the creator wasn't aware of and didn't understand the reasoning for.
Lilo and Stitch got an update because Disney was concerned children might try to hide in dryers because Lilo did, Splash covered up butt nudity with terrible CGI hair edits, Toy Story 2 got an entire joke gag scene removed (probably because it's now too "Weinsteinish"), Flight of the Navigator had a fat joke removed, inexplicably Sword and the Stone had a few lines of dialogue from the Mad Madam Mim about someone sounding sick and hoping that it's something dreadful ... because...who knows why...

And they never made a big buzz about any of it.

So if they keep this up, folks will just turn on Disney+ one day and then go grab their discs to check if they're crazy because they don't remember it that way.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Everything you've just mentioned were only fixes and no additional/new content like deleted scenes.

Btw that Maclunkey change wasn't Disney but it was the last change Lucas did himself before selling Star Wars.

 

Agreed

 

I was more thinking about alternate versions that cause a rift in opinions (e.g. special editions) - not so much about extra cuts and what not.

For that stuff, Disney seems more likely to release separate documentaries that just have extra material and call it a day.
The disks had some.

I'm purely guessing here though. I haven't the faintest idea what the hell they'll really do.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Hiring Abrams and Terrio and not further developing Colins and Dereks Script.

 

not sure how I feel about that, personally. What I’m reading of what that script was sounds kinda...eeehhhhhh....to me.

 

It's a fairly early draft and even then it felt more like a finale to the ST than TROS did.

 

I do get that, so it gets some leniency. some ideas could’ve been interesting, while others I question what’s the basis or the point, like the result of the Duel on Mortis, or Poe and Rey. Maybe there’s an updated version from that but it sounds like a big “but why?” to me if everything just gets erased (also..no hope for the Skywalker line? That’s a bummer, personally).

 

I don't agree with that, actually.
As a writer, I don't give big passes on conceptual elements of stories just because they're in first drafts.
I don't think the story concepts would have been very good for me.

Most of the attendance to the poetry of thematic narrative parallelisms is just entirely missing - there's no grand tour of the franchise even of interest in the approach.
It's much more tunnel vision locked into this trilogy.

And then there's the painful dialogue.

LUKE (VO)
This is where the dark path leads. An empty tomb.

LUKE SKYWALKER’S VOICE. Haunting his nephew like a spirit.

KYLO
And where did your path lead? You’re a ghost.

LUKE (VO)
I know what you’re searching for, Ben. Your Master promised you strength, but you feel hollow.

KYLO
Soon I will be more powerful than any Jedi. Even you.

LUKE (VO)
Are you sure?
​

Yeesh.
Not only on the nose, but on the nose and cliché.

Now, dialogue can be cleaned up, but the thing is - the nature and mind of the dialogue can't be cleaned up. That's the storywriter's motive of mind.
And from what I've read, I'm not that interested in where the mind was for the story.

Fine for others if they are, but it's entirely a different cultural bag than mine. Alien to me, for sure.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Yeah, this needs some polishing, but you have to watch this scene actually visualised. Star Wars Theory did this and I have to say it's more impactful than any other scene in TROS (Han and Ben might be an exception).

 

TROS is just a grab bag of random Star Wars things that you can loop back to other things and claim it fits the mold of Star Wars (because that's what Star Wars has largely become since ROTJ).
Trevorrow at least *tried* to push the story elsewhere and actually advance the story from TFA and TLJ. TROS is just "Hey, here are things that happened in other Star Wars (and in one case the other major Disney film) that's largely unearned but Star Wars!"

If you want to critique writing, removing agency of characters is a far bigger sin than clunky rough draft dialogue.

 

Yeah, no.
That lost my interest very quickly.

It's just not anything close to my style of interest at all.
It just makes me want to groan - I'll leave it at that because I don't want to offend people by describing how it strikes my mind.
I'll just say that I wouldn't have made it through a movie of that - it would have very possibly been the first Star Wars film I walked out of - not out of hate, but out of boredom.

Let me politely just put it this way - I don't watch films to be immersed in badarsery.
That's about the fastest way to bore me.

For instance, you may remember a sequence I sent your way from something I'm working on - the redraft of it.
Well, that went into the garbage as well because I tried to slant from a more "hard" stance just to see if I could get the supporting character developed better than a shtick and that was good to do.
I learned the character more, explored some nuances of their mind...all good things.

But the whole take was entirely scrapped. I think I kept a few moves from the fight and repurposed them elsewhere, but I completely chucked it because it was just bleeding "I want to be a cool badarse movie" far too much for my taste.

It was a good exercise, but it's way too much like this Dual of Fates vibe...which is too "The Crow" for my liking.

I completely disagree.
But I really don't feel like trying to convince someone who has a passionate dislike for the film of the point.

If you don't see the narrative arcs that it has relevant to its own trilogy, then so be it.

Cheers,
Jayson