Spoiler Alert: The following interview contains details about Andor season 2 episodes 1-3
What a great way to begin a Star Wars series with Cassian wrangling that tie-fighter. For anyone who has played a Star Wars videogame, that’s bliss. Was that a love letter to the fans?
It was a really, cool fun idea. It does a bunch of things for me. It provides Cassian’s contact with the young woman at the beginning. It shows what Cassian has been doing for the last year, what he’s been doing for Luthen. It reenforces the very thing he told Luthen in their first meeting: You walk in like you belong. He’s the stud that should be doing this. Then he doesn’t know how to fly it. It’s a testing. But the whole scene is a bit of an answer to anyone who said we started slow last time. There’s a couple of places where we are doing things intentionally. It was a little bit of reaction on my part. We can start hot if we want to.
Talk about kicking off with the wedding. Were you just showing something cultural with the bourgeoisie in Star Wars canon?
Davo Sculdun makes Mon Mothma’s money problems go away, and the thing that he wants, at the end of season one, is he says…they have a very intense scene, and she says, ‘Well, what will it cost us?’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s not going to cost you anything. I’m not going to charge you any money’ and she wants to pay, and he says, ‘No, no, I’m an oligarch. I don’t need your money, but what do you want?’ ‘Well, I have a 14-year-old so…’ and she flips out, and in the end, her daughter. It’s such a fascinating thing when the children become more traditional or more conservative or more doctrinaire than the parents; the sort of regression back to the old ways. The wedding is anticipated at the end of season one. It’s something I have to do. It’s also an opportunity for me to do something really cool, special and visual and get all my characters together.
But really, what it’s about, it’s another black mark for Mon Mothma to put in her internal monologue of things that she has failed at and things that are wrong, and when she’s going to have to kill Tay Kolma at the wedding. She has to put a hit on the guy who helped her because he’s a liability. It’s impossible now for her to escape the momentum of what’s happened.
Mon Mothma is marrying her daughter off. She feels terrible about it. She tries to give her daughter an exit strategy. Her daughter just shuts her down as cold as possible, that’s just brutal. Then the guy who is her childhood friend who is bailing her out has becomes such a liability in the interim, she’s been looking the other way. Because the stakes are so high, she has to sign his death warrant at wedding. That’s how she’s starting season two. She’s in a world of hurt there.
Season 2 was impacted by the strikes. Can you talk about where you were in the series before the writers’ strike. You’re a creator and a showrunner of a show. Even though you’re not writing, there’s other things that you can do. Were you in the editing room?
The way we make the show, I’ve described earlier, it’s our own method. There’s something sort of scientific about it. We get the scripts to the point of absolute perfection. I just rewrite them and rewrite them, and we have all the meetings, and we figure out everything. By the time we get to the meeting, the page turns for the script, with the director and the assistant director and all the department heads, we do three page turns.
I do the first one, and then a week or two later, I do one with the AD, sort of a group scramble. The last one is done by the AD and the director alone. The best version is I don’t ever say anything. Our scripts are so architecturally planned out, every single beat, every tempo, every line, everything’s been vetted, to the purpose that we never have a writer on set. I don’t ever go to set. I visit every once in a while, ceremonially.
But I want the directors and the actors to swing away when they’re there, and they have a great platform, because they know exactly what they’re there to get. Sometimes the phone will ring at 4 AM and it’s like, what are we going to do? But by and large, it’s done. My job is done at that point, until they finish shooting and then we do the post.
The writers strike happens in May. If you’d asked me six months earlier, five months earlier and said, ‘Tony, what’s going to be the most important day for you in this next year?’ I would’ve said, ‘Oh my god, somewhere around the Ides of March, I’m going to finish the last final polish of the last script, and my life is going to change because I won’t have to write anymore. I’ve been writing for five years. I won’t have to write anymore.’ And so, I finished about six days before the strike, and we were doing Emmy stuff in LA. So, they had all the blueprints for everything they needed to do.
And when the strike happened, there was a few days where it’s like, well, okay, I can’t write anymore. I can’t go visit. I can’t talk on the phone, but I can do music, right? And the guild was like, ‘Oh my god, no, we can’t do anything. Music, editorial, it’s all writing’ and I just completely divorced myself from the show for six months. I had no contact. I was completely absent from the show for six months.
You come out of the strike. What state is the show in?
Johnny (Gilroy) comes to New York, and he brings me 12 episodes that I’m terrified to look at. I’ve never seen a complete…I think I saw part of episode four, which had shot early. I’d seen a rough cut of that. He brings me 12 episodes. There’s all kinds of things that they’re missing because of the SAG strike. Everything’s temp. A lot of it’s shaggy, and it’s a very, very, very rough thing, but I got to watch all 12 episodes on a run with fresh eyes. I got to watch it like the audience is going to watch it. I make 100 pages of notes in a couple days.
And for me, personally, the most exciting two weeks that I ever had on the show are the two weeks when I went back to London with my notes. There were four cutting rooms open, and I was just running around. Two directors were there, and we just made a battle plan in London after the strike, but again, I would say it’s EP Sanne Wohlenberg and all the team and the problem-solving that they did, the workarounds that they made — just genius.
Your brother Dan Gilroy is a writer on the show, and John Gilroy is the editor and EP. Can you talk about the dynamic between the three of you while making the show?
Well, the amount of involvement is radically different between the two of them. I mean, Johnny was with me on Rogue One. When he’s in, he’s there all the time. Johnny moved to London five years ago. He’s almost been like a hostage for me. We started shooting during Covid, because we were one of the first shows that started back up.
It almost does a really great disservice to describe him in any way as an editor. Even when that is his job description, I mean, you look at his credits, he is the master builder. Obviously, with all the things that happen in post and all the editorial and all the insane attention to detail that he puts into everything. But it has so much more to do with how we construct the show. There’s so many side projects. What’s an example?
Just the funeral in season one or the end of episode 203, the wedding, where we have multiple stories colliding in a big crescendo, and we have music, and we have everything going on, Johnny and I have learned how to do that over the years. It’s a real construction project. We gave (director) Ben Caron and (DP) Damian Garcia the benefit of everything. Get your iPhones out. Videotape everything. Bring it back to the cutting room. We’ll cut mock versions of it all the way through. We’ll take that out. We’ll put all the music on it. We’ll see where we bump.
In 203, we’re using this very unusual EDM dance music that’s taking place at the wedding. We’re using that as the wraparound for a huge crescendo of different stories. How’s that going to work? So, again, we’re side hustling that and building it. Johnny’s working on that and filling in all over the place. It’s total filmmaking, what he does.
What’s your volley with Dan?
On season 2, when I went over to Scotland, I was with Diego Luna, and we decided we couldn’t possibly do five seasons. We have four blocks of three episodes, and we need four years. What if we did a block per year? So, I sketched that out, got approval from Disney and Kathleen Kennedy.
I had to prove that the concept would work. So, I had to write the top and the tail of every block. I had to write the first scene of every one. So, I have the shape of the season. I write the first three episodes in; I write them for the room. They’re not perfect. I go in with all that to the room, and then Danny and Beau (Willimon), and this time, we added Tom Bissell because I was really afraid that I was going to get short-handed on action, and he’s a Star Wars freak, and it was good to have him in there.
We bounced through the whole season, with Luke Hull, the production designer, Sanne Wohlenberg in the room every minute. I’ve already been working with Luke for months on designing Ghorman and designing the Senate, and what we’re going to be able to afford. Then the guys come in, and we go through it beat by beat by beat. We beat it out, and Beau Willimon stands at the white board like a real showrunner. I worked for Beau on House of Cards.
So, Beau stands up, and we have people writing everything down, and we just speed through the whole thing, and kind of divvy up who gets which blocks. I figure out who seems the most suited for each block. We knew Tom Bissell was going to take the end, because it was going to be the Star Wars leading into Rogue One, and that would keep us the most honest, but we’ve all beaten out the story. Those guys go, and they do their drafts for the whole block, and they turn them in, and they do rewrites, and we budget off that, and we cast off that, and we eyeball the show, but then they go away. They’re not around, but the writing continued. I’m beating the shit out of my scripts and rewriting those. Then I’m beating the shit out of their scripts and rewriting those, and so, the writing never stops. It all has to come from this depth. Their secondary huge value, which is, to me, as important as coming to the writers’ room and getting these drafts, is they’re a sounding board later on for me to call on.
Danny, before five and six the first time on season one, so he did Aldhani. When we did Aldhani, there was no COVID. It was supposed to be 10,000 indigenous people there. It was a whole different vibe. It was a whole different story, and when COVID happened, they were like man, you’d be lucky if we get you 150 up there. So, that all had to be rewritten. He’s off on another project. I’m doing it, but I got to run it by him all the time. I’m also talking to Beau all the time. All of them, calling and sending them scenes and seeing what they think.
If I rewrite something that they did, I want to make sure that they know why, and again, budgetary issues are the only really point of intersection that we have with Disney and Lucasfilm. We don’t really get any notes, ever, creatively. We just deal with the budgetary issues that we’ve had along the way, and sometimes they have really big ramifications, but they’re there to, like, launch the boat, and they’re there to provide a sounding board for me, because I’m in an echo chamber a lot of times on the script, and so, Danny’s a drive-by; Johnny’s an everyday grinder for us.
There’s been a report that Andor is the most expensive Star Wars show of all time costing $645M for two seasons. If you take 24 episodes divided by two hours, that’s 12 movies. That’s 12 two-hour movies. That works out to be around $54M for each movie.
We made eight Star Wars movies in five years. Forbes did a huge piece where they completely debunked the whole piece, the same way that you did, and they figured it out by, you know, screen time, and we came out at the bottom. We’re the most efficient.
Is there more Star Wars in you, or is this it?
Not that I can imagine at this point. No, not my intention right now. No, I’ve been doing it for 10…it’s 10 years now, between Rogue One and this.
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