During Star Wars Celebration in London last week, Lucasfilm debuted an awesome behind the scenes reel for ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’. Fans got a glimpse at what director Gareth Edwards has in store for Jyn Erso and her team this December, but some of the coolest bits came when we got to see some of the new creatures that will be featured in the movie. And though we didn’t really get to meet them properly during that presentation, the filmmaker is now introducing us to two of the more memorable aliens fighting for the Rebellion.
During a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Edwards talked discussed the process of picking the aliens that would inhabit his film alongside Felicity Jones, Diego Luna, and the rest of the cast. First, he revealed that he basically let Neal Scanlan’s creature department have free reign with their designs. After they compiled all of their ideas, they basically had a casting session:
“It wasn’t like, ‘We’ve got this character, we need to design a creature for it, and here’s what this creature’s like’. It was more like we told the creature department to come up with a thousand ideas, and then it was like casting the movie. There were walls and walls of these different types of characters that we could’ve picked from. We just went through them, like, ‘God, he’s fascinating…. Who’s that…? And she looks amazing…! And what’s that there?’ Slowly, we got it down to our top hundred, and then it got even more refined.”
Edwards then went into specific characters that particularly stood out in the reel. To get the ball rolling, he started with the big-mouthed soldier Pao. According to EW, he’s sort of a platoon leader that is coordinating the charge into battle. But the director shared that this role was born after seeing the character design:
“There was this great design of this creature that’s mouth would open really wide, and he looked like he was really good at giving orders and shouting at people during a battle. I was like, ‘We’ve got to give him that moment in the film,’ and so [Pao] was born out of that.”
Then Edwards moved on to a character that certainly stole the show at the Star Wars Celebration panel. Remembered for his mad cackling while manning a machine gun, Bistan is a gunner on the U-Wing, a new starship that acts as troop transport. And though there isn’t too much information about him, the filmmaker insinuates that while this soldier doesn’t do much in the film, what he does do will stick with the audience:
“It’s not necessarily a character that we get to know, but I think he has a very memorable, iconic look. [Bistan is] one of my favorites. I can’t give away what happens to him.”
What do you think about these two characters in ‘Rogue One’? Are there any more aliens in the film that you want to know more about? Let us know in the comments.
‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ starring Felicity Jones, Mads Mikkelsen, Ben Mendelsohn, Alan Tudyk, Donnie Yen, Forest Whitaker, Diego Luna, Riz Ahmed, and Jiang Wen infiltrates theaters on December 16th, 2016.
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