Tony Gilroy Had One Rule For Andor’s Coruscant Scenes
“I want an audience inside the story, not watching it.”
Andor creator Tony Gilroy has always been pretty outspoken about the things he’s not a fan of, particularly within the galaxy that his series calls home. The writer-director even has an issue with one of the most beloved planets within the Star Wars galaxy, Coruscant. In The Art of Star Wars: Andor — a new behind-the-scenes book that details the creative process behind the show — Gilroy called the famous locale “cheesy” and “soapy,” the opposite of the grounded feel he was searching for in Andor.
“The only piece of Coruscant that I liked, that really felt like it could be part of our show, was the bit that Gareth [Edwards] shot with Ben Mendelsohn and Mad Mikkelsen, a brief little flashback in Rogue [One: A Star Wars Story],” Gilroy told the Art of Andor author Phil Szostak.
The flashback in question is told from the perspective of Rogue One’s main heroine, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), as she watches her father Galen (Mikkelsen) entertain his boss — and the main villain of the piece — Orson Krennic (Mendelsohn). As a scene or an exploration of Coruscant, it couldn’t be briefer, but it does go a long way in establishing a lived-in feel for a planet that’s always been tied to one campy gimmick.
With so much time spent on Coruscant, Gilroy turned to Rogue One for inspiration.
Since its introduction in Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire in 1991, Coruscant has gone through plenty of aesthetic iterations. In early concepts (like the Star Wars: TIE Fighter game released in 1994), the planet was defined by impossibly tall skyscrapers, or (like in art by the Brothers Hildebrandt) pyramids, floating highways, and a sci-fi approximation of gothic architecture. When George Lucas brought all that into the canon films — starting with the special edition of Return of the Jedi, released in 1997 — it was with a slightly more grounded feel. Still, the prequels couldn’t quite shake the “soapy” tone that Gilroy so astutely pointed out.
Like so many great Star Wars concepts, the idea of Coruscant was often more promising than its execution. If the whole planet is one big city, why do we so rarely see the upper levels? The possibilities for this setting were endless, yet the prequels confined their Coruscant-set scenes to the Jedi Temple, Padmé Amidala’s (Natalie Portman) apartments, and an intriguing (yet again, brief!) excursion to the opera. It didn’t always feel like a tangible place. That’s why, when tasked with bringing it to life again in Andor, Gilroy had one rule: make it feel lived-in.
Andor didn’t sacrifice Star Wars’ trademark scale for realism, but split the difference between the two.
Gilroy detailed his thought process in The Art of Andor, citing Marvel’s Cinematic Universe as one of the worlds he wanted desperately not to emulate. “Yes, it’s got to be designed with a capital ‘D’ and trippy with a big ‘T,’” Gilroy said. “[A]nd yes, it’s Star Wars, but if we’re gonna live here for five years, it’s got to be alive. It’s got to have some error in it. I want an audience inside the story, not watching it... I’d want non-Marvel funk and non-soapy...”
In Andor, Coruscant retained the “crazy, credible, and fascinating” look and feel from earlier Star Wars projects. “How do you make it felt like someone built it?” Gilroy asked. “Someone cleans it? How do you make it feel like it goes off the frame?”
The answer lay partially in real-life locations. Andor’s production design team, led by Luke Hill, found gorgeous locales around Europe (like the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain) to give Coruscant that grittier feel. That alone helped distance it from the heavily rendered look of the planet in the prequels, which Lucas mostly achieved with wall-to-wall green screens. It also explored the Lower Depths as well as the peaks of High Society, offering a fuller portrait of a world we’d previously only seen one true side of.
Luthen Rael confronts his Imperial contact in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, Spain.
The result was one of the best renderings of a Star Wars story ever put to film. Andor is one of very few Star Wars projects that doesn’t feel hampered by its aesthetic aspirations. Gilroy and his creative team thread the needle between sci-fi grandeur and real, tangible worldbuilding: it was breathtaking when the show first premiered, and it’ll live on as the gold standard for Star Wars.
