‘Rogue One’ Director Talks Cameos And Easter Eggs

While most moviegoers will spend their first time watching Rogue One simply being dazzled by its spectacle, some will have their eyes peeled for cameos and Easter Eggs that other viewers probably missed, which they can then reveal to the world.

J.J Abrams managed to squeeze a hefty amount of hidden treasures into Star Wars: The Force Awakens last year, but Gareth Edwards, who directed Rogue One, has now admitted that he decided to hold back with his own cameos and Easter Eggs as he didn’t want it to adversely affect the finished product.

Gareth Edwards made this admission to CinemaBlend, revealing that while he’d have loved nothing more than to constantly put in little doffs of the cap to previous Star Wars adventures, it would have just come across as too coincidental and corny.

Edwards explained.

“One of the things we didn’t want to do was make the universe seem small. If you start to have too many of everything, it just seems like ‘That’s a fluke.’ And you want it to feel like, for me, it’s not Tatooine or Hoth. For me they shouldn’t be New York, Paris, London. They should be some obscure places. Not everyone is at them. And so you have to let go! We have little things in there, and obviously being Star Wars you can… certain characters and things are justified to exist.”

During the discussion, Gareth Edwards admitted that while he’d originally thrown as many Easter Eggs and cameos into his ideas and the film as possible they actually started to organically disappear the more and more he progressed on the production. Gareth Edwards spoke about how he went through a slow process of realizing that the moments he previously craved to somehow get into the final edit of Rogue One just weren’t necessary.

“It was a process of me grabbing everything – ‘I want all these. Please! We have to have these in the movie’ — and then slowly over time, people at Lucasfilm going ‘You don’t need this one, Gareth. You don’t need this one.’ And what’s funny is that you do that and you feel a bit bad about it, and then the next filmmaker turns up and they grab everything, ‘I want all these!’ It’s like you have to go through that process of ‘I want everything!’ and then it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s be realistic.'”

Of course, there are still some cameos and Easter Eggs in Rogue One, but with the film still not released in the United States, it’d be wrong to divulge them all here. Even though it has already hit cinemas across certain sections of the world.

Let’s hope that they’re able to match up to the cameos in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That’s going to be a pretty tough job, though, as The Force Awakens saw Ewan McGregor record an uncredited vocal cameo as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Bill Hader, and Ben Schwartz credited as the “Vocal Consultants” for BB-8, Simon Pegg play Unkar Plutt, and Warwick Davis, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Daniel Craig, Michael Giacchino, Nigel Godrich, and Lin-Manuel Miranda each contributing, too.

Rogue One is all set to make a mammoth splash at the box office in the coming days and weeks. Fresh off the back of its hugely impressive batch of reviews, which have seen it score a Rotten Tomatoes score of 84 percent, Rogue One is predicted to make somewhere between $120 and $150 million domestically alone, and there’s an outside chance that it could even rival Finding Dory’s worldwide opening haul of $486.3 million, which is the largest of any film in 2016.

Despite the excitement, it’s not expected to match The Force Awakens’ $2.068 billion haul. But it is predicted to eclipse Captain America: Civil War as the most successful film of 2016, and it will need to make $1.153 billion to do so.

[Featured Image by Lucasfilm]