Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is now playing in cinemas around the world, and the film is so much better than we ever thought it would or could be (read our review here). While it continues to batter the box-office, director Gareth Edwards has been speaking to UK film magazine Little White Lies about how he prepared to help the movie, and naturally, he watched A New Hope to get some ideas.
The big news is that he watched a fully-restored, 4K version of the 1977 original Star Wars movie, presented to him by Lucasfilm. This is what he told LWL:
“On day one, we were in Lucasfilm in San Francisco with Industrial Light and Magic and John [Knoll), our supervisor, he said that they’ve got a brand new 4K restoration print of A New Hope – it had literally just been finished.”
What?
“He suggested we sit and watch it. Obviously, I was up for that. Me, the writer, lots of the story people and John all sat down, we all had our little notepads, we were all ready for this. I’ll add that I’ve seen A New Hope hundreds of times. So I was sat there, ready to take notes and really delve under the surface of the film. You have the Fox fanfare, then scrolling text with ‘A long time ago…’, and then the main music begins. Next thing we knew it had ended, and we looked around to one another and just thought – shit, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it without getting carried away. It’s really hard to get into an analytical filmmaker headspace with this film. It just turns you into a child.”
Whether the 4K version will ever show in public or get a general release remains to be seen (next year is the 40th anniversary), but it’s pretty cool that it exists anyway. Also, is it the original version, or Lucas’s special edition? It wasn’t mentioned in the interview, and obviously we’re hoping for the former.
More on it if and when it comes our way.
