A Version Of 'Rogue One' Exists Assembled From Footage Of Hundreds Of Other Movies

There is extensive preparation for any blockbuster movie. When you have a multi-million dollar project that will be employing thousands of people for months, you have to know what you're doing. That's why there's a whole period of time called pre-production when filmmakers figure out what the movie is going to be and what they're going to shoot on set. And when it comes to the preparation for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, there was a rather unique approach to figuring out that out.

Editor Colin Goudie reveals that before the screenplay was even completed, director Gareth Edwards had him use a scene-by-scene story breakdown to create a cut of Rogue One that was composed of scenes from hundreds of other movies. How did this help them in the process of planning the movie? Find out more about this Rogue One alternate cut below.

Yahoo UK sat down with editor Colin Goudie (and John Gilroy) to discuss their work on the movie (which included some discussion about the reshoots), and in their chat, Goudie revealed the existence of this alternate cut of Rogue One made up of footage from other films:

There was no screenplay, there was just a story breakdown at that point, scene by scene. He got me to rip hundreds of movies and basically make 'Rogue One' using other films so that they could work out how much dialogue they actually needed in the film.

It's very simple to have a line [in the script] that reads "Krennic's shuttle descends to the planet", now that takes maybe 2-3 minutes in other films, but if you look at any other 'Star Wars' film you realise that only takes 45 seconds or a minute of screen time. So by making the whole film that way – I used a lot of the 'Star Wars' films – but also hundreds of other films too, it gave us a good idea of the timing.

So using a combination of footage from Star Wars movies, and hundreds of other movies, Goudie planned Rogue One as best he could in order to figure out how it would be paced. Thankfully, he provided a couple of examples that he used while putting this assembly together:

For example the sequence of them breaking into the vault I was ripping the big door closing in 'Wargames' to work out how long does a vault door take to close.

So that's what I did and that was three months work to do that and that had captions at the bottom which explained the action that was going to be taking place, and two thirds of the screen was filled with the concept art that had already been done and one quarter, the bottom corner, was the little movie clip to give you how long that scene would actually take.

Then I used dialogue from other movies to give you a sense of how long it would take in other films for someone to be interrogated. So for instance, when Jyn gets interrogated at the beginning of the film by the Rebel council, I used the scene where Ripley gets interrogated in 'Aliens'.

Since Disney and Lucasfilm would never be able to secure the rights to all the clips of the movies used in this makeshift cut of Rogue One in order to release it as a special feature, we'll presumably never get to see it. But that's something that I would love to see put together. Maybe Colin Goudie will release an extensive list of the movies he used in this pre-production cut of Rogue One and the internet can take it from there.