Even if Rogue One didn’t do it for you, you’d be hard-pressed saying the final scene involving everyone’s favourite brooding Sith Lord didn’t float your corvette. So, how did director Gareth Edwards go about capturing Darth Vader at his prime? WIRED caught up with Edwards to find out.
In the above video, which is a little over five-and-a-half minutes, Edwards shares a number of details about the scene, including how it came together just four months before release and the cinematic tricks employed to make sure Vader was “badass” enough.
One snippet I found interesting involves the Death Star plans themselves, which take the form of a small, credit card-sized device with a yellow disc in its centre.
Always striving for accuracy, it took a bit of effort to make sure the prop matched what fans had seen before… regardless of how brief its previous appearance:
What’s interesting about that card actually is that there’s no record whatsoever of what that looks like. The only reference is in the Blu-ray of A New Hope. There’s one close-up where [Princess Leia] starts to slide it [into R2-D2] and that’s all we had to base this card on.
Edwards goes on to say they he may or may not have made off with that particular prop, making him the true thief of the Death Star plans. Edwards himself also plays a crucial role in the film (as an extra) — in fact, the director is convinced, canon-wise, the original trilogy would never have happened without his character.