By George & Josh Bate
Official Star Wars art books always rank among our favorite releases from a galaxy far, far away in a given year. The extraordinarily detailed books offer unprecedented access behind the scenes of Star Wars movies and shows. Filled to the brim with beautiful concept art, detailed descriptions of production, and tidbits about scrapped ideas and hidden details, Star Wars art books consistently enhance one’s appreciation for the movies and shows they are based on.
Abrams Books recently published The Art of Star Wars: Andor, which is described by writer Dan Gilroy in the book’s afterword as “the definitive behind-the-scenes exploration of the making of Andor.” The book, which is written by Star Wars veteran Phil Szostak, chronicles the making of both seasons of Andor from beginning to end with astonishing detail and profound insights.
Having read The Art of Star Wars: Andor and immersed ourselves in every page of its rich writing and illustrations, we’re breaking down everything we learned from the new book, including hidden details, Easter Eggs, scrapped ideas, production information, and more.
Details of Andor Before Tony Gilroy’s Involvement Are Revealed
The book provides an overview of Jared Bush’s original pitch for Andor. Bush currently serves as chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios and is best known for co-writing and co-directing Zootopia and Zootopia 2. He also wrote the screenplays for Moana, Moana 2, and the upcoming live-action remake.
Bush’s proposed names for the Andor show were “Star Wars: Alliance” and “Star Wars: Andor Five.”
Check out a full overview of Bush’s original pitch for Andor here.
Rogue One was “the Greatest Movie Gamble of All Time”
The heroic crew of Rogue One all perish during the Battle of Scarif. After successfully transmitting the Death Star plans, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor are killed by the superlaser’s shockwave. Their companions—including the droid K-2SO, Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus, and Bodhi Rook—are all gunned down or killed by explosions.
Rogue One‘s ending was quite the daring creative call from Lucasfilm given that few, if any, major blockbusters conclude by killing all of their main characters.
“It was the greatest movie gamble of all time,” says Tony Gilroy about Rogue One and the fact that all the protagonists die at the end.
Andor represented an interesting challenge for the creative team as the fate of its lead character is decided and widely known prior to the very first episode. The art book notes: “As filmmaker Orson Welles observed, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” As necessitated by the sequel trilogy of films, life went on for Star Wars’ legendary original trilogy heroes Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Han Solo. But even they could not escape their own mortality. And so, life goes on for all of us.”
How Tony Gilroy Aimed to Make Andor An Entirely Different Star Wars Story
The opening paragraph of Gilroy’s manifesto for Andor reads: “The design must crush. Must be fresh and forward. Highest bar. Take the visual SW’s canon and pervert it into something real. That’s the goal here: Mad but real.”
Series creator Tony Gilroy identifies that “mania” is the “secret weapon” that made Andor as great as it was.
“Mania was our secret weapon,” Gilroy describes in his foreword. “Mania plus time and resources. Targeted mania. Hive-mind mania. Mania with a deadline that required focused decisions.”
Star Wars Rebels Informed the Logo for Andor
The original Andor logo envisioned by Tony Gilroy and Luke Hull was an “anti-Imperial, pro-rebel graffiti painted on the brick walls of Ferrix.”
Artist Baz Gingell designed the logo for the series and was aware of its similarities to Sabine’s symbol from Star Wars Rebels.
“I found it difficult to ignore the bird notion set up in Star Wars Rebels with Sabine’s phoenix,” explains Gingell. “But I saw this symbol as more of a dangerous talon than a sweeping bird. It’s a weapon.”
Hidden Details, Production Information, Scrapped Ideas, and Easter Eggs from Season 1
The first season of Andor was internally known as ‘The Education of Cassian Andor.’ “He’s a nobody,” Gilroy says. “He’s a disillusioned, very unhappy nobody. [But] there’s a knock at the door. The consequences just keep coming. And the revolution, and the machine, and the Empire – there’s just no escape.”
Young Cassian was described as ‘Mowgli-esque’ by Tony Gilroy. Mowgli is the protagonist of The Jungle Book.
The original plan was to film Kenari, Cassian’s world of origin, in French Guiana or Thailand, but COVID travel restrictions made them film on Black Park behind Pinewood. This is where Mustafar and Ajan Kloss in The Rise of Skywalker were filmed.
Tony Gilroy wanted to cast a little girl to play Cassian’s sister who could play the character for a while so that she could feature in “potential dream sequences/memories in [the] future.” Ultimately, this idea did not come to fruition and Cassian’s sister only appeared in flashbacks.
The Rebel leader Anto Kreegyr is played by artist Baz Gingell. “Who’s the biggest Star Wars fan that we have?” asked Gilroy. “Oh my god, that’s easy. That’s Baz!”
Cassian’s tribe is awestruck by the /Republic crew like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Concept art of Cassian’s adoptive father Clem seems to be based on Vikings actor Travis Fimmel.
Production designer Luke Hull explains why Tony Gilroy “put together a team of people where Star Wars didn’t necessarily come first.” “You don’t realize how much it makes people behave slightly strangely, as well,” Hull explains. “It brings baggage. You have to respect Star Wars, for sure. And you have to understand it. But I also think it’s a shame if you don’t try and do something bold with it.”
Cassian’s pistol was inspired by the Bryar pistol from Star Wars: Dark Forces.
The aesthetic of Morlana One was inspired by Blade Runner and In the Mood for Love.
The jukebox in the Morlana One brothel is a “pimped-up version” of the cantina droid detector from A New Hope.
A scene involving Syril was deleted from Season 1. “When he’s on the ship flying to Ferrix, the bigger officer in charge hands Syril a gun for the first time, in pieces,” Martyn Doust explains. “Syril never really had a weapon. So, the officer takes it back off him, puts it all together, and then hands it back to Syril.”
The control panels of the Pre-Mor base in Season One were inspired by the control panels on the disused and dusty base on Crait in The Last Jedi.
The Pre-Mor ship is an intentional homage to the Republic gunship.
The light effects on B2 were iPhones built into his body, which were then controlled by another iPhone on set.
B2 is voiced by Dave Chapman, who also puppeteered B2’s head during filming and did the head movement on BB-8 in the sequel trilogy.
The team made an entire scaled map of Ferrix, planning out all of the geography and buildings of the location.
The Little Mermaid inadvertently influenced the production of Andor. “Out of my window, every day in my [Pinewood[ office, Little Mermaid had the whole everything in the back there,” Gilroy explained in referring to the backlot where Jakku village and Maz’s castle in The Force Awakens, Jedha City in Rogue One, and the Kessel landing area in Solo were designed. “Right out my window. But we couldn’t have it. So I just found it incredibly frustrating that we were going to go to Marlow and couldn’t be there.” Instead, the site of the former Little Marlow Sewage Treatment Works in Buckinghamshire was scouted as a potential home for Ferrix. “It was just this flat piece-of-shit land. It was really far away. It was near a garbage dump. It was flat, and it wasn’t big enough. I was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me, man’ I was really depressed at that point.”
Gilroy never got to visit Ferrix due to COVID restrictions. “It just sucks. I know every street [of Ferrix]. I know every corner. I know every piece of it. But I never went there.”
Ferrix was inspired by the Chittagong Ship Breaking Yard in Bangladesh.
B2’s sturdy, planted pose was inspired by Looney Tunes’’ Butch/Spike
B2EMO was named after Tony Gilroy’s son Sam’s dog, a corgi named Bemo.
B2’s design was also influenced by sliding puzzle games, Transformers toys, and multi-tools.
Maarva’s house was inspired by 20th century Italian American architect Paolo Soleri, particularly Arcosanti, the ecologically experimental town built in central Arizona.
The engines made for Bix’s shop in Season 1 were reused in Season 2 for the Yavin hangar.
The anvil for the bell tower on Ferrix was scripted as being made of beskar.
Luthen’s ship was designed to “feel like it was made by the same factory that made the [Millennium] Falcon,” says Luke Hull.
Tony Gilroy proposed an aesthetic for Coruscant that had “non-Marvel funk.”
“How do we take that aesthetic I was talking about on page one and deliver that to an environment like this that’s gonna constantly want to pull you in a cheesy direction?
I’d need The Lower Depths and High Society.
I’d want non-Marvel funk and non-soapy, wealth-porn slick.
I’d want it vibrant but blemished. Crazy, credible, and fascinating. How to make these rooms and faces and decor – how to make it feel…. Real? – Lived in and lush?
How do you make it felt like someone built it? Someone cleans it? How do you make it feel like it goes off the frame?
Yes, it’s got to be designed with a capital “D” and trippy with a big “T” – and yes it’s Star Wars’s, 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.
How do you get all that and avoid the cliche sci-fi chiaroscuro -”
Tony Gilroy is candid about his distaste for how Coruscant was depicted in previous Star Wars series. “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,” explains Gilroy.
The team took advise from Amy Henning, creative director of the Uncharted games, who was once developing the scrapped underworld video game Star Wars: 1313. “Don’t put weird on weird…. You don’t want to put a crazy camera move in a fantastic environment, because then you have two levels of weird on top of each other. And the fantastic environment becomes less believable.”
The Carrie Fisher Building at Lucasfilm headquarters is now “just full of all Andor stuff,” says Rebecca Aleway.
Props from The Goonies, Labyrinth, Prometheus, Indiana Jones, Clone Wars, and Rebels were frozen in carbonate blocks and included in the background of Luthen’s shop.
Concept art of Perrin appears to resemble Alexander Skarsgård, whose father Stellan plays Luthen in the serial.
The ISB conference room bears similarities to Dr. Stangelove.
Heert was originally conceived as a blue-skinned alien, perhaps a Chiss like Thrawn.
The kitchen unit for Eedy Karn’s apartment was based on Ralph McQuarrie’s Wookiee kitchen design for The Star Wars Holiday Special.
In Gilroy’s mind, Luthen Rael’s powerful speech to Supervisor Jung was a “cri de coeur,” a cry from the heart.
An AK-47 was the basis for one of the weapons used by Vel’s crew in the Aldhani heist.
The device housing Marek’s manifesto was inspired by a Sanyo walkman.
Kristofer Hivju, who played the fan-favorite Wildling leader Tormund Giantsbane in Game of Thrones, was used as the basis for concept art for the leader of the Aldhani locals.
Niamos was designed “as a strip of land, like a band around the whole planet. Like Dubai, it was really built up and had beaches on both sides,” says Luke Hull.
The production design team drew inspiration from the kitchen sink in the Lars homestead in A New Hope to craft the appliances in Cassian’s hotel room in Niamos.
The blasters wielded by the troopers on Niamos are pistol variants of an E-11, the blaster that Boba Fett uses.
The prison transport on Niamos is a variation of the Imperial dropship from The Mandalorian Season 2.
Tony Gilroy and Luke Hull decided that Andor should take place almost exclusively in the light of day, a contrast to the frequent use of the dark in Star Wars.
The design of the Narkina 5 prison drew inspiration from George Lucas’ THX 1138.
The final day of principal photography on Andor Season 1 was when the Narkina 5 prisoners ran and jumped for their lives into the water.
Concept art from the Narkina 5 prison reveals that the prisoners were originally not all going to be human. For instance, a Mon Calamari can be spotted as one of the prisoners in concept art by Carr.
The quadjumper that Melshi and Cassian steal to escape off world from the Narkina 5 planet is the same kind of quadjumper that Rey and Finn were going to use to escape Jakku before it was blown up by First Order TIE Fighters in The Force Awakens.
Saw Gerrera was originally created by George Lucas for his unfinished/unproduced live-action television series Star Wars: Underworld. Lucas’ original plan was to include Saw in an episode of The Clone Wars to “plant story seeds that would later pay off in his live-action series.”
The double beam laser of Luthen’s ship was inspired by the spinning blades that come out of James Bond’s Aston Martin tires in Goldfinger and the one-off laser weapon in the Japanese garden fight at the end of Iron Man 2.
Season 1 of Andor features approximately 3,800 VFX shots.
Delays in The Acolyte production meant that various behind-the-scenes crew had to step back from Season 2 to work on Leslye Headland’s Star Wars series.
The headset used to torture Bix drew inspiration from Lobot’s headpiece in The Empire Strikes Back.
The music played during Maarva’s funeral was played live on set by performers during filming.
Hidden Details, Production Information, Scrapped Ideas, and Easter Eggs from Season 2
The production team’s nickname for Cassian’s home on Yavin was Chez Andor.
Andor Season 2 featured more creatures than Season 1 due to fans’ response that the first season did not have enough aliens/creators, according to Neal Scanlan.
The basis for the TIE Avenger was Kylo Ren’s TIE fighter.
The inside of the TIE Avenger was based on Flight of the Navigator.
Regarding the reveal that the planet Cassian is on with the Maya Pei Brigade is Yavin, Gilroy said, “We were going to make it some random planet at one point. [I asked], like, ‘Can I do this? There’s nothing there before that point?’ [Pablo Hidalgo] goes, ‘Not really. Not canonically.’ I go, ‘Okay. We can be in Yavin.’ That’ll be a Twitter moment, you know?”
The crops on Mina-Rau were real and planted a full year before filming began.
Mina-Rau is inspired by a place in China called Luoping County, an eastern Yunnan province north of Vietnam known for its vast fields of bright yellow canola surrounding hundreds of dark karst hills.”
The SAG-AFTRA strikes meant that filming for the Mina-Rau sequences was delayed. To preserve the crops, the team spent months putting them in eight-by-four sheets of polystyrene and stored them in the Bond stage at Pinewood.
The agricultural droids on Mina-Rau were originally designed for The Force Awakens.
The shots of Brasso on a speeder were captured in-camera. Brasso sat on a practical bike and foreground grain was placed in between cameras and whipped by.
Brasso’s speeder bike was inspired by bikes from Easy Rider.
The mountain range in the background of Chandrila was added later on to be consistent with how the planet was depicted in Marvel Comics’ 2024 Battle of Jakku comic book series.
A creature who attended Leida Mothma’s wedding is named Gony Tilroy, a spoonerism of Tony Gilroy.
The COMPOR (Commission for the Protection of the Republic) logo seen during Krennic’s meeting with Imperial officials about Ghorman includes a hidden Sith symbol.
Saw Gerrera and his crew are located on D’Qar in Season 2, because the location they shot at in Season 1 could have collapsed at any moment. With two weeks’ notice, the team was forced to quickly find a replacement for Saw’s base and landed on D’Qar. They filmed at Greenham Common, which was once a Royal Air Force airfield and station that housed ground-launched nuclear cruise missiles for 11 years, starting in 1980.
The big statues in front of the Senate Building on Coruscant do not appear in the show as the shots of the Senate Building are meant to be from the other side of the building.
“I can say that they have not yet spotted them all,” says Tim Wildgoose regarding Easter Eggs in Luthen’s gallery in Andor.
Gorst’s torture chair in Season 2 was a converted barber’s chair.
A Dathomirian skull is among the artifacts in Sculdun’s office.
“The [Lina Soh Medical Center] was incredibly controversial. There were a lot of struggles with the hospital and some very unhappy meetings about it while I was in London,” says Tony Gilroy.
Naboo in the Kleya flashbacks were shot where the deleted waterfall sequence on Naboo in The Phantom Menace was filmed.
Ghorman was inspired by Mecca and Medina. “There’s an Islamic formalism to some of the design of the city, and you don’t want it to be Europe. It’s not a European city, at all,” says Gilroy.
The outdoor Ghorman backlot set was previously used for the climactic duel between Rey and Kylo Ren on the wreckage of the second Death Star in The Rise of Skywalker.
Dan Gilroy envisioned the ninth episode of Andor Season 2 as a “self-contained horror story, in which a KX unit gets trapped inside a Yavin-bound tanker and begins hunting down its rebel occupants. Read more details about the episode here.
K-2SO’s birth coincides with Bix Caleen’s departure from Yavin, which parallels the simultaneous birth of the Skywalker twins with the loss of Padme Amidala and Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith.
The freedom fighters on Ghorman were inspired by the French and Italian resistance in World War II.
The hard drive cartridges used by the Ghorman resistance were based on a Nintendo NES cartridge.
Season 2 featured approximately 4,100 VFX shots, up from the first season’s 3,8000.
The rig that holds K-2SO as he is ‘birthed’ was inspired by the laboratory table that held Frankenstein’s monster in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), which also inspired by the medical slab upon which Anakin was sealed in Darth Vader’s mask in Revenge of the Sith.
Dan Gilroy says the team had a “hunger to redefine what Star Wars can be.”
A scrapped plotline from the series would have revealed that Perrin Fartha was aware of his wife Mon Mothma’s allegiance to the Rebellion but ultimately chose not to intervene.
The Art of Star Wars: Andor is out now, courtesy of Abrams Books