By George & Josh Bate
No one gives an interview like Tony Gilroy. Anyone who has followed the press tour and awards campaign for Andor over the past year will know that few filmmakers give as thought-provoking and eloquent responses to questions as Gilroy. Now that the dust has settled on the hit Star Wars series, Gilroy was interviewed by The Hollywood Reporter and spoke at length about the political relevance of the series, rumors of Dave Filoni disliking Andor, the future of Lucasfilm, and more.
The plot of Andor is playing out in the real world
A key topic of conversation in the new THR interview was the extent to which Andor parallels disturbing developments in contemporary American politics. So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible [in Andor],” said Gilroy. “How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it.”
Gilroy pulls no punches in his criticisms of the Trump administration in the interview, saying, “They have an incredible appetite. They have an incredible flood-the-zone ground game, but they have no narrative ability. They don’t really have a [Joseph] Goebbels or a Mike Deaver in there. They don’t have a presentation. They don’t have a Leni Riefenstahl in there. They do not have a way to get their message out in a narrative fashion. They’re terrible at that, and they’re never going to be good at it.”
Gilroy believes that the administration’s primary objective is to get rid of elections entirely. “So I don’t think they’re going to get over, but I think the ultimate goal was always to get rid of the elections completely and just do a complete takeover,” Gilroy stated. “I don’t see any other plausible endgame for them.”
A focal point of Season 2 was the Ghorman massacre, which resulted from calculated Imperial manipulations and the spread of misinformation. In the interview, Gilroy compared Ghorman to Greenland. “Ghorman is Greenland,” Gilroy remarked. “Ghorman is anything. ‘We want the rare earth, we want this.’ It really is just a crude laundry list of moves that they have, and my earlier answer stands for the way it rhymes with the show.”
“Disappointed would be too strong a word” to describe Gilroy’s feelings about the Lucasfilm transition
In response to Kathleen Kennedy’s exit from Lucasfilm, some have expressed concerns that the studio will be more hesitant to take on riskier projects. Gilroy does not seem to be disappointed by the direction Lucasfilm is heading in, however.
“Disappointed would be too strong a word,” Gilroy said. “What would I feel? I don’t know. I’m not an investor. I don’t have the responsibility. I don’t have that portfolio on my desk. I don’t know how I would behave if it was my ass on the line and there’s X amount of money. The problem is there’s no inexpensive way to do these shows [or movies]. I’m watching the [Game of] Thrones spinoff now, the low-key, the low-fi one [A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms]. It’s very refreshing in that it’s so nice and down there.”
Gilroy’s approach if he was leading Lucasfilm? Swing away.
Gilroy hypothesized that, if he were in charge of Lucasfilm, he would commission creatively riskier and subversive projects.
“If I was going to do that job, I would rather go down swinging. I’d rather go down in flames. As low-risk as my life is, my creative life is pretty high-risk, so I’d like to swing away. Safety has never been one of my navigational principles. But disappointed? It doesn’t matter to me what they do. I wish them luck. I really do.”
Did Dave Filoni actually dislike Andor?
The Wrap recently reported that Dave Filoni was not a fan of Andor, something Lucasfilm was quick to deny. Gilroy commented on this rumor in the new interview, shutting down any idea that there were creative disagreements between he and Filoni.
“No,” Gilroy said. “We’ve only met a couple times, and we’ve only had a half-a-dozen conversations over the last ten years. Seriously. I saw Jon Favreau at a scoring session once. We’ve always gotten along with those guys, and we’ve never had anything but high praise for everything that they’ve done. We only have our show because of them, and we’ve always said that was true. There’s no Andor without The Mandalorian. It would not exist. So it has never been anything but cordial and pleasant, ever, ever, ever, ever. I don’t know anything that you don’t know. I really don’t.”
“We’re proud of the show”
Tony Gilroy did not mince words in expressing his pride in making Andor. “God, we’re proud of the show,” the series creator said. “That’s our sustaining takeaway. We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end. It eats itself up in the end. So this will have been an incredible waste of time, an incredibly wasted opportunity and an incredibly dark period in America’s history that it may never recover from.”
Gilroy went on to posit that a show like Andor may never happen again.
“So I’m not sure if we’ll ever see something like Andor again — made live, not by AI. Will someone ever spend that kind of money to make something live again [on streaming]? I don’t know if that will ever happen again, but what a great thing it is to be able to have done it. We got away with it, and we feel pretty good about it.”