“Andor” creator Tony Gilroy recently spoke to Collider about the show’s second season and his previous promise to release scripts — a promise he won’t be fulfilling due to the rise of AI.
‘Andor’ Scripts & Season 2
Maggie Lovitt asked Gilroy, “I know when Season 1 had finished airing, you mentioned that you were going to release the Season 1 scripts. Is that something that’s still possibly happening in the future? Because I know people still bring it up every so often, like, ‘When is it happening?'”
“I wanted to do it,” Gilroy said. “We put it together. It’s really cool. I’ve seen it, I loved it. AI is the reason we’re not. In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the f***ing robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.”
Artificial intelligence trains on pre-existing documents, sometimes ripping lines directly from the work of writers without credit.
Gilroy not only penned several “Andor” episodes and co-wrote “Rogue One,” but also wrote or co-wrote the first four Jason Bourne films, “Armageddon,” “Michael Clayton,” “Duplicity,” and more. He directed the latter two and “The Bourne Legacy.”
Lovitt also asked Gilroy about how “Andor” season 2 will handle the Ghorman Massacre, an event only briefly mentioned before in “Star Wars” canon but a major moment in Mon Mothma’s history.
“Mon Mothma leaving the Senate is canonical,” Gilroy explained. “There are a couple of other events in here. The development of Yavin is canonical. Obviously, the discovery of the Death Star and whatever intelligence there is, espionage, that leads to the beginning of ‘Rogue One’ is canonical. I had to get to all those things. Ghorman, interestingly, is canonical but completely undescribed. It’s a total blank slate.”
“There’s also a bit of confusion about the Ghorman Massacre, and what is the Ghorman Massacre?” he continued. “There’s a lot of confusion within canon. So, it was an opportunity to rebuild in a really significant way. It’s a very significant part of our show that can do a lot of different things for us. Quite honestly, it’s very expensive to build, so we really want to use it as much as possible so it carries over five different episodes. I’m really confident that the really deep, passionate Star Wars community will appreciate how we’ve straightened out that story.”
Season 2 will also have Cassian meet K-2SO, his righthand droid in “Rogue One” who was notably absent from the first season of “Andor.”
Gilroy acknowledged “the bar is high” for K2’s introduction and there was “a really, really good reason” for delaying it.
“But it does mean that I definitely have to deliver on the meet-cute, so we’ll see how it goes. We’re happy with what we have,” he said.
Regarding the fates of other “Andor” characters, Lovitt asked if fans should have tissues prepared. “Is it the same sort of emotional gut punch [as ‘Rogue One’]?”
“Yes. But not even in matters of life and death,” Gilroy said. “The five women, what they go through…Cassian is sort of Star Wars Jesus running through there—this messianic character running through the middle. We know that story, and it has its own complexities. But, really, I think the surprising and shocking, emotional punch will come from from the collateral damage and triumph of the people all around him.”
He added, “If I don’t make you cry, I will be very unhappy.”
The second and final season of “Andor” will premiere on Disney+ beginning on April 22. There will be 12 episodes, released three at a time across four weeks as “chapters.”
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