Here's How Rogue One Acquired Unseen Star Wars Footage

Just because Rogue One is the first standalone Star Wars film, it doesn't mean it's cut off from the original saga. In fact, director Gareth Edwards did a lot to ensure the continuity between Rogue One and A New Hope, including adding previously unseen Star Wars footage to develop one scene even further into the canon.

One of the most impressive feats we've seen in Rogue One is how it digitally resurrected Jon Vander and Garen Dreis, the Red and Gold Leaders from A New Hope. They were added into Rogue One's Battle of Scarif flawlessly, making some fans wonder how Edwards was able to make that possible.

According to Edwards, the inclusion of the characters actually started by accident. Speaking to RadioTimes, he revealed that he discovered some never-before-used Star Wars footage while hanging out at Skywalker Ranch to research for Rogue One. He said:

"As we're walking around, and doing all the cool things and looking at the Millennium Falcon and trying on Han Solo's jacket and things like that, in the back at the bottom was all these cans of film. And we said, ‘What are they?' and they said, ‘Oh, it's Star Wars.'"

After Edwards was told the footage hadn't been examined in a while because it wasn't digitized, he grabbed the negatives and examined looked through the footage himself, then discovered original negatives from A New Hope that included deleted scenes of the pilots, mainly from the attack on the Death Star at the end of the movie. There's also an X-Wing call sign exchange that didn't make it to the final version of A New Hope.

The director figured out how to include the pilots' scenes into Rogue One's script during the Scarif battle, and thanks to Industrial Light and Magic, Edwards digitally edited the footage of the pilots and added the characters into the cockpits used in his standalone film. The characters were killed during the Battle of Yavin, but it's cool seeing them in action again.

"At the world premiere in LA, there was this massive cheer at a particular point in the film," Edwards said, referring to the appearance of the pilots. "It was the only time during the premiere where I actually punched the air."

Edwards said that he didn't expect resurrecting Jon Vander and Garven Dreis back in the Star Wars cinematic universe was something that people would care about, but it turns out a lot of fans noticed them at first glance.

Read: Top 10 Moments in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story