“We survived,” said creator, showrunner, and executive producer Tony Gilroy about the lessons carried over from Season 1 of “Andor” to Season 2. “We really survived. And almost absolutely everybody came back production-wise. So we had an institutional memory.”
But the process of breaking and filming Season 2 was still a completely different level of challenge. Though filmed in four blocks of episodes like Season 1, each three-episode block was separated by an entire year. For a conversation with IndieWire’s Jim Hemphill for our Pass the Remote series, presented in partnership with Disney, Gilroy joined executive producer and star Diego Luna, EP Sanne Wohlenberg, writer Dan Gilroy, actors Genevieve O’Reilly and Adria Arjona, composer Brandon Roberts, and supervising sound editor Dave Acord.
“I think the beauty of the structure of this second season is that that happens in every episode by going to those few days of the year that change everything,” Luna said. “It’s always crucial. I don’t think there’s a single block where something crucial doesn’t happen to every character in this show. The episodes are about those moments. I think, yes, Cassian has to witness so much, has to feel, has to understand he’s capable of feeling, of connecting with someone the way he connects with Bix. He has to lose many things, many battles. He has to understand Luthen. There’s a lot that has to happen to get him to the moment where we see him in ‘Rogue One.’”
Wohlenberg said that “the best day of the shoot for sure” was one of the most memorable moments of Season 2: The wedding of Mon Mothma’s daughter, and Mon’s delirious, slightly out of control dance as she herself is in fact losing control by ordering the death of one of her old friends.
It was also actor O’Reilly’s very last day of shooting as Mon. “It did feel from our perspective that we were shooting four films,” O’Reilly said. “And so the crescendo of that film for Mon is that moment [of the dance]. There’s so much in those three episodes. You learn about a culture just from my character. You learn about a whole culture, a whole history, an orthodoxy. There’s so much that’s implied within it. As an actor, what’s brilliant is there’s so much to carry. Also, you have, I think, a bit of an idealistic character at that moment [of the dance]. By the end of that film, she has tacitly agreed to the murder of her friend. She had the relationship with Luthen is very murky, and it feels dangerous. And so you can carry all of that into that sequence. It looks like a Renaissance painting because of Luke Hull’s designs and Michael Wilkinson’s costumes and Emma Scott’s hair and makeup. But what you’re examining is the chaos within character, with the chaos and the pain within a woman.”
Arjona also savored the growth her character, Bix, experienced in Season 2. “I think I grew. I grew from Season 1, and I grew in Season 2,” Arjona said. “I think this show has been my greatest school. I mean, I’ve gotten to work with these amazing people and with production design and Michael and Emma. You’re learning from some of the best of the best, and all you can do is soak it in. I also have him in front of me, and that’s probably one of my greatest gifts in this whole show. I have the most generous actor to react from. It really is a reflection of how talented Diego is and how great of a leader he is. In certain scenes, you don’t have to do much. You have a beautiful scene that Tony structures and then you have Diego in front of you. I’m like, ‘I just get to sit back and really enjoy the journey and savor it.’”
Dan Gilroy talked about how iterative something like the Ghorman Massacre on the show is. It involved an 80-page outline from his brother Tony, who then worked on endless back-and-forth revisions that also consider what was financially possible for the production. “It’s an intense group effort to make something that at the finished product looks, oh, this is like amazing,” Dan Gilroy said. “It’s just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours, which are enjoyable for me because a writer and I love doing what I’m doing. I think everybody was involved in it on every level enjoyed what they were doing, but it’s a major group effort.”
The creation of the massacre is one of the most suspenseful moments of the entire series, and it relied heavily on Roberts’ score and Acord’s sound supervision to ratchet it up.
“I think you can break it down into 30 minutes of building tension,” Roberts said of his approach. “Tony was pretty clear, ‘I want the audience to feel sick and…’ This is not what’s going to happen. This is inevitable, so the idea was how can we make the audience feel sick for 30 minutes leading to that first blaster shot? And so we really leaned into that.”
“I think, as Brandon pointed out, that the episode is largely a crescendo,” Acord said. “It starts with the quiet city. There’s that subtle alarm happening. Cassian’s building his weapon, and that’s the pulse that’s set as we build. And then there are beats as you go along. The crowd comes in and they’re chanting. There’s a beat, and then we’re singing the anthem. And then there’s a beat when the first sniper rifle hits. And then the music goes out, and then that’s when the chaos stops. We just keep building and building all these little moments, these beats.”
All of which goes to show it takes a galaxy’s worth of talent to pull of a series as sweeping and powerful as “Andor.”
IndieWire’s Pass the Remote series is presented in partnership with Disney.