Robert Rodriguez, who directed last week’s episode of The Mandalorian, you know, “The Tragedy” one, sat down with Collider to talk about his new We Can Be Heroes movie, but of course he talked some Boba Fett and Mando.
One of the more interesting reveals from the interview is that Robert’s episode was only 19-pages long, and according to him, in Hollywood, each script page is worth about a minute of content, so Jon handed him a 19-minute episode to direct. To Robert’s surprise Jon expected him to fill in the rest of the script with his brand of action, which Robert clearly did.
But first, he was asked about what it was like to essentially revive Boba Fett, to which he replied:
“It was my 12-year-old dream. When I was 12 was when Empire Strikes Back came out and I was a huge Boba Fett fan. You know, they would tease him out before the movie came out. You already knew he was going to be a character to watch. The marketing was really great, like, ‘This character Boba Fett,’ and so when you saw the movie, you couldn’t wait to see him. He captured your imagination before the movie even came out; it’s all we were talking about at school. I still remember that, how mysterious that character was. You got a little taste of him but you were waiting to see more.”
RR – Collider
Robert then talked about how fan-centric the script was and how he felt the need to really make Boba a badass:
“When I saw the script (on sent me the script) and it said ‘Boba Fett’ and ‘Darksaber’ and ‘Mando’ and ‘Fennec,’ I was just like, ‘This doesn’t even feel like a real script. It feels like a fan wrote this in a fever dream hoping that this would be an episode.’ And yes, this was the script. It had all the good stuff in it. It was like a ‘Greatest Hits’ of all the good stuff; I couldn’t believe it. To go play in StarWars with all the toys and to get to play with Boba Fett as one of your main [characters] — I just thought, ‘I gotta go in there and just have him be… I don’t know if he’s going to show up in any more episodes or what, so I just gotta make him super badass in this moment [and] be that character that I imagined him being when I heard about him when I was 12. That was my mission, just to go satisfy that 12-year-old fascination with the character.”
RR – Collider
Rodriguez went on to take about the short script and how Jon basically asked him to fill it in with action scenes:
“The script was much shorter than the episode. The script was, like, 19 pages so that suggests 19 minutes. I added a lot of action to this [episode]. I even asked Jon [favreau], I said, ‘Is it okay that my script is only 19 pages? Because I cut really fast and it’s probably going to end up being 16 minutes. Do we need to add more pages?’ and he goes, ‘No, that’s what you’re here for! You need to fill that out.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay, I’ll try and make that battle longer.’ So that’s where that extra battle came from.”
“I know my tendency is to cut things pretty tight. If I have a 100-page script, it’s a 90-minute movie. So I had a 19-page script [and] I thought, ‘Whoa! I’m gonna run out of things to do, so I added a lot of action.”
RR – Collider
You can check out the full interview with Collider below.
