Andor’s epic episode 10 prison break: A mini Star Wars oral history

Andor is a “grounded, gritty” reimagining done to actual perfection. Each week, creator Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have drilled down through the surface-level iconography of Star Wars — past the Skywalker saga and Boba Fett lookalikes — to find turbulent human drama unfolding in the shadow of the Empire. Gilroy partnered with Lucasfilm in order to tighten control of Star Wars. Rogue OneEach week, however, Andor, he’s brought Michael ClaytonThe political maneuverings and tension of the growing rebellion are at an all-time high. It’s astonishing to see, and it hits a peak with episode 10, a full-on prison break.

Three episodes by Beau Willimon were found.House of Cards), Cassian Andor’s stint in Empire prison has been decidedly more haunting than even fans of the show probably predicted — try being a “fan” of Darth Vader after a group of enslaved prisoners break their bones on a worker line in hopes of receiving “taste” with their daily gruel. Everything has to do with the way the story is told. The episode 10 prison break was a huge emotional moment. AndorThe team collaborated to develop the scene, set and players.

Below, Willimon, executive producer Sanne Wohlenberg, and several of the craftspeople who led the design challenge of the prison deconstruct an hour of television that might be one of the best things I’ll watch in any medium all year.

[Ed. note: This story contains spoilers through Andor season 1, episode 10.]

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Beau Willimon, writer: Tony brought a large bible with him that detailed his goals for the next season. Some parts of the story were more well-written than others. There were also some gaps and details that had to be worked out. Tony knew he would like to create a prison after Aldhani. He also understood that Cassian was on the run, trying to escape, but then finding himself in the other reality. It was not clear what this prison would look like, how it would tell the story, who would inhabit it and what type of prison it would have. That’s what we had to flesh out in the room.

Sanne Wohlenberg, executive producer: Tony is a great example of how to work from the top. When you are in a galaxy far, far away, and you ultimately have to conceive everything and think about cultures and planets and what would they be, then you write quite specific action into it, which is really hard when you don’t know where they will be moving or how this building might be or how you go on the elevators.

TJ Falls is a producer of VFX and production:Briefings are required for the first time AndorTony gave us these words of wisdom. [about] wanting the audience to feel immersed in the environment, wanting things to feel grounded and real, as though they’re in any other city. It was all about how Star Wars could be brought into the show, without being gratuitous in Star Wars effects.

Willimon: Our chief concern, initially, was: How do we make a prison different than every other prison you’ve seen in every other movie? We asked very simple questions. “Is there a way to get rid of the bars in a prison?” “How do you have a prison that doesn’t have a ton of guards?” “If you don’t want it to be dank and dirty and damp and it’s the opposite — it’s bright and white and antiseptic — what does that do to it?” And then slowly but surely a prison story emerged.

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Luke Hull, production designer: This concept began with the prison being more of a labor camp than a prison. We don’t know what they’re making yet, but they’re making these parts. Things like labs and clean rooms were the main points of reference.

Michael Wilkinson, costume designer:Luke and I discussed the idea for the prison. We liked the white uniforms in the white space. It’s almost disorientating, both for the audience and for the prisoners themselves. It’s got this sterile, soulless, soul-destroying quality to it.

Willimon: There’s no specific thing to point to that was, like, [a real-world]This was the inspiration behind the prison. It was Danny. [Gilroy]Tony, Sanne, Luke and I were all just having a little fun in the room. All the ideas we came up with ended up being posted on the board.

Hull: Tony’s big story point was that the floor could be electrified, which informed these various clinical, white, clean materials of steel and white — and it’s probably one of our most Star Wars-y sets, in a way. One of our main points when we began discussing the feel and content for these episodes was THX 1138. The show was trying to be a little bit grittier, more earthy and more character-based. However, [Star Wars and THX] are both George Lucas, there’s something about THXThat I thought was more Orwellian than Star Wars, and more real. This prison was meant to have something sinister. These were just parts of the machine.

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Willimon: By the time we exited the writers’ room, we had some givens: We wanted the prison to be hydraulically powered in a panopticon structure, like Alcatraz, where you would have to swim away. The labor force was something we desired. We wanted to have electric floors with very few guards. Also, we needed an image of the guys climbing to the top of the building and then jumping out in the water. We moved to the Outlining and Script phase. There was much back and forth among Tony, Luke, Tony, Sanne and Luke.

Hull:Important! […]It was the task of designing the whole building and its functions. The day and the night shifts, where they go and where they get cleansed, how they cross from the outer ring to the inner ring and through to the factory floor, what’s in the core, where did the parts go, and even bits you will never see were all worked out to the end and modeled.

Wilkinson: We knew that we’d see a lot of uniforms, would see every last inch of them, worn by hundreds of men over many episodes, so we obsessed over every last square inch. The fabric we created had a wonderful papery feel and was disposable. After that, the prisoner were sterilized and issued new uniforms. But we also leaned heavily into that world of ’70s graphics with some of the design that you see down the sleeves and the flashes of orange. Because of the orange flashing, guards could always see the location of prisoners. This was a practical source. We liked the sense of alarm of orange in a white space, but it’s also a color that is very much part of the Star Wars color palette.

Hull: There’s a logic to everything. It is possible that the plumbing in prison could be used.

Willimon: We talked about the toilet. We had to ask questions sometimes, like, “Are you allowed to show a toilet in Star Wars?”

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Wohlenberg: As Tony always says, we’re in the kitchen and not in the restaurant. [Andor is set]As this revolution develops, we see these ordinary people from all walks of the life who find themselves in an unusual situation. You will be taken back into the rooms, the house of Mon Mothma, and to the bathroom of the prison. The experience was frightening in some ways! I remember Luke saying, “What’s the Star Wars toilet gonna look like…?”

Hull: It was late when the toilet arrived! [laughs]It made me kind of cringe when I saw it. It is important to remember that you have access to the inside of the buildings and their cores even beyond walls. So we didn’t want to rely on CGI. Functionality was a requirement for all tables. Each part must be operational. Hydraulics for lifting the parts must work. This is what we called the jumbotron. It’s the huge overhanging droid with all of its physical movements up and down. When you’re shooting at the rate that we shoot, I think it’s really important to have very interactive sets.

David Acord (supervising sound editor): All of that stuff, including the actual clunks, pneumatic presses, and turns of ratchets was captured. Heavyweights are used to record a large portion of that weight. And then there’s some fabricated things in there, too; for the drill has this weird whrrrr!We did. You’ve got to have at least one or two weird sounds in there to make it Star Wars.

Falls: We were truly grateful for the wonderful sets that our art department had created [the VFX team]With a lot of its basic features. The challenge was finding a way to juxtapose the beauty of the prison with the terror that’s actually happening inside. You’ve got these waterfalls, you’ve got the way the corridors intersect, and they work in such a way that you can see from one to the other, and yet there’s still not any real communication other than this sign language that the prisoners are able to use. And so it’s maintaining that sense of what the world is in a functional way, so that as we get to the prison break, and everybody’s working as hard as they can to figure out how the heck to get out of there, the journey that they take and the way that they get out makes sense throughout the entire geographic relationship of the prison. While we wanted to keep that sense of continuity and understanding intact, we also had to retain this terrible, horrific, but beautiful architecture.

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Willimon: You can only see the action in a single moment when you enter an action scene like that shown in Episode 10. “How high are these tables off the ground?” “Can you actually leap from the table to the elevator thingy that’s halfway down?” You start getting into the minutiae. So I might say to Luke: “Here’s a scene where I’d like to accomplish this, and this is generally what I’m seeing in my mind.” And he might then come back two days later, with a 3D rendering, where I go, “Oh, that works. That’s great. However, what if that catwalk was here? Because then I can have this character go there.” And then he might say, “Well, the reason I didn’t do that is because of X, have you thought to maybe go with this route?” And yeah, I could write toward that.

Hull: We started with everything based on nines, and then went down to seven for various reasons, so within Narkina there are seven prisons, and seven floors on every prison, and you don’t necessarily get it from watching those brief moments of other floors, but they’re making different parts on every floor. In essence, they’re mass producing things. It is a panopticon in which the entire prison structure and organic human beings are inverted.

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Willimon: Tony leads the charge and ultimately does a pass and polish on everything, so I can’t take full credit for [Kino Loy], but here’s some insight into how he came about: [Cassian’s]His goal was to disappear without any money. What the prison forces him to do is confront the oppression of the Empire in a completely unavoidable and seemingly inescapable way, and it’s going to maybe change his feelings about where his place in the Empire is and taking action. At first, this is just a guy who wants to get out of prison, you know, it’s not necessarily ideologically, he just wants freedom. We needed someone who would be able to act as a guide and complicity in the prison. It is important to be an authority figure.

But isn’t it interesting if that authority figure is one of your fellow inmates, and he’s complicit in what the Empire is doing? Over the three episodes, he embarks on a personal journey that sees him go from complicity to the Empire’s hope for freedom, to becoming a rebel. That’s part and parcel for what Andor’s journey will be during the course of this entire series. And that’s where Andor ends up. [Stellan Skarsgård’s] Luthen. He’sThis guy is the recruiter.

As a result, this character shows real depth and is beginning to have a real arc. The breakout’s leader should be the same guy that had led them to their factory. This made perfect sense. Andor is smart enough to realize that this is a guy who always has authority and that people will trust and, and so rather than getting on the PA, he recognizes, if we really want to succeed, it’s got to be Kino. And that, you know, that’s really fun, because you get to create a starring role for this guest on the show and give that moment to him. Andy Serkis was a master of this feat.

Within the context of the world, this franchise, and the particular part that Tony has created, we were trying to find the best story for us in our characters, at any given moment in the narrative. And that’s all we were really trying to do, not necessarily trying to comment on the larger world or draw from the real world or anything like that. Interesting interpretations and comparisons can be made to real-world events. That’s hopefully what good writing does is open up the possibility for those conversations and debates. We were more plumbers than professors.