'Andor' Director Admits Creator Tony Gilroy Wanted To Use "Star Wars To Talk About Real Issues"

Janus Metz, one of the directors for Lucasfilm’s Andor show, admits that creator Tony Gilroy set out to use the show to “talk about real issues” and implied it was done to comment on current American political events.

In an interview with ScreenRant on the Director’s Guild of America red carpet, Metz said, “We all knew that it was going to have an effect and [create] a reaction because, obviously, Andor is a story about authoritarianism and resistance, and that story is universal through history. But it's obviously also very contemporary, and it's a very present thing right now. It was very hard not to draw those parallels in quite a literal sense while shooting it.”

“One of the things that drew me to the show when I spoke to Tony Gilroy was that he said, ‘Look, we're really trying to use the brand and the universe of Star Wars to talk about real issues.’ I think the strength of it is the specificity, which talks about right now, but there's also a universality to it,” he continued. “That's the beauty of the craft and the art, and why it's good filmmaking, because it's also a bigger universal truth about who we are as human beings among power struggles and politics.”

“Of course, it registers right in with the current moment. I think it’s extraordinary that the most political show out there right now is Star Wars. I mean, who would have thought? It’s a special thing to be part of, and it’s an important thing to be part of,” he concluded.

Metz’ comments are not surprising. Gilroy has openly spoken about the show being a political allegory for current events in America.

At the end of December he told Reason, “What I really can stand behind as an ideology in the show is it's the destruction of community.”

“The parallels to what's happening in our world right now are even beyond moralistic, I think,” he continued. “There's an essential decency aspect to what's happening politically in the world right now that I don't understand. There is a personal decency aspect to what's happening in the world that I don't understand. There is a giddy rush—you'll see people cravenly move toward power because it's gonna benefit them, or it's warmer there, or they have no spine or moral commitment to really back up.”

He then offered the following comparison, “People getting on board something—getting on board a train that's on fire that they know is heading toward a cliff. It's just amazing to watch the sort of giddy rush of people stripping off their clothes and jumping onto the fire here. It's quite amazing.”

He also admitted that the show would be seen as a commentary on current events, “Oh, we saw that. We did the first season and that was just sort of done in a vacuum. That was done as per just trying to live and get through the show and make it happen. By the time we were in the second season and developing it—and, you know, the Trump resurgence was coming back—as we were finishing the show, it takes two and a half years to do the show. As we're finishing and watching the election coming up, we're going, ‘Wow, are we heading for a highway collision here or not?’”

Ironically, after claiming people lacked a spine or moral commitment, he admitted he hedged about promoting the show as a commentary on President Donald Trump and his administration, “I would have been well pleased to not have the level of synchronicity that we had. As it started to happen—what can you do? It presented complexities for Diego and myself and some of the actors who were out selling the show, because we had to sell the show pretty hard for about six months. It made some of these early conversations very difficult, because we really didn’t wanna get…”

“Disney has a lot of money invested in the show, and the Star Wars audience is rather large and complicated and probably includes all kinds of different people. We didn’t want to have anybody to tune out. We didn’t want to have anybody turn off. We didn’t want to make it seem like we were spinach,” he continued. “So we tiptoed our way through the beginning of it. I think over time we gradually just couldn’t not face what was happening in front of us.”

In fact, he even confirmed he put in commentary on illegal immigration with the character of Bix, “It’s obvious that’s what they are.”

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