Many Bothans died to bring us this information.
While Disney has been happily jumping into their Scrooge McDonald-esque swimming pool of gold after the release of Rogue One, the rest of us are still watching Star Wars the old fashioned way. Apparently, the Mouse House has a 4K transfer of the Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope locked in the Disney Vault. But one man has seen it: Rogue One director Gareth Edwards. Help us, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope.
Talking to Little White Lies, Edwards discussed his first day of work on Rogue One, and it’s definitely much better than sitting down with HR and learning the dress code. He got to watch A New Hope in pristine 4K. He says:
On day one, we were in Lucasfilm in San Francisco with Industrial Light and Magic and John [Knoll], our supervisor, he said that they’ve got a brand new 4K restoration print of A New Hope — it had literally just been finished. He suggested we sit and watch it. Obviously, I was up for that. Me, the writer, lots of the story people and John all sat down, we all had our little notepads, we were all ready for this. I’ll add that I’ve seen A New Hope hundreds of times. So I was sat there, ready to take notes and really delve under the surface of the film. You have the Fox fanfare, then scrolling text with ‘A long time ago…’, and then the main music begins. Next thing we knew it had ended, and we looked around to one another and just thought — sh*t, we didn’t take any notes. You can’t watch it without getting carried away. It’s really hard to get into an analytical filmmaker headspace with this film. It just turns you into a child.
This dude is just trying to make us feel bad.
Edwards doesn’t say whether this is the original cut or that one with that awful CGI Jabba the Hutt, nor did he mention whether this would ever see the light of day, but he did make our little Star Wars-obsessed lives green with envy.