
Showrunner Tony Gilroy has given a new interview about the second season of Andor, using the word fascism to describe the story, something that Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from saying during last year’s promotional phases of the award-winning show.
So this is the interview you couldn’t really give during the run of Andor.
Yeah, we never were overtly misleading, but we were being delicate.
You devoted nearly a decade of your life to making Star Wars …
Oh God, don’t say it like that. (Laughs.)
Well, when you finally put it in your rear-view mirror and started making a movie called Behemoth!, real life, as it’s done before, eerily mimics numerous story points in Andor. Can you take me through your thought process as you’ve watched the reporting out of the Twin Cities?
Well, on a human citizen level, it’s just an absolute gothic nightmare. The simplest answer to the strange synchronicity of all of this is really on them, the outside forces. We were pretty much doing a story about authoritarianism and fascism, and the Empire is very clearly a great example of that. It’s a great place to deal with those issues, and as we’ve discussed many times before, we had this wide open canvas to deal with it.
So you get out your Fascism for Dummies book for the 15 things you do, and we tried to include as many of them as we could in the most artful way possible. How were we supposed to know that this clown car in Washington was going to basically use the same book that we used? So I don’t think it’s prescience so much as the sad familiarity of fascism and the karaoke menu of things that you go through to do it. You could list them from the show, or you could list them from the newspaper.
In the beginning, it was very confusing. People were like, “Oh, you’re psychic,” or, “The show is prescient.” But in the rear-view mirror, it’s really a much sadder explanation than that.
Yes, you were inspired by history books, including the use of pretext.
Yeah, it’s the same shit all the time. Get rid of truth, get rid of a free press, destroy communities, nationalize the businesses, find an arbitrary enemy that you can elevate and false flag them through propaganda. Flood the zone with as much gak and atrocity as you can so that nobody can pay attention to what just happened, and pray that you have an overwhelming majority of sheep that will follow you. It’s just tragically and sadly familiar. It’s on them; it’s not on us.
In Andor’s case, the Empire wanted a Ghorman mineral for their superweapon, and so they cultivated pretext for their occupation of Ghorman by blaming a local insurgency they empowered through Syril Karn (Kyle Soller). The current administration sent ICE and other related agencies to Minnesota to deport undocumented people. But in late January, the DOJ requested the state’s voter rolls, among other conditions, in exchange for a reduced presence. Do you consider the immigration crackdown to just be a pretext for larger election-related goals?
Yeah, but I think it’s much more terrifying than that. I’m having a great deal of difficulty — and have had a great deal of difficulty over the past few months — just watching really smart, good people try to make sense of what’s going on by normalizing it in the slightest and trying to bring normalized conversations to this topic. I think the overall goal is to stop elections and to have a complete fascistic state. Any controversy that they can make and elevate to a hysterical pitch allows them to cancel elections or modify elections in any way they want. I think fair elections are what they’re absolutely after.
But I think they’ve been stymied by their own stupidity. Fortunately for us, they have only a few of the pieces that you really need to take over. They have an incredible appetite. They have an incredible flood-the-zone ground game, but they have no narrative ability. They don’t really have a [Joseph] Goebbels or a Mike Deaver in there. They don’t have a presentation. They don’t have a Leni Riefenstahl in there. They do not have a way to get their message out in a narrative fashion. They’re terrible at that, and they’re never going to be good at it.
So I don’t think they’re going to get over, but I think the ultimate goal was always to get rid of the elections completely and just do a complete takeover. I don’t see any other plausible endgame for them.
Read the interview in full here, and stream Andor on Disney+ now.
The post Tony Gilroy Talks Andor Season Two Using the Word Disney Asked Him Not To appeared first on Jedi News.
