Andor Creator Tony Gilroy on Bureaucracy and the Surveillance State

This week, guest host Eric Boehm is joined by Tony Gilroy, the creator, writer, and director of Andor, the critically acclaimed Star Wars series that reimagines the origins of the Rebel Alliance. While Andor is set in a familiar sci-fi universe, it stands apart for its focus on the mechanics of authoritarian rule.

Gilroy discusses how Andor portrays the Galactic Empire not as a cartoonish evil but as a bureaucratic system that centralizes authority, normalizes surveillance, and absorbs previously independent planets, corporations, and cultures. Rather than relying on superweapons or singular villains, authoritarianism in Andor functions through institutions, incentives, and ordinary people just doing their jobs.

Boehm and Gilroy talk about how these themes connect to Gilroy's earlier work, including the Bourne films. They also discuss how Andor approaches moral compromise, resistance, and responsibility, why it matters that fascists still care about mundane details like parking spots, and why the series has resonated with viewers interested in liberty, power, and the quiet ways systems enforce obedience.

The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing "free minds and free markets."

0:00–Introduction
1:23–Behemoth
3:21–Andor in the Star Wars timeline
5:04–Cassian Andor's character development
12:04–The moral compass of Andor
18:31–Constructing the authoritarian regime
22:05–The reality of bureaucratic institutions
25:04–Mass media representation in Andor
31:43–Exploiting loneliness and vulnerability
37:40–Would Gilroy return to Star Wars?
39:21–Gilroy's contributions to Rogue One
42:25–The Bourne movies and whistleblowers
46:10–What is the libertarian view of Andor?
53:48–Gilroy's origin story
57:08–Themes in Gilroy's work

Transcript

This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.

Eric Boehm: Tony Gilroy, thanks for talking to Reason. 

Tony Gilroy: Pleasure.

Now, you are probably best known—at least right now—as the showrunner behind the two-season Disney+ show, Andor. I don't think I'm overstating things here to say that it is the best piece of Star Wars media since the original trilogy, at least. And maybe even the best piece of Star Wars media ever made.

That show is a prequel to Rogue One, which I think we'll probably also talk a bit about in this conversation. You were involved in the writing of that movie as well, and that's also in the conversation as the best piece of Star Wars media since the original series. You're also the writer behind the Jason Bourne movies. We may get a chance to talk about that as well.

But you are joining us, if I'm not mistaken, while you're also in the midst of working on a new movie. So I want to start there. This is a production titled Behemoth, and you're shooting this—again, if I am not mistaken—with Pedro Pascal and Olivia Wilde. I am really excited about that. That sounds really cool. Can you tell us anything about the new one?

It's an original. It's about movie music. It's about a cellist that returns to Los Angeles to do studio work. I guess that's about all I'll say about it right now, until we get out to sell it, whenever we do. No, it's all about music. I've been living in music for the last year, and I'm fully immersed in it right now. I've been living in California. It's a very California movie. It's a Los Angeles movie. And we're a little over halfway in shooting, so you're catching me on the weekend of a busy time.

Well, we are very glad you made the time for us. That sounds like a nice break from Andor, honestly. After all the politics and the drama and the sci-fi-ness, to do something so grounded that must be nice.

It's really been a great place to hide out for the last 10 months, yeah, to live in music. It's escapist for sure.

That's nice. We all need a little bit of that. So let's talk about Andor, the show that is out there, that is now finished. The second and final season was released earlier this year to widespread critical acclaim. Look, there's obvious political themes to that show. This is a political podcast—we've got to talk about that.

You know, one thing that came up to me, I think, as I was watching that…well, I guess we should start here. I imagine most people are familiar with Star Wars and Andor if they're listening to this conversation, but just for anyone who isn't: Catch us up very briefly on where this is in the Star Wars timeline and how this show fits into the broader overarching story of good and evil and Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader—because it kind of doesn't fit into that story exactly.

Rogue One is the discovery of the plans to the Death Star that will lead to what people traditionally know as the beginning of Star Wars. This is the five years gathered around the main character of Rogue One, Cassian. One of the main characters of Rogue One, Cassian Andor. It's the five years of his life prior to that film.

Our last image, our last scene in Andor, is him walking into what would be the first scene of Rogue One. So it's a five-year tranche of history right before the destruction of the Death Star, and it is a five-year period where the Empire is sort of really tightening its grip around the throat of the galaxy in the most extreme way.

You were involved in writing Rogue One, which in a very similar way leads directly into the events of the first Star Wars movie. Now you're sitting down and writing a prequel to a prequel, and you have to get this one central character to the point that he's at in Rogue One, where Cassian is somebody who's willing to do literally whatever it takes for the Rebellion.

There's a lot of constraints there as a writer, I would imagine, to have to build this character out. How did you sit down and think about who he was going to be five years before—or two years before—and lay out that arc? What were you thinking about? Where were you getting inspiration from as you were writing Cassian's character specifically?

Well, it's two issues that you raise. One is the idea of limitations. Limitations are really good, creatively. Boundaries and limited materials or this is what you can work with. Any kind of restriction is usually very beneficial in the creative process, to fill that vacuum.

I was given a five-year— The setting is a five-year piece of history that has some very specific guidelines to it. There's a few canonical markers that happen that are well-established. I guess most notably would be Mon Mothma's departure from the Senate. Mon Mothma is a character Genevieve O'Reilly plays, and she's a big character for us all along the way. There's a moment in canonical history where she calls out the emperor for something called the Ghorman Massacre. And it was never detailed what the Ghorman Massacre was, but she's—

Just to clarify, this is a pre-existing thing in other Star Wars media that you had to write around.

Pre-existing canonical Star Wars, exactly. So what's the frame? So that's on the calendar. I have a couple of other events on the calendar. Things have to sort of line up. So that's the setting I'm given.

And then, dramatically—I mean as a creator, as a writer, as a dramatist—Cassian Andor in Rogue One was sort of an all-singing, all-dancing, brilliant warrior-spy. I mean, he kind of has the full complement of skills. There's nothing he sort of can't do. He can lead; he can seduce; he can lie; he can plan; he can adjust. He's an assassin. He can fly. He does all these amazing things with a great deal of low-key commitment— a very casual, comfortable vibe to it.

There was no backstory for that character before. He never existed before. So, dramatically, my approach was to say, "Well, if we're going to go back five years, why don't we put him as far away from that level of competency and commitment and accomplishment as you could possibly get? Let's take a roach and turn it into a butterfly, essentially. How far away could you take him from where he'll end up to make that journey interesting?"

That's my approach to how I did it. He's an entirely fictional character, and it's completely free-range what I want to do with it. But I have to put him in the maze of that very specific canonical framework and the rules of Star Wars and the cosmology of it that already existing, and the geography that's already existing, and the calendar. So I roll them back and find out who he is, back five years ago, and it's sort of a wind-up machine and you let it roll.

You mentioned that constraints can be really helpful creatively. One of the other interesting things about Andor is that it sort of leaves aside—maybe not entirely—the mystical side of Star Wars. There's a sort of soothsayer, fortune-teller-type character who pops up in the second season there, right? So there's a hint of that. But you really left that aside.

Was that something else you decided to do deliberately as a constraint for yourself? Or was that just a result of, "Hey, look, there's so many characters in this story already we can't also have a bunch of Jedi pop up somewhere?"

You have to think of Lucasfilm and Star Wars—I've said this many times before—as sort of like the Vatican, in a way. I mean, it has a curia, and it has a whole bunch of cardinals of various… Our attitude was: we're gonna take the Latin Mass out of the church. So we're gonna do it a different way. That was the mandate.

One of my original questions to them, to the experts there, was, "In the galaxy—in this huge galaxy—how many people would have ever encountered a Jedi? How many people would ever know about the Force? How many people know about this family you keep rotating these movies on?"

And the answer is: nobody, or almost nobody. If you're living in the galaxy, if you're a being in the galaxy, you've probably never had any encounter ever with Jedi or even know what it is, or the Force.

So that was my intention. Probably in the beginning, I was never, ever, ever gonna touch on the Force. We're certainly gonna do a show without lightsabers. And we'll certainly do a show that doesn't have anything to do with the same bunch of people that you've been dealing with all this time before.

But the Force… We worked on the show for five and a half years. Coming into the second season, there was a really cool way to touch it and have it help us and have it enhance our story. And I think really gets a fundamental emotional feel for it as well—I mean, something that felt of value to me.

So we touched on it. I liked the way we ended up doing it. A lot of discussion went into it, a lot of finessing of it. But yeah, we do touch on it a little bit.

But as I said, the concept of the show was to put it in the kitchen and get it out of the dining room, and just talk about what happens when authoritarianism and fascism comes kicking down your door, ordinary people, and you're forced to make a choice. A lot of people in the show are forced to make choices because of events. And that doesn't really involve lightsabers, and it doesn't really involve a spiritual dimension that will help you.

There's something that I actually wanted to ask you about that I think you're getting at right here. You did an interview with Ross Douthat at The New York Times a few months ago, and something that came up in that conversation but sort of got glossed over was: You described yourself as a moralist.

You said when you start writing characters—I don't remember if you were speaking specifically about this show or just more generally—[you are] "a moralist." And that sounds like what you're talking about here: that there is a moral compass to this show, to Andor, that the characters are dealing with. It's not necessarily a religious or metaphysical one, right? They're not contacted by the Force and told to do something or not do something, and then making a choice.

They're making choices for sometimes political reasons, but oftentimes like moral, calculated reasons here.

That was an interesting interview, because he was really trying to pin the show down and pin me down. And to analyze it in a way, but certainly put it in a place where I didn't feel comfortable it should go.

I think it's two different things again. One is what my job is as a writer and, again, as a dramatist. You have to just completely inhabit the people that you're writing about—in a generous way—to do it. You have to live through them. If you're writing anybody, you have to get inside them. Everyone's the hero of their own story, and everybody believes what they're doing.

I really wouldn't want to… I'm trying to think. There have probably been characters over time that I've judged as I've been writing them, a little bit, but it's really not a great place to be. I want to be free to let them all let their freak flags fly.

But I think when you're talking about the moralism, it really came around from him trying to push me into a left–right definition of the show. And I don't see the show in that context. I mean, I know what my politics are, and they're certainly left. But I don't think the characters in the show are ever advocating monetary supply or social safety net or better schools or less drug laws or whatever issues. No one's ever talking about what they wanna have, where they want to get. There's no list of demands.

I found that conversation ended up pushing me to a place where—it wasn't a big revelation to me—but what I really do think is universal to the show, and what I really can stand behind as an ideology in the show is it's the destruction of community. And the parallels that people have found in the show—which made all the conversations about selling the show when it was coming out so interesting—and why we ended up in some pretty complicated conversations along the way. 

What do I wanna say? 

The parallels to what's happening in our world right now are even beyond moralistic, I think. 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. What we're seeing now is on a level that I'm not sure… I don't know when the parallel is. 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.

And I think that's provoked in me more of a realization that—surprisingly, I mean more than—I just feel there's a level of decency and compassion that's worth fighting for.

Were you surprised to see the response to the show being read in such… I mean, it's obviously a show with political themes, but being read as such a commentary on modern 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?"

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.

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.

I want to go back to something you said about the destruction of communities as that's sort of a hallmark of authoritarianism. That comes up very clearly in the show—with Ghorman most specifically. But also, one of the arcs I really enjoyed was Bix, who kind of goes off after the first season and is sort of hiding out. You might even read her character maybe as an illegal immigrant doing farm work on another planet, right? And yet even—

It's obvious that's what they are.

Right, and the Empire comes for her too. The way you've crafted this authoritarian regime as one that just becomes increasingly difficult for people to get away from.

Yeah. I mean, this is a period when the Empire is consolidating, as fascism does. In the very first episode, five years back, the inciting incident for the show is that Cassian Andor goes to a pleasure zone on a corporate-controlled planet, looking for a rumor that a long-lost sister may be working in a brothel there. And he's forced—really, by two funky, corrupt cops—they basically try to shake him down and an accident happens, and he kills them. Not intentionally, but he has to.

As that rises up, that bubbles up to the Empire's notice, they use that as an excuse to nationalize that corporation, which is, you know, the classic fascist model.

What are they doing on Mina-Rau, which is the agrarian planet where the Keredians have gone to hide—our people from season one, the few we brought over? What are they doing there? They're doing a big audit and a big top-down accounting of their agrarians' food supplies, because they're taking larger control of everything. So they're just tightening everything. And, you know, the Death Star is meant to be the final turn in that screw.

Yeah. And obviously the Death Star is hanging there in the background—metaphorically, and also literally I suppose. At least in Rogue One, it's there.

But what is fascinating to me about Andor is that you've taken the Empire—it has Darth Vader and the Death Star and these terrifying things that are almost cartoonish. They're scary, yes, obviously. But you've created an Empire that is this authoritarian surveillance bureaucracy, and in a lot of ways that is more terrifying, I think, to me and to other people that I've talked with who watch the show.

Why do you think that is? Why is it that seeing the inside of this bureaucratic institution—full of grain audits and takeovers of corporations—in some ways seems actually scarier than a planet-destroying superweapon?

Anything real—anything that you can identify as reality—is going to be more emotionally connected and more terrifying, or funnier, or more poignant to you. And you know it from any kind of show that you ever watch.

There's all kinds of lenses that we put on when we watch things. We're such sophisticated viewers of narrative at this point in our lives and in our culture and our history. I mean, we're the most sophisticated. People could argue that we're living in an idiocracy, and that the general IQ of political emotional literacy has deteriorated. There is no denying that even the lowest common denominator of that formula has consumed more narrative in their life than any 150,000 people did 100 years ago—and a million times more than anybody did.

You've been consuming narrative your entire life, and you have a incredibly sophisticated series of filters with which to watch it and how it comes at you. Something that really feels real, something that you recognize, is always going to just dig a little deeper.

Our show is always trying to be real.

It's always trying to be—what the motivations… And behaviorally, our fascists are worried about their parking places. Our fascists are worrying about whether they're going to get to the commissary in time to get the fresh cheesecake. Our fascists are worried about the person next to them getting ahead of them, or failing to hit their numbers on their quotas.

It's very recognizably empathetic for the audience in that sense.

Hannah Arendt, I think, said that the sad truth is that most people who do evil things never make the honest choice or the actual choice to do good or bad. And that seems to be, for the most part, what the world you've created here reflects that, right? 

Part of the success—or part of the game plan—of authoritarianism or fascism, when it's played well, is to create an environment where people will forget, willfully forget, about those things because, "Oh, it's not me," "I was only taking orders," "I was asked to do this," "Everyone's doing it," "It's the system."

That inoculation is the hallmark of really successful authoritarianism bureaucracies.

Yeah. You talk also about narratives and how we're inundated by them. I noticed that Andor also had a form of mass media, which is something I don't think had ever been in Star Wars before, right? But there is propaganda. There's cable news in this show.

Why did you make that decision? Is that a commentary on what you were just talking about—about the inundation of narratives and how that changes the way we look at the world? It changed how some of the characters in the show viewed a conflict that was taking place there.

Well, in season one, if you go back to the destruction of community—the destruction of familiarity—the planet Ferrix, which is where Cassian is from: When they come in and look for him, the place rises up. That place is destroyed, basically by fiat, by bad timing, by accident.

He then goes to Mina-Rau, which you just said before. They hide out in this agrarian society there, and we watch them come through, and we watch that get torn apart.

The main event—if there is a main event in the second season, because the show is so abundant—but it's the Ghorman Massacre. And it's the destruction of Ghorman. As I said before, I had this thing on the calendar for Mon Mothma—this Ghorman Massacre—but it was unarticulated and undescribed. It was a free thing to play. So we invented Ghorman: We invented the planet, the culture, the history, a language, a national anthem, a wardrobe, everything. 

The whole culture we built.

You've seen them destroy Ferrix, which was kind of a "leave-us-alone" salvage enterprise. We've seen them destroy Aldhani, which was a colonial, indigenous people—you could put the Lakota Sioux in there if you wanted to. You could put the Zulus. You could put anybody you want in there. But it's destroying an indigenous society that's not capable of fighting back.

We've seen them go after Mina-Rau. We wanted to see something really substantial. What happens when the Empire really has to take down something really substantial—a political force, an economic force? And Ghorman is a really successful. They manufacture all this material, clothing material. They've done it for centuries. It's very bourgeois and very established and politically powerful.

So to take them down, you can't just—you know, what's the new weapon that's required for that? That's propaganda. And that hadn't really been done in Star Wars that much before.

There was a HoloNews Network that's already canonically true, and we thought, "Well, this is how they do it."

In the very first episode, we have something very much like the Wannsee Convention. I don't know how many people in your audience are familiar with the Wannsee Convention, but the Wannsee Convention is where the Nazis—basically over a PowerPoint luncheon, right outside Berlin, about 15 to 20 people—got together, and over lunch and some herring and some Sachertorte set out the detailed logistical plan for the Final Solution over a three or four hour luncheon. And they kept great notes. And they had their lawyers there. And the logicians were there.

So we wanted to do that. So we see that the plan for the destruction of Ghorman has happened long beforehand. It's been a long-term plan. And one of the key components is to turn the galaxy against Ghorman and make its destruction seem not only inevitable, but a wise choice. 

And so propaganda is really part of that. And state-owned media is clearly the way to go.

And the show plays with that concept. Syril ends up being stationed there, has conversations with his mother. His mother's perspective on Ghorman is obviously one that's been influenced by the propaganda. He's seeing something different on the ground.

And I thought that was a really interesting moment for a character that went through some really interesting evolutions. Syril is a guy who's kind of lonely and looking for meaning, and ends up as part of this imperial machine. Ends up kind of trapped by it. If a different set of circumstances happened, he seems like the type of character who could have stumbled his way into the Rebellion too. I don't know, am I overreading that?

No, you're right. I think that's what makes it so tragic. That's what makes his character so complicated and so fascinating to write—and so fascinating for Kyle [Soller] to play—and so heartbreaking. No, I agree with that. 

I think he's a fantasist. I think he's a romantic. I mean, look, so many people are looking to belong to something, right? The need to belong is really primary for so many people. So where do you belong?

And he's found a place to belong that probably—and this may be true for a certain segment of the people that become legitimately fascist or authoritarian—there's a lot of chaos, emotional chaos, in his life. You see his home life. I think the world is very challenging for him, and in a chaotic way.

If you become the thing that you're afraid of, it's a great way to pretend you're inoculating yourself against it. Why do so many people who were abused as children become child abusers? How do you become a monster? If I become the monster, I don't have to be afraid of it. I'll be part of it.

I think he sees that. I think part of him also has fantasies of dreams of glory. I think he really is a romantic in a way. So I do believe—and always believed—that he was available for all kinds of ideas and had just chosen the wrong way and committed to it.

What you see in Ghorman, as the show goes on, is we watch someone who's really, really deeply committed having those scales torn away—in a very explosive fashion. And he just doesn't have time to process the alternatives.

Yeah, he doesn't quite have a chance to get there.

There's a lot of talk and commentary in the media about the loneliness epidemic, or about people who are searching for meaning—even in a very prosperous, very successful, generally very free country like America. Does that prime the pump, if you will, for authoritarianism? Do you worry about that? Is that something you were trying to say with that character? Or is that something you thought about as you were going back and writing him?

I'm not sure. I mean, as you're saying it—yes. I fundamentally do believe that.

There's a terrible scene with him in the first. He moves back to his mother's house in Coruscant after his whole police career blows up, and he's in the room that he grew up in. He's all by himself with his crazy mother, and he's got his little figure there. We had a thing where like the sun passes by his room in Coruscant, and it reflects off a thing for like a minute every day. 

And you just see him alone.

Yeah, I don't think I've ever written those lines that go to that, but it's absolutely true. I do think that isolation and loneliness almost always lead to vulnerability of choices. I think social media, I think isolation, I think what's happened economically in America, and the fragmentation of media, the lack of a common narrative—even lack of a common entertainment experience in a weird way—has led to the rise of MAGA.

I thought the show went out of its way, like you're saying here, to sort of establish the loneliness of that character.

We also have to mention Dedra Meero, since we're talking about Syril. The sort of other—

Not a romantic. 

Not a romantic. Very different. But in some ways, she is also trapped by this machine, and much like him, doesn't really realize it, I think, until—I mean, obviously until it's too late. She's the victim, in some way, of the Empire. Maybe even more so than the overt targets of the Empire are. Right?

What does she say? When Syril's mother asks her: "Well, I don't have a family. My parents were criminals." She always says the five: "My parents were criminals. They were arrested when I was three. I was raised in an Imperial kinderblock."

So she has been a child of fascism. Again, what's the thing you're afraid of? Become the thing you're afraid of.

What's it like to be three years old and have your parents stripped away and be put into a state-run… God only knows what an Imperial kinderblock is really like. We didn't write that. We can imagine what that would be like.

But I think she does not have a wavering belief system. I think there's only one path that she's driving. She may have doubts by the end of the show, where we end up. And she certainly has time to think about it now.

But I don't think she's been living in doubt along the way. There's one path she's chosen that's been offered, and she's gone for it.

So many characters and so many arcs here. We don't have time to spend a lot of time with all of them. Was there a favorite one for you to write in either season? Or was there a certain character…

I can't say that, I really…

Was there a certain character that revealed something to you that you were surprised by as you were writing?

That is one of the perks of the job, is that you find out what you think when you write. Everybody knows that who's ever written anything.

If you tell people to write and they start to write, it's always fascinating. Because they'll come back a month later, and you find out what you think when you write.

You can find out a lot on a barstool or in a coffee shop or in a conversation like this, but I think I found the most of what I believe when I'm actually alone with a keyboard and writing for something else.

So the whole thing has been illuminating. And then—it's very weird—this happens on everything. The first time I went out to sell a movie that I directed, I'd worked on the movie for like five, six years to try to get it made and make it. And you're selling it, and you're out, and you go out and you start to talk about it and do things like this. And you kind of find out why you did it—after you did it.

I find the junkets and interviews and stuff afterward, it's sort of a forensic reveal. Like, "Wow, I didn't realize I did this show for this reason, or I wrote this movie for that reason." So there's some of that.

You want to be finding stuff all the time, or why would you do it?

So do you think you've found something more about Andor through the process of selling it and talking about it for the past year?

I have. I mean, the idea of being a moralist—trying to put the show in the context of everything that I had done before. I think there's a consistency in my work that you're unaware of. Even what I'm doing a movie about music, and then my son said to me, "Gosh, look at the Cutting Edge." 

I'm always dealing with economic disparity. Even in Cutting Edge, even in a rom-com—the first thing I had—there's an element of class struggle in there. So I think there's a consistent through line, weirdly, through all.

And there's no consistency to the kinds of projects. If you put my credits up in a row, they don't really make a lot of sense. But I do think I can feel myself all the way through there.

That's probably a great place to transition to other topics. But before we leave Andor, I did want to ask: Would you ever go back to the Star Wars world again?

I don't know if Disney has approached you to ask about that. Would you be interested at all, or have you told the story that you wanted to tell there?

I spent a year on Andor, and then this was like six years. We did 24 hours of the show. The way we think about it, we made eight Star Wars movies in five years. That's essentially what we did. We really made eight full films, and that's a lot.

And I think it's hard to imagine the circumstances that would lead me to go back, but I would never say never. But it was a gas to do. I doubt I'll ever be prouder of anything I ever do. I'm very proud. We're all very proud of it. We're not just proud of what we ended up with—we're proud of how we made it. We're proud of the community that we built doing it. We were proud of the process that we had, our efficiency. It was a lifetime achievement, I think.

And it must be really satisfying to tell a story and know that it's done. In TV, so often that's not the case.

I think that's why the show is good. That's one of the things is that we knew where we were ending. And I think knowing where you're going—I can't imagine working on a project and not knowing where I was going.

There's a lot of great things that have happened, and you've seen a lot of shows—and they can remain nameless or not—where people start something and it's a really cool idea, but they don't know where they're going. And if they don't figure it out in a decent amount of time, it turns into mush.

I was a big fan of Lost back in my younger days, so I am very familiar with that feeling.

We're not going to really have time to talk a lot about Rogue One here. I know you were brought into that process—I mean, Andor wouldn't exist without Rogue One. You were not part of that process, if I understand correctly, at the beginning. You were kind of brought in midway through.

This is just a pure writer question for me, but being dumped into that and asked to do whatever work it was that you did to move that script along and into the final form that it took—what was that process like? I know you've described yourself in the past as not really a Star Wars guy. You were coming in somewhat cold, and then it turned into this, you know, three-project-long…

It's very different, though. I mean, the side hustle for a successful screenwriter is weekly work and doctoring work and rewriting and repairing. So you have two different—

Andor is a completely original. I take full ownership from the first minute to the last minute. It's all mine. I'm absolutely invested.

But Rogue One was completely the opposite. And I've done a lot of work like that—a lot—like a lot of screenwriters before me, where you come in and there's a huge problem. And you're just basically…script doctoring is the most apt term. Because you're just coming in. The less emotionally connected, or the less territorially connected, you are to the material—in fact, really, really cold-blooded disdain for what's happened before is often the best approach. You just come in cold. I mean, you don't want your heart surgeon to really give a shit about anything else other than what's on the table. 

So I mean, I've done a lot. That's a big side hustle for successful screenwriters. And I came in on that job like that. It morphed into something else over time, and I don't really—I've said everything I want to say about that. But it was a completely different experience in terms of my commitment to it. Yeah.

I know there is still a great deal of speculation out there in the fandom about what the original draft of that movie looked like. I can't imagine that's something you're able to or want to disclose here, but like I have to ask for the sake of asking: What were the changes that were made in Rogue One? What elements did you add? Was it Cassian? What was the through line?

I won't. I'll only say that the easiest way to say it is: Writers Guild arbitration is a very…  Who gets credit on a screenplay is a very articulated, legal, and important process, and something that screenwriters argue and bicker about all the time.

There's a threshold for coming in on a rewrite where one has to contribute a certain percentage to get a credit. The easiest thing to say is that I came in after the film was finished, and I have a full screenplay credit on the film. So I'll leave the rest—the math—to somebody else.

Fair enough. We'll leave it there.

Let's talk about some of the other things you've done in your career. I just went back and watched, actually, the Bourne movies to prep for this conversation. And The Bourne Ultimatum really stood out to me as one I wanted to ask you about.

Maybe this is just the libertarian journalist side in me, I don't know, but amid all the car crashes and the awesome fight scenes and the special effects and all the great action sequences that are happening in those movies, one of the most pivotal scenes happens at the end of Ultimatum, when the assistant director of the CIA makes the decision to fax some information about the assassin program to someone.

We don't know who gets it. We don't know where it goes. We just are left to assume. And there's this sort of confrontation that happens over a fax machine in a small office in the center of the CIA's headquarters in New York or whatever.

Maybe it's because I've seen Andor now too, and I'm thinking about conflicts of interest and drama within an authoritarian bureaucratic regime or something like that. But that stood out to me as this important moment in the movie that comes well before, you know, Edward Snowden or anybody like that was leaking secrets.

Was that scene something that stood out to you at the time of making the movie? Am I overemphasizing the importance of that? Or is that moment saying something about the way in which—in the same way that Andor is—kind of the way in which these regimes contain their own destruction, in a way?

I think you could probably do a whistleblower film festival if you wanted to. I don't think there's anything wildly new about that.

I think maybe what you're recognizing is, in general, it's an approach. And I think probably if you go back to the beginning of our conversation. My approach is really small. Really, really small. Start small. All these big things will take care of themselves.

It's really what happens right now, and what's happening between these two people? What's happening at this meeting?

If you go in to try to make a movie and say, "I want to do…" Use Michael Clayton for example. "I want to do a movie about evil corporations and pesticides and legal malfeasance." If I tried to write a movie with that as a starting point, I'd sit here forever and never get anything. Ever.

I start with like, "Oh, man, there's a lawyer. You know what? They have these lawyers in these law firms that fix things. What's that guy's life like? What would that be like? What would he fix? How would he be treated at the law firm? How will the other lawyers deal with him? What comes out of that?"

I really start just lighting safety matches. I'm not making a bonfire. I'm just trying to light little kindling on the thing and what happens. I trust that my opinions, my worldview, my attitudes, my obsessive gathering of information over time will lead me someplace ultimately larger. But I don't want to ever start larger.

Arguing over a fax machine is right in my wheelhouse. A small thing that has great significance is really valuable to me.

And it's a pivotal decision that, as you say, is over ultimately a relatively small bit of action in a movie that's consumed by much larger, more impressive action sequences. Pushing a button on a fax machine doesn't really add up. But yet, that's kind of the most consequential decision that anybody makes.

I want to ask you a question. What is the libertarian view of Andor? What's the libertarian interpretation of Andor?

I can tell you that you have a lot of big fans here at Reason magazine, at least. But I think I see it as a story about anti-authoritarianism and about the— You know, we talked earlier about the morality or the political compass of the show, right? I agree your conversation with Ross was, like, left-right doesn't make a lot of sense. But the libertarian perspective here would say, "Yeah, sure, a left-right dichotomy is the wrong way to look at the world anyway."

It seems to me—I'll throw the question back to you—is it that the political compass on Andor is more complex than that? And it seems like it's more of a moral compass to me. It's like: How far are different people willing to go before they are radicalized or they're willing to fight back in some way? That takes different forms for different people.

Right. I mean, that's human and universal. I know libertarianism… What I know about it probably has a lot of gaps in it. But no, I'm just curious. I was trying to think before we came on this morning—how the show lines up with that?

For me, I can just say—I don't want to speak for all libertarians—but showing the cracks and the problems in a bureaucratic machine is something that you don't see enough of in media.

One of the things we talk about a lot in libertarianism is that when people go into government, they don't become angels. They are still human beings. They still have the same basic incentives that any human being has.

And that's why I think Syril and Dedra stood out so much to me. Their characters are responding to real incentives. They're not evil bad guys in the same way that, you know, Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine are evil bad guys for these huge, metaphysical reasons. They're doing what—I think you said earlier—they're just doing what puts food on the table. Or they're doing the thing that seems like it makes the most sense to them at the moment.

The Bureau of Standards, where he works, is really the total libertarian nightmare, isn't it?

Yeah—just like the endless rows of desks. No, no, no.

All right. No, I'm just—I am curious. OK, cool.

I think that would definitely be our reading of it. And I think it stood out.

Something else I had on my list to ask you is this: So much media with a political message to it seems like it's hackneyed or boring or just too obvious. And I think the various ways that people read Andor and found some meaning in it—whether it's the libertarian interpretation or something else—it must be, to your point earlier, because you're starting by writing these characters in these scenes. You're not going into this thinking, "I'm going to make a statement about the ways in which people oppose authoritarian regimes."

I want you to care about the people before they tell you how they got there and what they believe. No, I really need you to be deeply invested in them, and then you can decide if you trust them or not along the way. It's the behavior. If I'm writing a libertarian character—someone says, "You have to write"—my first instinct is not, "Well, Jesus, I have to find out all about the specific… What's the spectrum of libertarianism?"

And it is confusing in some ways. You have libertarian MAGA. How do those people—how do you deal with church and state? I have all kinds of questions. I'm sure there's a lot of different parsing that goes into your community, I'm sure. 

But my interest is: What leads somebody personally? What happened? What's leading that person? What led you to this? And why are you there? And what are you getting out of it? How shaky is it for you? Those are the things that interest me.

Yeah. And it's interesting too—again in Andor, not to just constantly be pulled back to Andor, but it's a fascinating show—you've got these different factions that form the Rebellion, right? And because we know the future of Star Wars, we know they will all eventually come together and successfully fight the Death Star and all of that. But they've got different incentives. They've got motivations. Some of them are more violent. Some have ideological differences with the Empire. Many of them are just motivated by politics or economics.

Finding that Luthen being the one who's kind of trying to thread that needle is a really interesting…

Now he's your real bureaucratic revolutionary accelerationist. Saw Gerrera's an anarchist, basically, I think. I think he's pretty much—as he says—the only one with clarity of purpose. But he runs down a whole list of other factions that he thinks are foe. But yeah, fascinating.

Yeah. There's a paranoia that inhabits some of your stories here, and this goes beyond Andor—this goes to the Bourne movies too. There's definitely a sense of paranoia that is embedded in those movies.

Are you a paranoid person? Or do you think that's just a sensible way to think about authoritarian regimes, whether it's the Empire or the CIA? Just to always be worried about what they might know in their sterile rooms?

I would say that the overwhelming wheelbarrow of history would be on my side here. I don't think it's paranoia. I think it is reportage, really.

I'm an anticipatory human. I think I have a very—I mean, look, I get paid for a couple things. I get paid for being a grinder and working really hard. I get paid for the discipline of having figured out how to make people come alive and write shootable scenes and understand the structure of how stories go and how to keeping your interest.

But I primarily make my living off my imagination. This is ultimately, after all the books and stories about screenwriting and all the rest of the crap they have, ultimately: Can you make shit up? And make a lot of it up?

And Andor was the maximal expression of that. Part of a constantly unstoppable imaginative engine is you wanna anticipate. Sometimes it's really good for you. It's good if you're traveling. It's really good if you're in an emergency. It's really good if you're trying to figure out a whole bunch of different problems.

It's not really good if your imagination works against you. If you're ill it can really fuck with you.

So—what am I answering? What was the question? I mean the imagination is the key here. I don't think I'm a fantasist. I don't think there's anything that I've written… I don't think there's anything in Bourne…

Is there a world of assassins? Not probably as much as that. Are there government pharmaceutical programs that were like The Bourne Legacy? I think there are. I don't think there's anything where I'm pushing the fantasy into the point of unreality.

I think that's interesting. Obviously science fiction, always, has been a good filter for bringing real-world issues into media.

Let's finish up here in the last few minutes with some more concrete building out the character of Tony Gilroy here. You didn't go to college, if I understand it correctly? Or didn't finish college?

I went for two years. Yeah.

Why did you not finish? Do you regret not finishing? Would you recommend to other people in this day and age whether they go to college or not?

Oh, I went when I was 16, 17. I sort of got a plea bargain from high school. They kind of threw me out—asked me to leave. Then I got into BU. At that point, you could just go to college if your father could pay for it.

So I got in there, and I was a musician. And by my second year in college, I actually liked college. I really liked it.

I had been encouraged socially all through my schooling. There was no path to popularity by being a good student where I went to school. So I was constantly anti-authoritarian.

I mean, I'll tell you the truth: That's it. Really, I don't know, I've never been able to figure this out. I've never gone deep enough into any kind of analysis.

My relationship with my father was just fantastic. I had a great father. No issues with him whatsoever. He's just an absolutely wonderful, benevolent, interesting, fascinating dude.

Why I am so rebellious against any kind of authority in my life, I don't understand. I've always been very good at working with everybody down below. I chafe at a hierarchy above me. I always have.

And I have to guard myself against it, because sometimes I make the wrong decision just because it's an instinctive thing. I don't know where that's from.

I hated school. I hated it all the way through. I hated school. I got to college, and I was like, "Wow, it's OK to be smart here. It's OK to do well here." I really liked it. I was just working too much as a musician in my second year. And I was like, that's what I want to do. And, like, I was making a living, and it's like, I don't know, "I'm gonna go do this other thing and become a rock star. I don't need to go to college."

And, I mean, I liked it when I was there. I mean, I never stopped reading. I never stopped being an autodidact my whole life. But it just I get uncomfortable in a classroom, I guess.

We get that anti-authoritarian streak. I can only imagine what some of your emails with the Disney executives must have been over.

Oh, wow.

Won't ask you to reveal any of that.

You know what? I'll say this: We never took a note, creative note, on the show.

Really? Wow.

No. Kathy protected us and protected the show. The show's so complicated—either people didn't pay attention, or…

We originally said "Fuck the Empire," and they said, "You can't say that. You've got to say 'Fight the Empire.'" So we changed that bit.

But many, many, many controversies over money in the second season. So, yeah. There's a lot of people who see my emails appear in their mailbox on a Sunday morning or a Saturday night and don't want to open them. That's for sure.

Two more questions and we'll let you go here.

You mentioned it earlier: You wrote The Cutting Edge. I think that was the first movie you wrote. If I—again, if I'm understanding the history correctly—this is a—

First one I had made.

First one you had made. That was a romantic comedy about a figure skater and a hockey player in the Olympics.

The second one you had made was Dolores Claiborne, which is a Stephen King adaptation about a daughter and mother, and there's a murder involved.

These are very different movies, and they're very different from the Bourne movies and from Andor and things like that—at least at first blush.

So, Tony Gilroy, what is the theme of your life's work? Find me the through line there. You mentioned earlier that you think there is a consistency. What is it? Sum it up for me in two sentences.

Oh, I mean, you've been talking about it. I do think there's a moral…

I did Extreme Measures, which is about human experimentation and philosophical, and The Devil's Advocate, which is literally a Nietzschean approach to—

Yeah, sure.

Exactly. I'm trying to think back. Proof of Life. They all have…

Look, I always want to do things that interest me. I don't want to do anything like what I just did before.

I'm doing this music movie now. My game is I have to be able to see it. I have to see what it's about.

It has to be about something. I can't start something if I don't know what it's sort of about—or feel that what it's about will reveal itself to me before I actually start the script.

I have to start seeing scenes for it. I just want it to be exciting.

There are things that I've worked on that I loved that didn't get made, and then later on you want to revive them. And somehow, as exciting as they were—some of the best things I ever wrote—I feel like the moment's passed.

I think there's a timeliness about things, that you want to be on the spot, on the moment. I want to be part of the conversation. I want to be relevant. I want an audience. I want your attention. I do. I mean, I'm desperate for your attention, so I think I'm honest about that.

But I want to look forward to going to work, you know? I want to look forward to, like, "Wow, I want to get into this, and I want… I want to be here for a while."

Well, you've certainly got our attention. We're very excited about Behemoth. I know you're in the middle of making that movie, so you probably don't have a lot of free time, but I also wanted to wrap this up just by asking:

What is the most recent movie or show or anything you saw that you were impressed by? That you liked? Give me a recommendation for something.

Oh, my God. I hate these questions. I mean, I don't know. I turned down like five of these things in the last week—the year-end thing. It's so hard.

Number one—also—I've been intensively making something, and it's really hard for me to take a lot of other information in while I'm doing that. So I don't consume. I'm not as much of a consumer.

I've certainly not reading. I don't read a lot when I'm doing this, because I don't want a lot of other stuff. I mean, I don't know what I'm watching. What do I like?

I have been enjoying The Diplomat. I think that it's really well-written. I think she's doing a really great job on writing that. So, I don't know, I was watching it.

But I don't know. My TV here is weird in the house I'm staying in, so I have a western channel that I've been watching. So I've been watching a lot of westerns when I come home.

I watched The Professionals the other night when I got home at night. So I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you. 

That's a good—we'll come back to you next time.

The Geese album is really good—like everybody else says. The Geese album, I think, is really good. That's on constant rotation this week. I don't know.

Sounds good. Well, you're a busy man at the moment—we'll give you some time to catch up with the latest in media.

That's Tony Gilroy. I'll insert the obvious libertarian joke here at the end and say that I'm already excited about the sequel to Behemoth, which I assume will be called Leviathan. Although maybe you aren't…

There's a great movie called Leviathan already…

That'd be a good one. Tony, thank you so much for joining us. This was a great conversation.

Be well.

• Producer: Paul Alexander
• Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser

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