Does Hollywood have anything interesting left to say? In a world where franchises dominate and grown-up movies have fallen by the wayside, Ross talks to the showrunner Tony Gilroy, whose “Star Wars” spinoff “Andor” has, according to Ross, succeeded in being both original and smartly political in a Hollywood that is often neither.03:04 - The political world of ”Andor”08:36 - Tony Gilroy's syllabus for “Andor”10:40 - Is “Andor” a left-wing show?17:07 - What makes Hollywood progressive or liberal?24:22 - Debating the politics of “Michael Clayton”29:42 - Why aren't there more movies for grown-ups?32:56 - “There are no movie stars anymore.”35:55 - How A.I. changing the movie business39:28 - Tony Gilroy's advice for future filmmakers(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.) Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What makes 'Andor' politically unique?
From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times. American popular culture is in trouble. The Hollywood dream factory has gone stagnant, recycling the same stories time and time again. Giants like Marvel feel too big to fail, but they've lost the ability to tell us new and surprising stories. But there is one notable exception.
The Star Wars serial Andor has somehow managed to pull off originality within the constraints of a familiar franchise. And part of its originality is that it has an explicitly political and, to my mind, left-wing perspective on its world without feeling at all like tedious propaganda. My guest today is the showrunner behind Andor, Tony Gilroy.
We're going to talk about how art and politics interact in a show about radicals trying to defeat fascism and whether Hollywood can ever tell stories for grownups again. So, Tony Gilroy, welcome to Interesting Times. Thank you for having me.
Chapter 2: How does Tony Gilroy approach storytelling in 'Andor'?
So I want to start by congratulating you on what I personally think a large number of critics and a sizable fraction of the viewing public consider the most successful Star Wars production maybe since the original trilogy.
Thank you. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of material to be compared with. So it's a big thank you.
So you've been frank in the past about not having been an intense Star Wars guy before you got pulled into... this universe and into this work and this project. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that's like, what it's like to come into a story, a franchise. Were you saying to yourself, I'm going to do something inside a franchise that no one has done before?
Or were you saying, look, there are other models here of how, you know, like Christopher Nolan's Batman or something like that?
No, I'm always trying to do something that I haven't seen before that is gonna be unusual. So no, I had no, I was very much not into any other model. I was very into striking new ground. And the other thing that I was being offered was a five-year piece of history on that calendar that you probably know pretty well. I think you're a big fan.
I have that five-year tranche of history that takes you up to the first scene in Rogue One.
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Chapter 3: Is 'Andor' considered a left-wing show?
And that is... It's the story of the... For listeners and viewers who are not huge Star Wars fans, right? This is the story that Andor tells is the story of the rise of the Rebel Alliance. How you get to the point in the original Star Wars where Luke Skywalker comes in and there's already this rebellion ongoing against the Empire. And... You're telling a very, very political story.
Well, that was the offer. The canvas that was being offered was just a wildly abundant opportunity of...
To use all of the nonfiction and all the history and all the amateur reading that I'd done over the past 40 years and all the things I was fascinated by, all the revolution stuff, that not only I would never have a chance to do again, but I really wondered if anybody else would ever have a chance to do again.
When are you going to be able to have, as we've ended up with, a 1,500-page—I think of it as a novel, really, a 1,500-page novel— that is trying to deal with as many aspects of authoritarianism and fascism and colonialism and rebellion and coalition and sacrifice and all of that.
I think this is a good place to pivot more to a discussion of politics and art. Because Andor is, it's telling a political story in a way that goes beyond anything Star Wars has done before. It's not just the world of Skywalker family and the Jedi Knights. It's a world of bureaucrats and senators, politicians, and so on, right? So talk a little bit about what is this world that you're showing?
What is the political world that you're depicting in this show?
The five years that I've been given are extremely potent. You have the Empire really closing down, really choking, really ramping up. The Emperor's building the Death Star. The rebellion on Gorman was a front from the start, a cover to strip mine the planet for some mineral that they need.
Fronting for what? A weapon.
They are closing out corporate planets and absorbing them into the state. They are imperialistically acquiring planets and taking what they want. The noose is tightening dramatically. There still is a Senate. There are senators that are speaking out impotently.
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Chapter 4: What themes of authoritarianism and rebellion are explored in 'Andor'?
The Senate has been all but completely emasculated by the time this five-year tranche is over. And there are revolutionary groups, rebellious groups, and people who are acting rebelliously who wouldn't even know how to describe themselves as part of any movement. There are a completely wide spectrum of unaffiliated cells, I guess, and activists that are rising independently across the galaxy.
And at the same time, you have a group of more restrained politicians who are trying to make an organized coalition of a rebellion on a place called Yavin, which will end up being the true victory of the rebel alliance. I wanted to do a show all about the forgotten people who make... a revolution like this happen on both sides.
And I want to take equal interest and spend as much time understanding the bureaucrats and the enforcers of the rebellion.
I think one of the fascinating things about fascism is that when it's done coming after the people whose land it wants and who it wants to oppress and whoever it wants to control, by the time it gets rid of the courts and the justice, and by the time it consolidates all its power in the center, it ultimately eats its young. It ultimately comes after its own... It consumes its own proponents.
That's been the... It's just reading about the last days of Mussolini a month ago. And it's just like right out of the... People get lost and get hung out to dry. So I want to pay as much attention to the authoritarian side of this, the people who've cast their lot with the empire who get burned by it all. Sure.
So is Andor a left-wing show? Because this is something that I've said a couple times in my writing about it, using it literally as an example as a conservative columnist of a work of art that I think of as having different politics from my own that I really, really like. And I've had friends...
especially on the right, come back to me and say, oh, you know, it's not it's not left wing or right wing. It's just a TV show about resistance to tyranny. But I think you've made a left wing work of art. What do you think?
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Chapter 5: Why are there so few movies for grown-ups in Hollywood?
I never think about it that way. I never think about it that way. It was never... I mean, I never do.
I don't... But it's a story, but it's a political story about revolutionary... Do you identify with the empire?
Do you identify with the empire?
No, I don't. But I don't think that you have to be left-wing to resist authoritarianism, right? But I see the empire as you just described it, right? It's a fascist... It's presented as a fascist institution that doesn't have any sort of, you know, communist pretense to solidarity or anything like that. It's it's fascist and authoritarian.
And you're meditating on what revolutionary politics looks like in the shadow of that. Right. I mean, who. So you talked about all this history that you brought in.
Yeah.
Talk about that history a little bit.
I mean, my education is very, very spotty and not college graduate, but completely autodidactic. I grew up in a house with an amazing library, and I've been a very active reader my whole life. And I've done just an incredible number of deep dives in my life where I've become obsessed with all kinds of different things, and I've made my own syllabus, and I've I mean, I don't know.
I probably read Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette when I was 15 or 16 years old and started a French Revolution jag. And then, you know, and I probably revisited that. I probably revisited the French Revolution half a dozen times in my life. And probably the last thing I read was, oh, there's a great novel, Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.
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Chapter 6: How is AI changing the film industry?
Oh, yeah. It's a terrific book.
Amazing book. And so I've done that, and I was obsessed with the Russian Revolution. And then the literature on that has expanded over time. And the show trials. And, you know, I don't know if you've ever seen House of Government. It's just an incredible book. And at different times, different things would come out. Oliver Cromwell, Zapata, the Roman Revolutions. And...
So, yeah, I mean, my syllabus for the show is, it just goes back too far and too deep. It's just something I've always been fascinated in. I don't think of the show as a left-wing show, and I don't want you to think that I came on the show, I sort of said before, I saw the opportunity to use all this material and to dig into all these things, but that is not how I write.
It's completely antithetical to the way I write. I write very, very small. I trust my instincts are going to take me someplace larger if I'm doing it right. But it's really almost exclusively all about character. I plot through dialogue. I go very, very deep. And you can see how many characters I have and how many I'm carrying. And I... I don't think of it as a pushing or promoting or anything.
Chapter 7: What advice does Tony Gilroy have for future filmmakers?
In fact, the ideology... But you're rooting.
But in the end, I mean, in the end, you're rooting. I guess here's how I think about it.
Yeah, go ahead.
Right, so this is a show, it's a story, where you are rooting for... against a fascist regime, right? Okay. As you said, you're not rooting for the empire in the end, right? No. So that to me is sort of the political foundation of the work, right?
And that's why I use the term left-wing, not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you're telling a story in which basically you're on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries, but then at the same time, and this is why I think it is effective art
what i think you've been able to do maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading right is give people a window into why the radicals even if you're rooting for them you can see how things can go wrong right But that is what I really like about the show's approach to politics, right?
But there's no ever – what's fascinating is there's no – and particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of particularly for – and using Stellan Skarsgård's character, Luthen, as the sort of – and Forrest Whitaker's character as sort of the original gangsters and the difficulty of integrating – the inceptors of radicalism, into a coalition.
But I never... There's never anybody, I don't think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than to please leave us alone, stop killing us, stop destroying our communities, don't build the Death Star and kill us. There's not a...
I never have a character I don't think stand up and say, this is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.
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