One of Star Wars: Rogue One’s planets was named after a coffee cup mix-up

Director Gareth Edwards reveals the inspiration for Scarif

Published: Wednesday, 15 March 2017 at 1:47 pm

The path to artistic inspiration is a long and rocky one, with all sorts of different factors influencing creators when deciding exactly what kind of project they want to bring into the world.

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And sometimes that even includes misspelled names on coffee cups, as Gareth Edwards, director of Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, has revealed.

Apparently, during production Edwards’ drink order came mislabelled, and the incorrect name was just too good to pass up, so he assigned it to the tropical planet where the film's final battle takes place.

"I must have said, 'It's Gareth,' and they wrote 'Scarif,'" he told the audience at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas to laughter, while simultaneously making everyone feel bad for not drawing artistic inspiration from every time they went to Starbucks.

And it wasn’t the only inspirational part of Edwards’ keynote address, where he also looked back to his first viewing of the original Star Wars.

"I instantly knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," he recalled (via The Hollywood Reporter). "I was going to join the Rebel Alliance and help blow up the Death Star."

And thanks to writing himself a cameo in Rogue One, that dream did in fact come true…

"Never ever, ever listen to anybody who tells you something is impossible," he said. "Because if you never give up, you sometimes CAN join the Rebel Alliance and help blow up the Death Star."

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And to think, he didn’t even get that line from a foam cup.

Authors

Radio Times commissioning editor Huw Fullerton. He sits in front of a shelving unit, looking at the camera and smiling. He wears glasses and has a moustache

Huw FullertonCommissioning editor

Huw Fullerton is a commissioning editor for Radio Times magazine handling comedy, entertainment and specialist drama. In a previous regeneration, he covered all things sci-fi and fantasy for RadioTimes.com.

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