Whitta said, "At one point Jyn was already a Rebel soldier. She was the one who uncovered the existence of the Death Star and had to find a way of exposing the Empire's plans. Early on, Jyn was envisioned as more akin to Jessica Chastain's character in Zero Dark Thirty.
Krennic is basically the Cristoph Waltz Nazi in this movie coming to interrogate the poor innocents who have to hide this girl.” Jyn Erso's Original Role A great deal about the plot and direction of Rogue One changed during development, including the specific role Jyn Erso played. "This scene was very much inspired by that. “Gareth and I talked a lot about how much we loved the opening of Inglorious Basterds, if you remember that with the French farmhouse," said Whitta. Whitta was particularly inspired by the suspenseful opening act of Inglourious Basterds.
And a lot of the visual tropes - the iris wipes, the opening crawl, things like that - we felt like the standalone movies had more license than the saga films to do something a little more different.” The Quentin Tarantino Influence When discussing the opening sequence where Director Krennic confronts Galen Erso and his family, Whitta revealed 2009's Inglourious Basterds had a strong influence on his writing. But one of the things that we arrived at fairly early on in the process is that it was OK to liberate ourselves from the traditional storytelling language of Star Wars. Back when we were still experimenting with the idea of maybe doing one. Whitta said, “The way the movie opens is really one of the first interesting questions that Gareth and I had: Should there be an opening crawl? I did write one. Whitta revealed he actually wrote multiple versions of a crawl before it was decided eliminating the crawl would help Rogue One veer away from the usual Star Wars tropes.
However, it wasn't always intended to be that way. Let’s do a title that’s shorter so that even from the title of the movie, you know this is something that doesn’t necessarily conform to the unwritten rules of the saga films." There Was an Opening Crawl Rogue One set an unusual precedent for the Star Wars Anthology movies by eliminating the iconic opening crawl sequence. So like Star Wars: Rebellion, Star Wars: Rogue One, things like that. And so it occurred to me that one of the ways we could differentiate this movie from the rest is we had a title that was only one word or two words long. One of the things that occurred to me, I went back and looked to all the previous films, and this continues to be true even with the sequel trilogy now being completed, the titles of Star Wars saga films are always either three words or four words long.
… Shadow of the Death Star and all these kind of fancy titles. At one point, John Swartz, who was one of the creative executives on the film, had a list and we all kind of voted on the ones that we liked. Other possible titles included "Dark Times," "Rebellion" and "Shadow of the Death Star." Whitta said, "We had a lot. Rogue One's Other Titles The Rogue One team went through a number of different working titles for the film before finally settling on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.