Though he enjoys building a futuristic world on screen with his hit TV series “Andor,” in real life, writer/director Tony Gilroy is trying to slow the future.
Speaking in a recent interview with Collider, Gilroy expressed his animosity toward the use of Artificial Intelligence, particularly in Hollywood, where many are training their models on screenplays whether they have the rights to them or not. For this reason, Gilroy decided to nix an initial plan to release the scripts for Season 1 as a book, similar to how “Succession” and other shows have.
“I wanted to do it. We put it together. It’s really cool. I’ve seen it, I loved it. AI is the reason we’re not,” said Gilroy. “In the end, it would be 1,500 pages that came directly off this desk. I mean, terribly sadly, it’s just too much of an X-ray and too easily absorbed. Why help the fucking robots anymore than you can? So, it was an ego thing. It was vanity that makes you want to do it, and the downside is real. So, vanity loses.”
In writing the scripts for Season 1 and Season 2, Gilroy had more time than most to put them together. Considering how many feel the show speaks to the rise in fascism currently taking place throughout the world, many believe the show has become adept at channeling real-world conflicts into a sci-fi allegory, but Gilroy doesn’t view his work as capturing the moment.
“No one was working on the show with a newspaper at any point in time. We write so far in advance,” he told Collider. “I’ve said this before: I’ve been a student of history, as an amateur, a dinner table historian all this time, and it’s nothing but revolutions and uprisings and people being swept up into events that they weren’t ready for and people assuming heroic roles that they had never anticipated.”
Showrunner Gilroy isn’t the only writer working on “Andor,” of course. Though most writers’ rooms work together to shape a season of television, Gilroy prefers to let his staff loose to follow their own voices.
“The writers on the show and myself, it’s a pretty fancy bunch of writers, really, in a way. Everybody’s very experienced,” Gilroy said. “We only get together for five or six days in the beginning to talk about the story, and then we kind of go, and they do their thing, and then they go away. But I always have them as a reference to call upon.”
“Andor” Season 2 premieres on Disney+ April 25.
