Tony Gilroy and the Art of Making the Fantastic Feel Real

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You don’t have to be a Star Wars fan to love Andor. However, it might help to be a Tony Gilroy fan. The master screenwriter-turned-director behind The Bourne Identity and Michael Clayton excels at injecting profound themes and nuanced characters into large-scale spectacles.

As Gilroy recounted at the Playhouse over the weekend, the rise of the Rebellion in a galaxy far, far, away can sometimes feel pretty darn close to our own world. “I thought I had lived through history,” Gilroy told the audience. “Vietnam, the sixties in America, race, drugs, 9/11, the Iraq War, and COVID. I had no idea there was a lot more history left to me. That’s what’s happening to the people in this show.”

Throughout his career, Gilroy has excelled at elevating realistic characters who exist in a moral gray zone. (He did not elaborate on his decision to pass on Forrest Gump, but lovable naifs aren’t exactly his thing.) As he made inroads on bigger Hollywood projects, he started to advocate for a more intimate approach. “I had been trying for years to get people to make action movies that were more acoustic,” he said.

When he got the chance to improve the script for The Bourne Identity, he said, he came at it from a unique direction: “What if all the things I thought were good were bad and it turned out I was a bad person? That became the theme of the movie.”

It also became the throughline for much of Gilroy’s work. Watch Andor with zero awareness of the Star Wars mythology and you’ll still witness a tense, poignant, and even philosophical rumination on the roots of revolution. “If it’s not real to me,” Gilroy said, “it’s not possible.”

Gilroy didn’t write How to Train Your Dragon, but the new live-action remake of the 2010 animated hit demonstrates a similar capacity for building authenticity into a vast, fantastical canvas. Director Dean DeBlois, who directed the previous three animated features, returns with a faithful live-action variation of the original that will satisfy anyone who enjoyed this series’ clever blend of Viking characters and cryptozoology.

At the same time, DeBlois demonstrates a keen understanding of the differences between real-world imagery and the exaggerations of a cartoon world. The 2025 How to Train Your Dragon has the distinct look of a Viking villages come to life, the dragon scales shimmer in the sunlight, and the flying scenes are almost as impressive as the one that caps off the latest Mission Impossible. (No joke.)

DeBlois has delivered a fast-paced coming-of-age story with dazzling action shot high in the clouds above wooden encampments, where the youth learn to do battle with the beasts around them – until they realize that they aren’t really beasts at all. (Well, some of them, anyway.) The young would-be dragon killer (Mason Thames) pushed into battle by his wild-eyed father (Gerard Butler, who voiced the same character in the animated films) gradually develops his own empathy for dragon species and makes the case for a less militant approach. The movie is essentially an animal rights documentary in disguise.

The whole thing reflects the care that DeBlois has brought to a story that must work on its own terms. The physical nature of the work, much like Gilroy’s achievements, lends a sense of credibility to the proceedings and heightens their stakes. “I continue to not be a fan of live action because they often miss the soul,” the director said in an interview with CBC this past week. “They don’t have the benefit of the years of iteration that went into those animated classics…I had to put all those convictions to the test to make sure we were bringing over the wonder and the emotion and the deep knowledge of the characters to this new medium.”

Whether it’s dragons or spaceships, certain motifs have enduring power in popular culture. It’s up to the creatives involved to figure out how to keep them relevant – and the secret seems to be: Make them real.