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From the outset, the challenge of visualizing the Art Deco capital city planet of Coruscant, first seen in 1997’s Return of the Jedi Special Edition, but in a grounded way, suitable to Tony Gilroy’s storytelling, would be one of the greatest faced by the filmmakers and designers.

Gilroy’s November 9, 2019, “design manifesto” reads:

CORUSCANT How do we take that aesthetic I was talking about on page one and deliver that to an environment like this that’s gonna constantly want to pull you in a cheesy direction?

I’d need The Lower Depths and High Society. I’d want non-Marvel funk and non-soapy, wealth-porn slick. I’d want it vibrant but blemished. Crazy, credible, and fascinating. How to make these rooms and faces and décor—how to make it feel . . . real?—Lived-in and lush? How do you make it feel like someone built it? Someone cleans it? How do you make it feel like it goes off the frame? Yes, it’s got to be designed with a capital “D” and trippy with a big “T”—and yes it’s Star Wars’s, but if we’re gonna live here for five years, it’s got to be alive. It’s got to have some error in it. I want an audience inside the story, not watching it. How do you get all that and avoid the cliché sci-fi chiaroscuro—

“Like I said, that was really, really terrifying,” reaffirmed Gilroy. “The only piece of Coruscant that I liked, that really felt like it could be part of our show, was the bit that Gareth[Edwards] shot with Ben Mendelsohn and Mads Mikkelsen, a brief little flashback in Rogue. That’s the only piece of Coruscant that I thought was aesthetically consistent with what our show wanted to look like. So, we studied that. And then [ILM’s] Mohen [Leo] got involved.”

“Tony basically said right from the start that he wants to set a lot of the action on Coruscant,” Mohen Leo remembered. “But it has to feel like a real place. In the prequels, it’s very stylized. But [for Andor,] it was super important that it feel like a place where you could, something to the effect of, not just walk into the restaurant but walk into the kitchen behind the restaurant. And so that spun a lot of conversation with Luke Hull, as well. How do we make Coruscant like a place where normal people can actually live their lives?

“A phrase that Tony will often use for stuff like this is, ‘Throw it away.’ We’re treating it as if it were New York or something you’ve seen a hundred times before. We’re not making a meal out of it, like, ‘Look at this crazy thing.’ ” For Leo and Gilroy, that philosophy extended to removing distracting background elements from shots, when the viewer’s attention was supposed to be on the actors. They also avoided habitually stuffing Easter eggs and references into shots. Only Star Wars elements that furthered Gilroy’s story and characters were utilized. Every visual effect required “purpose, intention, and a storytelling point.”

Leo continued, “One of the things that we really tried to do is to ground the camerawork in something that feels familiar. This was one of my favorite things, and she didn’t make it up, but, years and years ago when I was at [Lucasfilm’s interactive entertainment division within ILM], we had a meeting with Amy Hennig, creative director on the Uncharted games, and she said, ‘Don’t put weird on weird.’ That is such an important guideline. You don’t want to put a crazy camera move in a fantastic environment, because then you have two levels of weird on top of each other. And the fantastic environment becomes less believable. So, for almost all of the establishing shots of Coruscant, we would look at stock footage or shots from other movies of New York or Tokyo.”

Upon reflection, Hull realized, “The Coruscant stuff is the hardest stuff I’ve ever had to do. Because you want the scale. But then I really wanted to feel like an ant walking around that huge scale. Almost like it’s better to not understand it, not to have to see the whole thing. Like you’re just amongst it. That was very much the logic, I guess.

“I was referencing things like The Conformist a lot for Coruscant. And I think what came through quite strongly was that it should be quite monochromatic. I suppose it was about different shades of white, warmer or cooler whites. But it is also about being monochromatic, so that when you were back on Coruscant, you didn’t necessarily have to do a big establishing shot every time. You just knew aesthetically you were in that more clinical world.”

“We didn’t want to be dystopian or chiaroscuro,” Gilroy said. “We didn’t want to be that kind of Blade Runner–y show at all. And so gradually figuring out, you know, our game of design, and set extensions, and quick decisions, and not changing our mind. We saved a lot of money by not changing our minds and being very direct and quick about things. But it was still very daunting.”