Dan Gilroy Talks About Mon Mothma's Senate Speech
Source: Comicbook
“The distance between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss. Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous. The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil. When truth leaves us, when we let it slip away, when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”
In a season full of highlights, Mon Mothma’s speech before the Senate in episode nine of Andor is one of the pivotal moments in Star Wars history, not only for the in-universe character who delivered the words, but also for the people who worked on bringing them to life.
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And the person tasked with creating the whole speech was Dan Gilroy, brother of Andor shworunner Tony Gilroy.
Andor as a whole was not only the depiction of the cruelty and the ruthlessness of the Galactic Empire, but also a reflection of the political changes that have happened and still do on our planet, and this was not lost on Gilroy when he was crafting the senator’s speech:
“As I was literally starting to write this episode, I was watching senators and congressmen and congresswomen abandoning their democratic principles and bending their knee to power. So when I’m writing that speech, I’m angry. I’m very angry. Because I can very much relate to what’s going on in Mon’s world.”
Although Mothma’s speech has only 269 words- three fewer than the Gettysburg Address - Dan Gilroy was well aware of the importance of the words he had to lay in Mon Mothma’s mouth, and he didn’t take this task lightly:
“I revelled in it,” he remembers. “I got lost in it. I imagined it. I respected it. I wanted to make every comma and period proper and right. This was hallowed ground to me.”
He took inspiration from real-life speeches by Abraham Lincoln, President Kennedy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr,. and Mahatma Gandhi, but he also harkened back to the dark times, when Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi propaganda manipulated the truth, by telling lie after lie, until the public was basically numb and, as he put it, “stop sort of paying attention.”
And the “...monster who will come for all of us soon enough...” is not only Hitler or Palpatine, but everyone attempting to rip the truth from us for their own purposes, and Mon Motha’s speech is a testament to everyone who stands up against this deceit:
“There’s nothing more important to me than someone who’s willing to sacrifice themselves for a political ideal, or a fight against the evil tendencies of our human nature,” Gilroy says. “I bow to that.”
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Sources: Empire, Los Angeles Times
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