With the Blu-ray release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story impending, the press circuit has kicked back up again for the Star Wars film and even more revelations have come forward. At this point it feels like we know everything there is to know about Rogue One, how it came together, and the various different incarnations of the story along the way to the finished film. So you may be surprised to learn there’s still one more piece of brand new information to be gleaned about Rogue One, and it comes from the film’s director himself Gareth Edwards.

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Collider’s own Steve Weintraub recently spoke with Edwards in anticipation of the Blu-ray release, and Edwards noted that this was the last interview he’d be doing in promotion of the film, and as such had one nugget of Rogue One trivia he wanted to share:

“There’s some stuff we did in there that are visual clues to ideas that maybe no one would ever know. I’ll tell you one thing, and this is my last interview to do with Star Wars so this is a scoop (laughs), but it’s probably not as interesting as some of the other things we talked about. If you look at the establishing shot of Jedha from above, the layout of it is this giant, circular rock formation around where Jedha is—the idea was that there was a meteor impact that hit Jedha and it came at such a force that it was what created the Kyber Crystals at the center of that crater of impact. So Jedha is like this very unique place in the galaxy in that it’s got a very high density of Kyber Crystals, which is what the Jedi need for lightsabers. So it became this holy city as a result of that meteor impact. But that must’ve happened maybe millions of years ago. We tried to tell that story in the establishing shot, you see the circular formation and at the heart of it is Jedha city.”

So there you have it, Star Wars superfans—the reason that Jedha is a holy city for Jedi is because a meteor created a hotbed of Kyber Crystal activity. This is one of the many reasons Edwards was a solid fit to helm Rogue One, and further proves his intense passion for the Star Wars universe as a whole. He and his team went to great lengths to honor what came before and build upon that in a compelling way, and this Easter Egg of sorts relating to Jedha’s geography is quite neat.

Look for Steve’s full interview with Edwards, which includes a great Peter Jackson story, on Collider soon. Until then you can watch Steve's interview with Edwards from the Rogue One junket before the film was released.

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Image via Lucasfilm
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Image via Lucasfilm
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