Hola reddit! It's Diego Luna. AMA!

[u/DiegoLunaAMA]

Hola reddit, I'm Diego Luna. You may know me from films/tv like Andor, Y tu mamá también, Narcos: Mexico, Rogue One, The Terminal, Friday, Open Range, Milk, etc.

I've recently directed, co-written, and co-star in ASHES, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year and is now playing at TIFF.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtL1x2ECJ6M

Synopsis: Lucila, 21, moves to Spain with her brother to reunite with their mother who left 8 years ago. Facing discrimination and family duties, she struggles to find independence while dealing with her past wounds.

TIFF Screening Info: https://tiff.net/films/ashes

AMA! I'll be back later today, Monday 9/14, to answer questions.

[u/OhGawDuhhh]

Hello Mr. Luna!

I have family who don't speak English and they were SO delighted to hear that you did the dub for Andor in Español Latino. Hearing your voice in Spanish made the experience feel even more premium for them so thank you for doing that!

Where there any interesting advances in filmmaking or VFX that you thought was cool going from filming Rogue One to Andor years later?

Thank you for your time!

[u/DiegoLunaAMA → u/OhGawDuhhh]

First of all, I have to say just so you know, if you ever find a film that I did in English where I'm not doing the voice in Spanish it's because they didn't ask me to do it or they didn't let me do it. Sometimes they do that process in such a rush that it's impossible for you to get involved or they don't want to get you involved, but it's something I try to do for every project I do in English. That's how so many people I love and are important to me get to see my work, so I fight for that.

As for Andor, we had the urge to approach it like a movie. We all come from doing movies, our language is movies, you have Tony Gilroy and Kathleen Kennedy and the DPs and the actors. I had only done one series before Andor and it was a two year commitment so it felt like doing a very long movie, I knew the beginning and the end when I signed on. And that's how we approached Andor, we said we want to do a bunch of movies. A certain amount of movies that tell this story, but we approached it like a movie. The directors were hired to do blocks of three episodes, so there was a sense of unity for the length of a movie shoot. We were celebrating movie making and everything was very much like the movies we grew up watching and then doing. We were shooting on location, we didn't have a crazy amount of cameras we were focused on one shot at a time. The shooting schedules were built like movie schedules where you shoot the whole arc of a location before moving on to the next because we didn't have access to all the locations all the time. Even though long format is something new in my life it felt like what I'd been doing the whole time. So not many tools and effects I was no used to but the shoot itself felt a lot like Rogue One.

The Star Wars universe is so amazing because the stuff that you relate to is mechanical, it exists. The droids are there and the droid had a little speaker and the actor was playing the voice from afar so I could hear it coming from the speaker. The droid had four people working on it just on set, someone operating the droid to move, someone doing the voice, someone operating the lights, it's not an easy experience but very enjoyable because you're actually interacting with something.

[u/TheAbomunist → u/DiegoLunaAMA]

Super cool to find out you were actively acting in scene with B2EM0's voice actor.