Jon Favreau Reveals The First Scene Filmed For THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGO, And It's a Great Moment In The Movie

Jon Favreau has shared a lot of details and commentary about The Mandalorian and Grogu through the TheatersEars app, and one of the things he revealed was the very first thing he shot for the film.

According to Favreau's director's commentary, the movie's production kicked off not with some grand Star Wars set piece, but with an ocean. Specifically, it was the plate shot of the waters at Adelphi Base, the scene where Grogu and Rotta the Hutt run through the tides together in what is a purely joyful moment in the movie.

For anyone unfamiliar with how VFX-heavy productions work, a plate shot is real-world footage captured to serve as the visual foundation for a computer-generated scene. The ocean was shot first. Grogu and Rotta came later, added into that world.

There's something almost poetic about starting there. What’s great about this scene is that we see these two characters giggling and splashing in the water and being completely carefree in the surf. It’s a nice moment for them after everything they went through.

What makes it work so well isn't just the cuteness factor, though Grogu has always had that in abundance. It's what the scene is actually doing thematically.

Rotta, who was a genuinely welcome surprise presence throughout the movie, gets to be a kid in that moment alongside Grogu. Two strange creatures from wildly different corners of the galaxy, just existing together without the weight of whatever danger the plot has lined up next.

Meanwhile, Din Djarin is right there watching them, and that's where the scene earns its warmth. Those two get to splash around in the surf because somebody showed up for them. The film's whole meditation on fatherhood and protection lands softly in that quiet image of a man in Beskar armor watching two little ones play.

Favreau's commentary has been a goldmine of production details like this one. He's talked about reaching out to George Lucas for approval on a specific element of the film, about how Edgar Wright weighed in with advice on Embo the bounty hunter, and about a Luke Skywalker callback that wasn't even in the script until the day of the shoot.

There's the revelation that one of the movie's best lines was completely improvised, that the Droid Gotra were drawn from a cancelled Star Wars video game, and that Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order served as a reference point for one of the action sequences. If you're the kind of person who likes knowing how the sausage gets made, the commentary is worth your time.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is in theaters now.