Transcribed from an old, mostly in-French, interview with Gareth Edwards:
We felt we needed to have some characters in the film that represented a belief in the force, because there's no Jedi in our movie - it was in an era when they'd all been made extinct, in theory. And so, to try and get inspiration I'd watch the things that inspired George Lucas, which was the original Akira Kurosawa film The Hidden Fortress and in that film there are two asian characters that bicker and squabble a lot, and they became, eventually, R2-D2 and C-3PO in the final movie. So we just rewound time and didn't make them droids, and kept them as two asian characters fighting. They were like the yin-yang of our film - the Belief and the Not-Belief, like War and Peace, which became Baze and Chirrut.
