“When we looked at the footage from The Force Awakens,” director J. Photo: David James/Lucasfilmīut plans changed between then and now, as Leia plays a fairly prominent - if also somewhat strange - part in the last Star Wars film. Fisher and director Rian Johnson (left) on the set of The Last Jedi. “Sadly, Carrie will not be in IX,” she told Vanity Fair in December 2017. In an interview upon the release of The Last Jedi, Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy said that the company had no intention to keep using CGI copies of actors, and that Fisher wouldn’t appear even in archival footage. So where did that leave Leia’s arc for The Rise of Skywalker? A single scene - that of Leia flying through space - was created digitally the rest was all the real Fisher.

Fisher had finished shooting her scenes for The Last Jedi, but hadn’t completed some dialogue re-recording in post-production, which meant that director Rian Johnson had to stitch her previously recorded lines together. Digitally de-aging Carrie Fisher for a Leia cameo at the movie’s end was one thing digitally bringing a person back from the dead crossed a threshold.įollowing Carrie Fisher’s death in 2016, a year before the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the question of how to handle Leia’s unfinished storyline became a particularly concerning one, with the uncanny images of Rogue One still on fans’ minds. Whether you loved or hated Rogue One, there’s no denying that the digitally recreated Peter Cushing was a shock.

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