Princess Leia became General Organa, and finally she was known as Master Leia — but the woman who brought her to life was not there to complete the four-decade journey.
Carrie Fisher died on Dec. 27, 2016, a few months after completing work on The Last Jedi but nearly a year before it was released in theaters. Yet her final appearance in a Star Wars film came just weeks ago with The Rise of Skywalker, a movie that didn’t even have a script when she passed away.
By now, fans are well aware that unused scenes of Leia from The Force Awakens were repurposed to close the character’s story in Rise, but doing that meant more than just splicing shots from old deleted scenes into the action. The Leia in Rise has different hair, a different costume, and exists in an entirely different location than where Fisher shot.
The character’s dialogue, (“Never underestimate a droid,”) was originally delivered not to Daisy Ridley’s Rey but to a political emissary Leia was dispatching to the New Republic planet that was later destroyed in The Force Awakens.
With the blessing of Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd, who co-starred alongside her as Resistance Lt. Connix in the films, and her brother Todd Fisher, director J.J. Abrams decided that it might be possible for Leia to return, even if Carrie could not.
Doing that required intense work and imagination from the entire team, from co-writer Chris Terrio, to cinematographer Dan Mindel, the visual effects team led by Roger Guyett, and editor Maryann Brandon, who was haunted by something Fisher asked her while working together on The Force Awakens.
J.J. Abrams, writer-director: Before we started writing, we knew that Leia had to be part of the story—you couldn't tell the end of the Skywalker saga without Leia. We weren't going to recast, we couldn't do a CG character. We looked at the footage we had not used in The Force Awakens, and we realized we had a number of shots that we could actually use. It was a bit like having a dozen pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and then having to make other pieces around it and paint a cohesive image from these separate pieces.
Chris Terrio, co-screenwriter: I think getting to say goodby to Leia and to this part of the galaxy was a really important thing. We were able to find moments that felt completely true to this situation that she was in in The Force Awakens, but also had a lot of overlap with her predicament in The Rise of Skywalker. She’s [still] the leader of the resistance, she has this enormous responsibility on her shoulders, she's carrying the grief of what happened to her son, and now in the The Rise of Skywalker she's also carrying the grief of what happened to Han on her. We tried to stay really true to Carrie's intentions in the scenes.
Maryann Brandon, editor: The last time I actually was with Carrie was in the last [audio] session on VII. I got there before J.J. arrived, and she took me aside and was very upset, and said to me, "I look terrible in this film, you have to make me look good. Promise you will always make me look good." And I said, "Carrie, that's my job, I'll always make you look good. That's what I do." So I started on this film, and J.J. told me we were going to use the footage from VII. I felt so obligated to make her look good — because she had asked me, and it was all I ever heard. And of course I loved her so much.
Terrio: One thing we knew is we were going to put Leia in the Jedi pantheon in this movie, and we knew that there was the promise that was made in 1983 that "there is another" and that is Leia. I remember that from my childhood, and I always wished that I could see Leia as a Jedi. And so when we came into this movie, we didn't have Carrie. The problem of this movie was how do we finish Leia's part without actually having Leia? Ultimately we came up with a story that someone would come along who would pick up Leia's saber and would finish her Jedi journey for her. So every day, whenever all the bells and whistles were happening, a cast of thousands, [shooting in the desert of] Jordan, we would say, "How do we tell the story of the two twins, the promise of the two twins being fulfilled," which are Luke and Leia.
Abrams: Obviously we all loved her and were heartsick that she wasn't there, and yet we knew the character had to be. So we started looking at what these shots were, we started writing scenes around these shots, completely new contexts, new locations, new situation. We did a test, but it was really like, "Will this work? Let's just try this.” The one thing I'll say is that whenever you see Carrie, we completely constructed, lit, and composed the shots around the original pieces that we had.
While Fisher’s expressions were never digitally changed, everything except her face was rendered by visual effects artists.
Roger Guyett, visual effects supervisor: When you watch the movie you just want to believe that Carrie's there, and it's just completely natural within the scene. Basing it around the performances that she'd given us previously was the key. Then, of course, we had to stage the scenes and create those shots. It required a tremendous amount of planning to the nth degree to make this work. I mean the absolute detail of it. All the footage that we were using was quite often lit in different ways. We had to be really careful.
Dan Mindel, cinematographer: [Roger’s] a huge ally of mine and I pay a huge amount of attention to what he's telling me. Sometimes it's counter-instinctual and it's completely backwards, but I've seen him do his stuff.
Guyett: Dan and I have a lot of experience together. So the real trick was just matching that lighting every time. That's not an easy thing to do sometimes.
Abrams: Sometimes there was a shot we wanted to use as an exterior but [the original] wasn't. And Roger's like, "No." And I say, "Yeah, but yes." And then he'd say, “Ah, and no." And then we'd go back and forth.
Guyett: That was part of the thing about it too, we didn't want it to look as though we'd taken footage from another movie and used it. We wanted it to look as though it was really part of this one.
Abrams: That moment where she gives Rey the saber and she says, "Nothing's impossible …” [We wanted] those kind of handshakes, as much as we could, whether it was Leia walking in front of Rey, whether it was her handing her something, whether it was a moment of dialogue, anything we could do to not have it feel like it was too much like a binary thing. It felt like it was an interaction was important.
Guyett: The key to that, as well, to me, was that you couldn't just cut to her in a single shot every time. You wanted her to be part of the scene and you wanted her to integrate into that moment. Because if she'd been there, you wouldn't have just been cutting to her every time, you would have been moving the camera, you would have been doing all these things. She would have been hugging people, for example, all of the things that she does in this movie, and that's what was really complicated.
A digital body was created because it would have been difficult for a human stand-in to match every small turn of the face.
Guyett: We often used motion control. You'll notice that she has a different hairstyle, she's wearing different wardrobe, all of those things. I always thought, when we were doing these shots, that everyone's looking at her face. That was the thing that we held onto, and then we fixed everything else.
Brandon: Roger would come with [visual effects supervisor Patrich Tubach] to my room and we'd sit there and we'd go through takes, and I had the advantage of having cut those scenes before so I was quite familiar with her performance. I'd pick three or four takes, [note] which one was my favorite, then I'd send them off to the storyboard operatives who would draw out the rest of what the other actors were going to do so I can present this to J.J. Then I'd give it back to Roger and he'd talk to J.J. and he'd inevitably pick another take! Then we'd switch to another take and it went back and forth until we got the perfect take. Because that's how we do it.
Terrio: The scene, for example, in which she says, "Do me a personal favor, be optimistic," Carrie had various takes of that that were a little more serious, and she had a few takes of it that were a little bit more funny. We wanted to show all aspects of Leia's character as much as we could. Also within the performance there are lines where Leia is super serious, and motherly, and general-like, so I think J.J. really wanted to have a sense of the totality of the performance.
Guyett: J.J. would give us notes, we'd try and assemble a version of that moment with storyboards and then put it back together and say, "J.J., something like this?”
Terrio: In any of Carrie's performances as Leia, there is sincerity, and earnestness, and softness, but there's also a hard edge to her as a leader, and there's also sort of a biting, sardonic edge to her humor. We did as much as we could with the limited options available.
Abrams: Real credit also needs to be given to Daisy Ridley, who was extraordinary in the movie. In these scenes with Leia, I was watching her off-camera on the set as we were shooting the other side of the scene. There she was, acting with Carrie in a way that made me believe it, looking at the monitor. And I thought, if we can pull this off — which with these people I knew we could — Daisy was the one who was selling it in a way that really made me hopeful on the set.
During the shoot, Ridley was played audio of Fisher’s voice and shown the rough edit or storyboards that Brandon, Guyett and Abrams had assembled, so she would have an understanding of how it would all fit together.
Abrams: We were showing her the piece that we had, which of course had not been changed or effected. We had a double there, so there was someone for her to look at. But it was something that was completely [imaginary.] I always look back at it from A New Hope, in the scenes with Mark Hamill —with Luke, and the droids— and the credit that he should get for selling these droids. He was extraordinary in those scenes, making us all believe that those droids were alive and real. That was something amazing on the set that was moving, that I didn't expect. Part of it is that we were all part of this illusion of keeping Leia alive in the film.
Guyett: When you watch the movie, hopefully you're seeing Carrie, and we obviously wanted to respect the integrity of her performance in every one of those pieces.
Abrams: You may have also noticed that Billie Lourd, her daughter was in scenes with her. When we first wrote the script we didn't have those scenes. Everyone presumed she wouldn’t want to be in the scenes, but when she read the script she said, "Please, if you would, put me in some stuff with her." So there's an added emotional element to it, which was, again, really beautiful and sweet.
Terrio: And it was so brave of Billie, when Carrie is going off. The person helping her off is her daughter, in the last shot that we see of [Leia] before her death. Every time I see that scene I'm just moved by Billie's bravery that she wanted to do this for her mother.
If moviegoers felt any disconnect between Leia and the other characters in Rise, the filmmakers felt that could be part of the story too.
Terrio: Leia is really the last of her generation that's left at the base. In the performance that she gave in the original, she was very worried, and she did seem distracted. Leia came so close to death in The Last Jedi. The way that we would discuss it among ourselves is the Force has kept Leia alive for a reason because she still has something left to do, which is the thing that she does, the final act that she does in the film.
That was using her last bit of life to reach across the galaxy and connect with her son — sparing Rey in the moment Kylo Ren was about to strike her down. The act ends her life, but resurrects Ben Solo so he might begin to set right some of what he did wrong.
Terrio: There’s almost the sense that Leia is already in another place when the movie starts, and in a way looks to Rey as the daughter that she never had because her son is lost. Then in the course of the movie she kind of regains both. Leia, in The Last Jedi, says to Luke [about her son,] "I know he's gone," but of course she doesn't really believe that. We wanted to underline that in this movie.
Abrams: It was a million intricate decisions and discussions and trials. Again, we made it look really easy but it was not. … I wish of course that she had been with us. I wish she were here now.