It’s been two and a half years since Star Wars fans lost their Princess Leia. Fisher was due to star in Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker and since her death director JJ Abrams has revealed she will be included thanks to deleted scenes she shot for The Force Awakens. Speaking on the process, he told Vanity Fair: “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball. But it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.”
Abrams decided to write new scenes around the footage he had and managed to fit Leia’s lines around The Rise of Skywalker.
Re-creating the lighting to match The Force Awakens scenes, they managed to make her inclusion in the new movie work.
The director continued: “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.”
Originally, Abrams cut Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd – who plays Lieutenant Connix – out of the scenes as he was concerned it would be too painful for her.
However, Lourd wanted to appear in the edited scenes with her mother.
Abrams added: “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,
“There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked.
“And I never thought it would.”
He said: “That’s the challenge of this movie.
“It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny.
“But one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker is released in UK cinemas on December 19, 2019.
