Carrie Fisher’s daughter played Leia in key Rise of Skywalker scene
Any fantasy or science-fiction film will have its share of visual effects challenges; that’s what happens when you’re trying to bring to life things that don’t exist. Having worked on several of the Harry Potter films, a few Marvel installments, and even Pirates of the Caribbean, Patrick Tubach knows this well, although Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker presented a new set of challenges for its ILM Visual Effects Supervisor to contend with.
The biggest question surrounding the use visual effects in the film involved Carrie Fisher, who passed away in 2016, before she’d begun shooting scenes for The Rise of Skywalker. Wanting to remain respectful to Fisher’s memory — and wanting to give Leia Organa a farewell worthy of her character — director J.J. Abrams avoided recasting the role or using CGI to fill in the blanks. Instead, Abrams used eight minutes of extra material from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi to piece together the end of Leia’s story. And for the most part, it worked.
Still, there was one scene where Fisher wasn’t playing her character, and that scene required visual effects to fully come to life. During the flashback that shows a younger Luke and Leia training with their lightsabers, Billie Lourd, Fisher’s daughter, actually stood in for her. In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Tubach described it as an emotional moment for those on set:
"It was an emotional thing for everybody to see her in that position. It felt great for us, too. If you’re going to have someone play [Fisher’s] part, it’s great that it’s [Billie] because there are a lot of similarities between them that we were able to draw from. The real challenge was just making the Leia footage we had to work with fit in that scene."
To do that, the crew used imagery of a younger Fisher from Return of the Jedi. Visual Effects Supervisor Roger Guyett explained that the surprise of seeing a younger Luke and Leia, even for a short amount of time, was what they wanted to give fans. Guyett believes that at the “heart” of the scene is “the utmost respect for Carrie and her memory and her performance.”
"When you see her in this movie, it’s the live-action element of her face taken from outtakes of either The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi, and then building a digital Carrie around that face. She’s wearing a new costume, she’s got new hair, she’s got new jewelry. We didn’t want it to feel like we’d simply taken previous shots from previous movies just edited her in; we wanted her to be unique to this movie, and we wanted her to be integrated into the scenes. J.J.’s principal in pre-production was, ‘I want Princess Leia to be played by Carrie Fisher. How do we do this?’"
As it turns out, Fisher’s absence while filming the final film is also part of the reason Ben Solo’s Force Ghost doesn’t appear with Luke and Leia at the end of the movie. Fans have been asking why Rey didn’t see him one last time, but Guyett explained that the footage used for that final moment with Luke and Leia is actually leftover from The Force Awakens. “My interpretation of it anyway is that when you see Luke and Leia there, it’s about the Skywalker [legacy],” he said.
And it wasn’t just Carrie’s legacy or the Skywalker line the crew wanted to pay homage to. According to Creature and Special Make-up Effects Creative Supervisor Neal Scanlan, Abrams wanted to give honor the entire franchise with this conclusion. That’s why he had the effects team include ships from animated series like Rebels and Resistance when putting together the scene where Lando joins the Resistance with his fleet during the concluding battle. “J.J. was very keen on us getting some of that Star Wars history and nods to other series in there, because he loves that stuff so much,” Scanlan explained.
It’s clear that The Rise of Skywalker was made with much love and respect for the franchise, whatever fans thought of it. Abrams wanted as much of the world and characters explored in previous films included as possible, and the VFX team was able to help make that happen.
Next. The Rise of Skywalker's big Reylo scene was almost cut. dark
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