This touching scene in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was all Oscar Isaac’s idea

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the final film in the nine-movie “Skywalker saga” comes out on DVD and Blu-ray today, and anyone who picks it up will get a nice extra: The Skywalker Legacy, a documentary all about the making of Rise of Skywalker, compiled from 1,000 hours of behind-the-scenes video combined with archival footage from the original trilogy, and strung together with interviews with the likes of Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Anthony Daniels, Billy Dee Williams and more.

Director Debs Paterson shadowed Abrams throughout the filming process, and captured some amazing stuff, including the moments where the actors wrapped on their characters for good. “Everyone kind of cried and hugged,” Paterson remembered. “It did feel like an end of an era.”

You can discover the details of the two-hour documentary yourself, but it might be fun to go over some highlights here. For example, did you know that longtime Star Wars composer John Williams has a brief cameo in The Rise of Skywalker, as a background player at the underground hangout where Babu Frik tries to hack into C-3PO’s memory?

As revealed in the documentary, Abrams had 51 props made to fill this droid junk prop set, each of them based on one of John Williams’ 51 Academy Award nominations. “We thought it would be fun to do something as a kind of celebration of what he’s done and who he is,” Abrams said. And Williams didn’t know about that until the day he arrive to shoot the cameo, and immediately found himself surrounded by trinkets referencing everything from Saving Private Ryan to E.T. to Home Alone.

But the documentary has heavier moments, too. For example, it’s well-known that Carrie Fisher died before she could turn in a final performance as Princess Leia, and that Abrams used excess footage left over from The Rise of Skywalker to fill in some of the gaps. But even so, that still left a pretty big hole the team was never going to be able to completely fill, which required some quick thinking.

The whole team pitched in with ideas, including Oscar Isaac, who played the hot-shot pilot-turned-sober Rebel leader Poe Dameron. There’s a scene late in the movie where Poe sits beside Leia’s shrouded body and talks about his doubts about his abilities as a leader. Turns out the scene was all Isaac’s idea. “That scene wasn’t originally in the film, and I talked to J.J. about ‘Well, I think that it would be great to just see a moment that Poe has with Leia, even just a moment for him to say goodbye,'” Isaac says in the documentary. “That speaks to J.J.’s ability to try things.”

And there’s lots more where that came from. Like I said up top, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is now available on DVD and Blu-ray, with all the fixings included. You can also download it digitally on Amazon, Apple TV and iTunes, Vudu, FandangoNow, and through other online retailers.

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