Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker may have used old footage of Carrie Fisher after the Star Wars legend passed away in 2016, but it looks like the film didn't use any footages of Leia from the previous Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi.
Speaking in an interview with ComicBook.com to help promote the new Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker director J.J. Abrams decided to discuss Leia's appearance in the film, revealing the footage that was used to bring General Organa to life.
Star Wars legend Carrie Fisher passed away in December 2016, years before the actress could complete filming her scenes for The Rise of Skywalker. While Lucasfilm has the technology to bring Leia to life with the use of computer graphics (the same way that Rogue One: A Star Wars Story brought back Peter Cushing), Disney promised fans that it wouldn't use CGI to create the likeness of Leia. Instead, the studio would be using extra footage from older Star Wars films, and according to Abrams, most of these scenes came from The Rise of Skywalker.
"It wasn't hard to find the footage because obviously I was very familiar with it," Abrams said. "We only used footage from Force Awakens, there really wasn't anything from Last Jedi that was not used in that movie. We had, I think, five or six pieces, scenes that Carrie had shot that we didn't use in the film. So it was easy to find those pieces and identify them and choose takes and look at them and see what we had. Then it was about reverse engineering those scenes and writing everything around it. Then when we shot the pieces, lighting everything around Carrie so that we were never using a kind of digital Carrie, we were always using her in her performance."
It definitely makes sense that Abrams would want to focus more on the extra footage of Leia left from The Force Awakens. After all, the director is familiar with the film, and so he knows the footage by heart.
We're definitely excited to see Leia again on the big screen. This is going to be the very last film where fans get to see Fisher as General Organa – after The Rise of Skywalker, Leia's story would have been told.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker premieres December 20, 2019.
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