Star Wars: Kevin Smith Shares Tribute to Carrie Fisher

Filmmaker Kevin Smith has Star Wars to thank for his career, which isn’t a slight against the writer/director as Smith himself admits it. The director’s first film Clerks featured frequent talk about the franchise from its lead characters with Smith peppering in references in almost all his movies before culminating in 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back which included Mark Hamill as a lightsaber wielding character and even a bit part by Princess Leia herself, Carrie Fisher. Earlier this week on Star Wars Day, May the Fourth, Smith opened up about his memories of working with the late actress in a new video and some life advice she gave him.

Smith started by talking about the impact Star Wars had on him which lead to him discussing the circumstances of her being in “Strike Back” that resulted in the pair exchanging emails for many years. In an anecdote, Smith revealed someone on his old forums told him that Fisher had talked trash about the movie at an event which lead to Smith sending her an email that he described as a guilt trip, resulting in what he calls “the single greatest thing (he) got out of Star Wars.”

“A piece of wisdom, wizened piece of Carrie Fisher’s brain sugary mind was this,” Smith shared. “She read my email, I guess she wrote back to me in a relatively timely fashion and she said ‘Oh Kevin, did you fall prey to the internet?’ And then she wrote about how like ‘You’re like me, you get up on stages, you tell stories, you try to be funny. When you’re up there you say anything if the audience attaches to it and laughs, you go with it. I was just being funny.’ She’s going ‘You and I are friends, you know how I feel about you, you know what I think about your movie, Why would you let something somebody on the internet said, change all of that?’”

Smith continued, “And then she dropped this truth bomb right in my lap, and I still use this today, this is a piece of knowledge that changed my life and it wouldn’t have happened without Star Wars; because without Star Wars I wouldn’t have known Carrie Fisher and she wouldn’t have been in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, here you go. Carrie Fisher goes: ‘Sometimes you have to spin that microscope around, because the thing you’re looking at isn’t as big as you think it is.’ That came from Carrie Fisher herself. Now she may have just been like ‘F***, he caught me,’ but regardless that is a piece of advice that I still adhere to today.”

You can watch the full video from Smith, including a great story about Fisher reading at a poetry event held by Smith that brought the house down, in the player above.