Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Doesn’t Use Any Carrie Fisher Footage From The Last Jedi

It was previously revealed that not only will the late Carrie Fisher appear in the upcoming Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, her scenes will feature the actress herself. Unlike in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story where both Peter Cushing and Fisher’s Star Wars characters were recreated digitally, actual footage of the actress will be used. Director J.J. Abrams previously revealed that her appearance in the film is constructed from about 8 minutes of deleted footage. Speaking with ComicBook.com’s Brandon Davis in an exclusive interview, Abrams revealed a new detail about Fisher’s appearance, including that no deleted footage from Star Wars: The Last Jedi was used, while also discussing what it was like to create these scenes.

“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.”

The director went on to talk about how important it was to not only include these scenes for the narrative, but how they felt to assemble for the cast and crew having known and worked with Fisher before.

“It was weirdly emotional doing it because it was all about honoring this character, having her be an integral part of the story but the most important piece wasn’t there. So it was a very strange kind of, I don’t know, negative space thing where we were doing this thing. She was such a personality, her sense of humor as you know was just profound and she was so great and witty. So to not have her there, we all luckily knew her and lover her so it didn’t take much to conjure those feelings of being with her, and there are scenes with actors in this movie where they are in a scene with Carrie, we just shot Carrie’s scenes four years earlier.”

You can check out our full video interview with Abrams in the player above.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is directed by J.J. Abrams and also stars Daisey Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran, Ian McDiarmid, Billy Dee Williams, Joonas Suotamo, Anthony Daniels, Jimmy Vee, Dave Chapman, Brian Herring, Mark Hamill, Billie Lourd, Lupita Nyong’o, Domhnall Gleeson, Keri Russell, Dominic Monaghan, Richard E. Grant. and Greg Grunberg. The official synopsis for the film reads:

“Lucasfilm and director J.J. Abrams join forces once again to take viewers on an epic journey to a galaxy far, far away with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the riveting conclusion of the seminal Skywalker saga, where new legends will be born and the final battle for freedom is yet to come. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in U.S. theaters on December 20.”