Fans were taken aback at last week’s announcement that Carrie Fisher’s General Leia would indeed be making an appearance in Star Wars: Episode IX, courtesy of unused footage shot during The Force Awakens. At the time, I thought it was curiously specific that they’d singled out footage from the 2015 film for use as logically, they must have a similar amount of unused Leia material from The Last Jedi, right?
Well, it’s looking like that was just an omission on Lucasfilm’s part. The Resistance Broadcast spoke to Carrie’s brother, Todd recently and he told them he’s been liaising with J.J. Abrams in order to ensure that she’s treated respectfully and tastefully on screen, saying:
“I talked to Todd Fisher today about all of this and he has been talking with JJ Abrams about it. I asked him, because the press release only said The Force Awakens so I asked about The Last Jedi, and they are also using unused footage from The Last Jedi. I asked him how many minutes of footage they had from it and he said ‘I can’t tell you that!’”
If nothing else, it’s going to be absolutely fascinating watching the Leia sequences in Episode IX and trying to figure out which film they came from and in which context her lines might have been originally delivered. And though the studio’s firmly said they’re not going to make a CGI recreation of her, I think they’re going to have to at least do some form of CGI work on the existing footage to make it fit in seamlessly with the action going on in Star Wars: Episode IX.
Whether that be placing her on a new background, changing her costume or perhaps the order of her lines, the pressure is certainly on for Lucasfilm, as the whole world will be scrutinizing these sequences very closely indeed.
