One of the coolest sequences in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has to be the night training sequence between a younger Luke and Leia as they spar with duelling lightsabers during the flashback.
Vanity Fair has revealed how ILM used newly shot footage with Carrie Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd (also plays Lt. Kaydel Ko Connix) from The Rise of Skywalker and combined it with archival footage of Fisher from Return of The Jedi.
Here is a previous interview that Yahoo! did with ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach about the sequence.
Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Tubach says that Hamill played the “young” Luke in that sequence, and had his youthful appearance restored thanks to the magic of de-aging technology. But they also needed an actress to perform Leia’s role, someone whose face would be digitally replaced by a younger version of Fisher in the finished film. When the time came to shoot that scene, Abrams decided to keep the part in the family by asking Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd — who also plays Resistance lieutenant Kaydel Ko Connix in the sequel trilogy — to take on the mantle of Leia. “Billie was playing her mother,” Tubach reveals, confirming rumors that first surfaced online this past spring. “It was a poignant thing, and something that nobody took lightly — that she was willing to stand in for her mom.”
TUBACH: “It was an emotional thing for everybody to see her in that position. It felt great for us, too. If you’re going to have someone play [Fisher’s] part, it’s great that it’s [Billie] because there are a lot of similarities between them that we were able to draw from. The real challenge was just making the Leia footage we had to work with fit in that scene.”
The Rise of Skywalker’s Visual Effects Supervisor Roger Guyett also confirms they used archival/outtake footage for the sequence, which is confirmed from the new Vanity Fair piece to be from Star Wars: Return of The Jedi.
GUYETT: “The idea was to provide this great surprise where they take the helmets off, and you see Luke and Leia’s younger faces. We scoured outtakes from the original movies, and we took some pieces and then had to try and figure out the technical aspect of putting that shot together.”
We’re still slightly in the dark concerning what Lucasfilm plans to do with Star Wars 2022 as they were reportedly making a big announcement last month that never happened and while rumors suggested that Lucasfilm’s Star Wars publishing event Project Luminous (focused on The High Republic era) would be connected to future films, an ABC correspondent had recently poured cold water on speculation it lead into new films and video games.
I still think The Old Republic is the way to go but we’ll have to wait and see what they’re actually going to do with the 2022 flick.
Season 2 of Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian is the next live-action coming (expected to drop in the fall on Disney+) with the Cassian Andor series shooting in the summer and Ewan McGregor confirmed the Kenobi series won’t begin production until January 2021.
SOURCE: VANITY FAIR
