'Star Wars' Braintrust Plots Leia's Life After Carrie Fisher's Death

'Star Wars' Braintrust Sets Meeting to Plot Leia's Life After Carrie Fisher's Death »

We shall see. Sounds messy.

 

Gonna be difficult for them as I mentioned previously (and highlighted above) concerning future scenes with Ren in IX.

 

Just saw this myself. They'll come up with something that is satisfactory. I don't think fans will be disappointed.


In a related story:

A Fan Petition Aims to Make Carrie Fisher’s Leia an Official Disney Princess »

 

Unless by some serendipitous circumstance they've already filmed Carrie's scenes for the next movie, I think they're going to have to go full Dumbledore and re-cast the role. Or just write her out of it entirely.

 

I suspect Carrie Fisher wouldn't know whether to laugh out loud at this or be very annoyed.

 

They have. Episode IX is the issue... as well as changes they may have to make to episode VIII to lead into that.

 

I'm sure Disney execs are weighing public acceptance of their recent CGI actors in Rogue One. In case any of them are reading these words: DON'T DO IT! Don't create CGI closeups of famous faces for your space opera movies! It looks terrible!

 

Recasting is the traditional way to go, and they should honor it. Recasting is fine.

Give another actor a chance. Another actor might be able to do the character more justice than Fisher herself was able to do.

Bearing in mind that I haven't seen her scenes from the next film, it seemed that in The Force Awakens Abrams gave her only a few brief lines, and she managed to pull them off - but with difficulty. She had trouble speaking.

Of course if she was still alive I'd want her to finish out the role. But the prospect that someone more talented might take the role is not a negative.

 

They can't have another actor play Princess Leia now -- not after Carrie has played her in five movies, younger and older.

It might have been possible if she'd died before The Force Awakens was made, but not now.

Another actor is going to play Han Solo but I think that's a different case... Harrison Ford never played him in the time frame that movie is going to take place in.

 

I agree that recasting is the best way to go. A problem with using CGI is that it calls attention to itself and away from the character. As shown with Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series, it is possible for a new actor to make the role his/her own (as has also been shown with a number of actors who played The Doctor in Doctor Who).

 

What about Carrie's daughter taking up the role of a young Leia?

 

As far as I see it, as soon as Disney bought the rights to Star Wars, Princess Leia immediately became a Disney Princess. No petition required.

 

She already had a bit part in VII that's supposedly going to be expanded in VIII. Plus, their age difference was about 40 years - that's pretty tough to work around.

 

At this point,if the rumors are true that Leia was supposed to have a larger role in IX,AND if writing her out creates too many story changes that would harm the roadmap for where the trilogy ends...then I don't think a recast would be too unreasonable IF done with proper care and respect .

Honestly,if they go that route,id say Carrie's half sister Joely Fisher may not be a bad choice if she would agree to do it. Not only does she bear a physical resemblance to Carrie,but she is fairly close to Carrie in age and to the Leia character (she is around 50 I think which is right around Leia's age in this trilogy) but honestly I think it's the only type of recasting fans and Carrie's family would be willing to accept and would be more respectful than CGI especially if the film is also dedicated to Carrie's memory as well. If done right,and seeing as IX would likely be Leia's Swan song anyway ,it may be a good way to ' finish the race ' in her steed.

Otherwise if Leia's role can be written around in IX, do it. Have her appear as CGI in far away shots or repurpose unused footage from VII and VIII.

In any case, I hope the rumored reunion between Luke and Leia happens in VIII so we at least get to see Carrie and Mark together one last time. My only real beef with VII is we never got to see Luke Leia and Han share at least one scene together.

 

I don't think she should be included in the Official Disney Princess group since it's traditionally for animated princesses. Instead they should have a live action "Disney Royalty" category created starting with Princess Leia.

 

This is for a film that takes place after the events of The Force Awakens, when Leia is an older woman in her 60s. I think pretty much everybody agrees that recasting will look distasteful. The article repeats what I had heard, that there was a bigger role in Star Wars IX than in the film now being worked on, and now all this is up in the air. What I expect they'll do is find a way to kill off Leia at the end of Star Wars VIII, which unfortunately is a downbeat ending (and parallels killing off Han Solo in the previous film), but I don't see another way this can work.

And I'm not gonna buy a CGI version of the character. Nope, not gonna do it. I think Carrie Fisher's death is going to affect both the next Star Wars film and the one after it, and it's a disaster that will take a lot of work to fix. And I wouldn't be surprised if they just took out a $100M life insurance policy on Mark Hamill.

That's not exactly true. What Fisher publicly said was, the first shooting day was very hard for her because she'd been out of practice in not acting for quite a few years. I also think she was acutely aware of how old and heavy she looked on camera. My memory is that J.J. Abrams reshot those scenes the next day after taking her aside and having a talk with her, but I can't find hard evidence of it. The only thing that matters is what appeared in the final film, and I think she came off very well in the show.

I have seen many, many famous actors who had absolutely horrible performances on the set and in dailies, but somehow the editor managed to cobble together enough moments, the actors looked and sounded absolutely fantastic in the final finished film. (In some cases, they wound up ADR'ing the whole performance months later.) I even know of at least one or two cases where the actor wound up getting nominated for an Oscar. In one memorable instance, I told the editor, "I think you're the one who should get the 'Best Acting' award," and we had a good laugh over that.

 

CGI Force ghost (and I know she hasn't done any training for that, like Yoda said, but neither did Anakin and he came back).

 

My prediction is that Leia will die "offscreen". In the Episode 9 crawl there will be something along the lines of "Following the death of General Leia..."

However they handle Carrie Fisher's passing, it will have to be done tastefully and with a bit of class. After all, Star Wars fans can be very unforgiving when faux pas are made.

 

Anyway you cut it, it's pretty clear to me that in the future, you won't even need the actual actor anymore-they can just CGI their face onto a body. Right after I saw Rogue One, I saw a story about the film "The Irishman", where they're going to make Robert De Niro look 30 years younger with the help of CGI. Who's to say that in 20 years, they won't make an entirely new SW movie with young looking Luke, Han, and Leia-brought to you by the power of CGI? I'd say that it's definitely going to happen.

 

Like a friend of mine says, give it time, eventually they'll just design completely CGI actors and actresses...and a lot of filmgoers probably wouldn't even be the wiser.

 

I'd be alright with that. I'd quite like to see another Superman film with Christopher Reeve in it.

 

The technology to do this is still not there yet. Maybe in 25 years.... maybe.

But we can make movies about the technology at least.

 

At what point is this just a photorealistic cartoon? If it doesn't have humans in it, it's bull****. The whole point of movies is emotion and story and feeling, and it's not there with computer-generated crap. There are moments where it almost works, but it's not happening and it's not satisfying as art or as a believable performance. It's a gimmick, like a video game. (And there's already enough movies out there that are so VFX-heavy, they border on being video games.)

I think cartoons have their place, and the artists who create some of them are often brilliant. When you can watch a movie like Pixar's Up and want to weep in the first 15 minutes because the death of an animated character, you realize the power of great art and talent. But making a synthetic human being believable... there are so many difficulties there, I don't even know where to start.

I just watched a terrific (but short) making of doc on the CGI Peter Cushing and young Carrie Fisher in Rogue One, and I was floored to find out that, by a miracle, the VFX crew talked to the crew on an earlier 1980s Cushing picture where they had done a complete life mold of the actor's face. They said without that, the reproduction wouldn't have been half as good as it is. There's still something missing in the eyes -- a sense of life and nuance, perhaps -- and I think the mouth movements look a little off. It's enough to take me out of the picture to the point where it bothers me. It doesn't work for me. I don't doubt that it'll get better, but for now, it's just uncomfortable and strange to watch.

Video: How 'Rogue One's' Princess Leia, Grand Moff Tarkin Were Created »

And for anybody who believes I'm too negative: I do think there have been some successful uses of CGI in the service of telling the story. For example, the first couple of minutes of the 2016 Captain America film, where we see a 16-year-old Tony Stark (and a teenage Robert Downey, Jr.), were miraculous. It also cost them about $2 million a minute, by all accounts -- and that was with the living actor doing the scene and digital artists taking the face and "youthifying" it, using VFX techniques that go back to Benjamin Button in 2008. I don't have a problem with this provided it's absolutely undetectable, and they get pretty damned close here.

 

I think the best option would be to gracefully kill her off-screen in Episode VIII, and take what would've been her larger role in IX and transfer it to Luke, if possible.
At the end of IX, use unused footage of her, with footage of Harrison, as Force Ghosts ala the ending of ROTJ.

 

I recall someone posting that Disney had the older actors scanned for possible CGI use,but surely it's down to the actor or their remaining family wether to allow future use.......unless Disney has taken care of this already but only for these 3 instalments.