Appearing this morning on Good Morning America, J.J. Abrams discussed progress on The Rise of Skywalker stating that they finished everything “just yesterday.”
“Part of it was scary because I care about it so much. Part of it was it’s an ending not of three films, but nine films and it means a lot to a lot of people, us included. We felt the pressure but the opportunity was always greater than the challenge.”
The inclusion of Carrie Fisher using footage from The Force Awakens also gave Abrams pause.
“It was impossible for us to figure out how to tell the end of the Skywalker saga without Leia. She’s such an important character, and Carrie, we needed to have her in the movie. We realized there were probably five or six scenes that we never used and we went back and looked at the footage and realized we could tell the story, create scenes with her, but we did it in a really interesting way where we used her footage and everything in the scene was written around, built around, lit around what we had of her.”
“(I)t’s impossible for me to believe she’s not there.”
“We’ve been working with her in the editing room for almost a year and she’s vital and she’s there and she’s funny in spirit. She’s Leia in this movie. It’s sort of surreal.”
