How Star Wars Movies Could Still Bring Princess Leia Back
It just might not be all that popular...
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They might have already said that they have no plans to follow Rogue One's use of a digitally recreated Peter Cushing with any more digitally revived characters, but LucasFilm have the ability to do exactly that, should they decide to.
Since the death of Carrie Fisher, the question of how Episode IX will deal with wrapping the character's story up without the actress has been a pretty pressing issue. As much as it would be the most respectful approach, simply retiring the character off-screen wouldn't entirely work and you have to suspect they have a specific plan given that they swerved the perfect opportunity to retire her in The Last Jedi when she beat death.
That scene - or at least how it was achieved - has raised the possibility once more, as the film's VFX supervisor Ben Morris has revealed in an interview with Inverse that ILM's standard practice is to digitally scan the lead actors of the films they work on. He revealed that it's a necessity as they don't know what they might need to add in post-production, but of course it also means there is a possibility that ILM and LucasFilm could use Fisher's image to wrap up Leia's story in Episode IX.
Morris explained the process of achieving the flying Leia sequence in the interview:
“We had Rian [Johnson’s] shot of Carrie doing the scene. That was for us to be able to add some of the idea that she’s freezing over, as she’s in that vacuum of space, meant that we had to do CG work and re-project her onto a CG version of the character. We kept her performance pretty much intact and were matching, where needed, with any animation stuff. It was pretty much all Carrie.”
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ILM's John Knoll has previously stated that achieving full renders like Rogue One's Tarkin sequences are particularly taxing, so it's unlikely it will become the norm, but the Fisher/Leia situation is an exceptional circumstance and it will be a shame if we don't get some sort of closure for the character, particularly as her fate is so tied to her son's.