Todd Fisher: “[Leia] was going to be the big payoff in this final [Skywalker Saga] film and that's what the intent was prior to [Carrie] exiting [after her death]. She was going to be the last Jedi, so to speak. And that’s cool right? People used to say to me, ‘Why is it that Carrie never gets a lightsaber and chops up some bad guys?' Even as a person of her age, Obi-Wan was in his prime was about Carrie’s age!” "I felt the stuff that Carrie did in The Last Jedi was her best work. She had really come to grips with who Princess Leia was and that she and her were one and the fact that they had all of this other footage - I didn't even know - they had eight minutes of [previous] footage. Yeah, it's a lot of footage. The truth is that J.J. Abrams was great friends with Carrie, loved Carrie, he had an extraordinary sense of love for her and so he took great care in moving this concept along. You know...grabbed every frame and analyzed it...thanks to J. J. conscientiously doing that and then reverse-engineering it and [got] it into the story the right way. It’s kind of magical.” “This is, in its own way, a payoff to all of that. It’s Carrie talking to us all from beyond. The beautiful thing about the concept of the Force is that there is no real death; you just exist in another dimension. So Carrie is looking down or sideways or wherever and so she is still part of us. To be able to see that — it’s magical stuff only in the movies.” (
November 6, 2019)