Documentary goes behind the scenes of film franchise
Release of Skywalker movie offers a trove of features
There’s a new Star Wars movie coming to DVD. Well, sort of.
The Skywalker Legacy is a feature-length documentary that’s one of the bonus features on the new digital and DVD release of Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. At a shade over two hours, it qualifies as a film in its own right and anchors a suite of additional short features on the new release.
Ostensibly a making-of feature writ large, The Skywalker Legacy also looks back more than 40 years to the original movies, and features comments from the initial cast back in the day.
In one bittersweet moment, a young Carrie Fisher on the set of 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back says she’ll be known as Princess Leia “until I’m 85,” and jokes about feeling invincible while walking through traffic: “I won’t get hurt; there’s a sequel!”
Fisher died in 2016 at the age of 60, before filming on the final chapter began, but the filmmakers reveal in the documentary how they scoured the outtakes for usable footage of her character, and built her scenes in Episode IX around them. In one flashback scene, Leia was played by Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, who also had a small role in the film as Lieutenant Connix of the Resistance.
It wasn’t the only family connection in the movie. Sir Alec Guinness’s granddaughter Sally had a cameo as a First Order officer. And there’s a separate feature, Warwick & Son, about Warwick Davis returning to play an Ewok — he had first done so as a child in 1983’s Return of the Jedi — and bringing along his son Harrison to do the same. As Wicket W. Warrick and Pommet Warwick, they are also the only Star Wars characters to carry their real-world names into the movies with them.
The Skywalker Legacy is full of such fun moments, like a look at the cameo by composer John Williams as a bartender. Though he’s only on screen for a moment, director J.J. Abrams took great pains to design the set behind him. There’s a token or tchotchke there representing every one of Williams’s 51 Oscar nominations — a whip from Indiana Jones, an iron from Home Alone, a dog tag from Saving Private Ryan, and so on.
The features also reveal some of the massive amount of work and creativity that went into every aspect of Star Wars, past and present. To create the old ship that Rey and her companions find on the desert planet of Pasaana, designers referenced the Millennium Falcon (for its “retro” look), the Apollo XI lunar lander (yellow highlights in the cockpit) and a late ’60s Camaro, for the sound of the engines coming to life.
Scenes on Pasaana were shot in the Kingdom of Jordan, whose army and even the royal family pitched in to help.
One bizarre sequence shows the filmmakers putting up green screens in the desert to film a mock-up speeder for a chase scene. Why go on location and then hide the background? It turns out there’s no match for the natural light of the desert sky, even if you see it only indirectly in those shots.
The Skywalker Legacy was directed by Debs Paterson, and includes some amazing archival footage.
Here’s Harrison Ford in a blooper from the original movie, at least keeping his mistakes on theme: “Travelling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid: Without precise calculations we might fly too close to a store or bounce into a supermarket.”
Then there’s a clip from 1982 of a fan peeking through the fence at the Arizona set of the sail barge from Return of the Jedi.
He tells the documentary crew filming him that he can’t wait for “all nine parts” of the saga. Here’s hoping he’s still around to catch the latest, and see his younger self on film.
And without driving the point home, the features make it clear that a lot of female filmmaking talent went into Star Wars, from producer Kathleen Kennedy to second-unit director Victoria Mahoney, and many of the army of technicians and designers.
There’s also stunt co-ordinator Eunice Huthart, described by many as a force to be reckoned with — and that’s not a term thrown about lightly on the set of a Star Wars movie.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is available on demand now, and on Blu-ray and DVD on March 31.