“The minute [Carrie Fisher finished “The Last Jedi”], she grabbed me and said, ‘I’d better be at the forefront of IX!’ Because Harrison was front and center on VII, and Mark is front and center on VIII,” Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy explains in Vanity Fair’s new “Last Jedi” cover story.
“She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”
“We pretty much started over” with the IX script after Fisher’s Dec. 27 death, Kennedy said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month.
Also in the Vanity Fair piece?
* “Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson says Luke Skywalker has not been living alone on that island where Rey found him. An “indigenous race of caretaker creatures” have been keeping Luke company on Ahch-To (bless you), site of The First Jedi Temple. Johnson says they are not Ewok-like.
* Johnson also refuses to tell the magazine who the titular character in “The Last Jedi” happens to be.
* Benecio Del Toro’s character is never identified by name in “Last Jedi.”
The new Vanity Fair issue, which also features more than 17 pages of “Last Jedi” photography (including a shot of Luke’s BrudlePod-like Ahch-To domicile), inhabits newsstands now.
