WE WON’T GET to see it until Christmas time, but this week we finally learned a thing or two about the forthcoming Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi.
Vanity Fair’s latest edition brings some juicy tidbits from the set of the film, and even though the cast and crew are pretty much sworn to secrecy about what we can expect, we still got to find out a lot.
At the end of the last film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, we had some dramatic shots of our own Skellig Michael, where Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was found by Rey (Daisy Ridley) hiding out on his own.
According to Vanity Fair’s interview, the new director of The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson (JJ Abrams having directed The Force Awakens) was left to decide how much more of Skellig Michael to include in the new film – as he was effectively given a carte blanche when it came to the script.
Luckily for us, he decided a return trip to the Skelligs was in order. Says the magazine:
The site of Rey’s Force Awakens encounter with Luke is Ahch-To, the temple’s home planet, which bears a striking resemblance to southwestern coastal Ireland. Though their time on Skellig Michael was brief, the Last Jedi crew returned to the area for additional shooting on the Dingle Peninsula, a ragged spear of land that juts out into the North Atlantic. There, Johnson said, the set builders “duplicated the beehive-shaped huts where the monks lived on Skellig and made a kind of little Jedi village out of them.”
As for the first shoot there, Ridley said that Rey looked so unwell in her shots as she had just vomited due to adrenal exhaustion. But for her second trip, she was feeling a lot better.
While Mark Hamill is in great health, he was allocated an hour and a half to climb up Skellig Michael for the shoot, while the younger members of crew were given half that time.
It did tickle us to learn, however, that poor Hamill spent 50 weeks dieting and training for Episode VII, before learning he would only be in that last scene on Skellig Michael.
But for The Last Jedi, it looks like the focus will be on him. Once people stop getting distracted by the stunning Irish landscape, that is.
Finally, in sad news – Leia Organa Solo (Carrie Fisher) was supposed to take centre stage in Star Wars Episode IX, but sadly we won’t be getting the Princess Leia movie we deserve due to her recent death.
Read the fully Vanity Fair interview on its website.
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