Carrie Fisher on ‘The Force Awakens’: ‘I’ve Always Been in ‘Star Wars”
At one point,” says Carrie Fisher, “I felt like I had to de-Leia the house.” Clearly, the effort did not completely succeed: There’s a life-size Princess Leia doll on the porch of her Beverly Hills mansion (in a phone booth, for some reason); once you go through the doorway, there’s also a glowing light-bulb sculpture of Leia made for Fisher by a Japanese artist and a footrest upholstered with ancient Star Wars bedsheets, among the other artifacts. Long ago, Fisher made her peace with her semi-permanent residency in a certain distant galaxy. So despite a heavy cold that turned out to be pneumonia, she was happy to spend an hour lying in bed and talking Star Wars. Here’s her full interview from Rolling Stone‘s new cover story on the making of The Force Awakens.
Was your dog, Gary, okay with Chewbacca on the set of Force Awakens?
It wasn’t Chewbacca that did it. I don’t know what the name of the creature was, but Simon Pegg was involved somehow, and he came down a little hallway and Gary almost fainted [laughs]. Anyway, he never got over it. I think he accepted Chewbacca. But there was no way to accept this other thing and we had to really, like, had to go to therapy about it. I kept thinking J.J. would say, “Oh, well, come on. We’ll put Gary on set and then we’ll handle it in post.” That’s my favorite saying: “We’ll fix it in post.” I want them to fix me in post. That’s yet another book title, probably.
What is the new book you’re working on called?
Well, for the moment it is called The Princess Diarist.
And is it based on those diaries that you found from filming the original Star Wars?
Yeah, partly. Well, either I do it or I burn them now and no one does it, ’cause I don’t wanna leave them for someone else to interpret, God forbid. I actually said to Harrison that I’m gonna put out a book based on the diaries, and he went, “Lawyer!” [Laughs] But I’m not the type of person that says, “My goal is to write something that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Go!” They wanted it out this year. I’m in a lot of trouble, so that’s what I’ll be doing for the next three fucking months. I found some stuff that I hadn’t seen in 40 years.
What would you want to tell that 19 year old now?
Just relax! That wouldn’t be possible, so … something else. Oh, I know! What I always wanna tell young people now: Pay attention. This isn’t gonna happen again. Rather than try to understand it as it’s going along, have it go along for a while and then understand it.