New images and details from Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi have us excited… and pretty emotional too

Star Wars, the first movie, is 40 this year (40?!) and Vanity Fair has delivered an astonishing batch of images and details on the world’s greatest franchise (come at me Trek, LOTR, Bond, Marvel and DC Fans).

And we’ve sifted through the details and images and delivered some of the best stuff that is in there… but we absolutely encourage everyone to go HERE to check out the full details.

The magazine has released four magazine covers by Annie Leibovitz (the first time they’ve done this for Star Wars) featuring Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill (above) as well as Gwendoline Christie, Adam Driver, and Domhnall Gleeson (below) along with Oscar Isaac, John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran and finally the late, great Carrie Fisher.

Here’s some very cool facts about the movies that we learned thanks to this issue:

• Mark Hamill had been dieting and training for 50 weeks before he learned, via the Episode VII script he finally received from Abrams, that he would not appear in the movie until its last scene, and in a nonspeaking part at that.
• [Director and writer Rian] Johnson, in drawing up his screenplay, decided to raise the stakes further. “I started by writing the names of each of the characters,” he said, “and thinking, What’s the hardest thing they could be faced with?”
• Luke, it transpires, has been living in this [Jedi] village among an indigenous race of caretaker creatures whom Johnson is loath to describe in any more detail, except to say that they are “not Ewoks.”
• “There’s a training element to [the last Jedi] but it’s not exactly what you would expect.” So no Luke/Yoda type teaching, then.
• Until The Last Jedi, Johnson had never overseen a picture with a budget above $30 million.
• The Last Jedi [features] three significant new figures: a “shady character” of unclear allegiances, played by Benicio Del Toro (pictured), who goes unnamed in the film but is called DJ by the filmmakers (“You’ll see—there’s a reason why we call him DJ,” Johnson said); a prominent officer in the Resistance named Vice Admiral Holdo, played by Laura Dern (pictured); and a maintenance worker for the Resistance named Rose Tico, who is played by a young actress named Kelly Marie Tran [] the largest new part, and her plotline involves a mission behind enemy lines with Boyega’s Finn, the stormtrooper turned Resistance warrior.
• Carrie Fisher had a bigger role to play in The Last Jedi—General Leia Organa logs significantly more screen time in Episode VIII than she did in VII.
• Lucasfilm head Kathleen Kennedy said of Carrie Fisher’s role in the movie: “The minute she finished, 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. She thought IX would be her movie. And it would have been.”
• Fisher’s death doesn’t change anything about The Last Jedi except make it more poignant: the film farewell of both the actress and the character. But it does change Episode IX, for which, as Fisher hoped, a central role for Leia had been planned. However, said Kennedy, “we don’t have any intention of beginning a trend of re-creating actors who are gone.”
• Mark Hamill said of Fisher’s death: “I think of her in the present tense. Maybe it’s a form of denial, but she’s so vibrant in my mind, and so vital a part of the family, that I can’t imagine it without her. It’s just so untimely, and I’m so angry.”

It looks like The Last Jedi will be an emotional journey both onscreen and off. For those who made it and for those who will watch it.

December feels so very far away at this stage…

While the covers themselves are fantastic, we’re so in love with the other images from inside the issue… that image of Luke and Leia has us reduced to a bunch of weeping Nerds.

Source: Vanity Fair