Oscar Isaac Recalls Shooting a ‘Last Jedi’ Scene with Carrie Fisher Over 25 Takes
Shooting a movie’s not like performing a play. The theatrical process is primal, all rooted in emotion and immersion within the fictional moment. Production on a feature film requires far more on a technical level, to the point where actors will be ordered to pick up a spoon in the exact same way ten times, just to be safe. (David Fincher famously went through 100 takes to nail the opening breakup in his magnum opus The Social Network.) For the typical actor, most of filmmaking is waiting around for stuff to happen — but that’s far less tiresome when you get to hang out with Carrie Fisher between calls of “ACTION!”
In a new interview with Business Insider, Oscar Isaac recalled one particularly special day of production on the upcoming Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The eighth installment of the Star Wars saga paired Isaac with the late Carrie Fisher as General Leia once again, and he recalled a fond memory from day one:
It was basically my first day [on set] and we did about 25 takes total. Half of them were on me and half of them were on her. I can’t give anything away but there was a scene where there was some physicality there and it was shot just over and over and over. She relished the physicality of it, let me just say. It was pretty intense. It will be funny to see what they cut together based on that.
“Some physicality?” “Relished?” “Pretty intense?” I understand that Isaac’s trying to talk around any possibly spoilerific specifics of plot, but at the risk of editorializing, it sure sounds like he’s talking about making out. Or — dare we dream? — a Poe Dameron/General Leia sex scene? They make steamy eye contact across the airlock bay ... a velvety John Williams R&B score creeps onto the soundtrack... BB-8 jacks into a wall interface and dims the lights ... and it’s on.