Star Wars Insider #68

Carrie On: Star Wars, Celebrity and the art of conversation

by Christopher Cerasi

Transcribed by Pavla Truhláøová

In Carrie Fisher, the erudite and the earthy collide to form a delightful conversationalist. She alternates between quoting literary figures and offering a sharp insights on everything from the onus of fame to her time in that galaxy far, far away. But during a recent telephone conversation these converging facets of her personality came together in a veritable explosion. “I got angry at the direction the call was going,” explains Fisher. “I was reminded of that line in Pygmalion: ‘You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly happened to me before.’ So that’s what I said, and hung up. My assistant was stunned.”

Such a behavior seems perfectly appropriate for the woman who breathed life into the outspoken and feisty Princess Leia Organa. In fact, most people are quick to assume that Carrie Fisher shares attributes with her onscreen persona. They are mistaken. “I will avoid conflict at any cost,“ says Fisher. ”I do love the feeling of being angry, which gives you the illusion of control...but rarely do I have that illusion.” Fisher admits, however, she does “kind of formidable personality.”

It’s hard to argue with that statement, as anyone who has seen Fisher in the original three Star Wars films can attest. Onscreen she is tough, confident, intimidating - and, yes, even formidable. But this appearance, she insists, is nothing more than an act. “In reality, my personality breaks down into this dwindling little sobbing creature, but on the way there I put on a good show.”

A good show is something Fisher has been putting on since she made her screen debut in Shampoo in 1975. Playing a teenage nymphet who propositions Warren Beatty with one of the most memorable lines in cinematic history [a bit too risque for younger readers], Fisher catapulted to international stardom with the surprise succes of  Star Wars in 1977. Her role as Princess Leia made her famous, but it is also a past she left behind twenty years ago. As fun as it was playing the Senator from Alderaan, being Carrie Fisher has proven a much more interesting role.

Eavesdroping on Herself

Around the initial release of Star Wars, Fisher and costars Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford went on numerous press juinkets. The three sat through countless interviews that would have made even hardened pros uncomfortable. Even as a 20-year-old actress, Fisher was able to handle sudden fame and constant publicity with the same wit and sence of humor evident today.

She certainly needed it, as the bulk of her questions, unlike Ford’s or Hamill’s focused on the breakup of her parent’s marriage and her feelings toward Elizabeth Taylor. Her thoughts on Star Wars were discussed, but almost cursorily. Fisher’s take on her mother (Debbie Reynolds), her father (Eddie Fisher), and Fisher’s new wife (Taylor) seemed to be the main focus of interviews. But instead of dodging these awkward questions, Fisher good-naturelly answered them. More often than not, she wound up talking circles around the media.

“I have a thing that I notice in [some] people that I find very appealling. It makes interviews interesting to listen to,” she says. “Certain  people are asked questions, and they are genuinely interested in their own reply. They are basically eavesdropping on themselves. I have that characteristic a lot of the time, and I try to mix it up for myself. I don’t want answer the same way unless I have a fantastic line that I just found and want to drag out.”

Freigh Train of Celebrity

Fisher’s fondness for verbal  gymnastics served her well on these rigorous Star Wars interview circuit. A trait that would come in handy later as she developed as an author. Her competitive nature also asserted itself during those long tours, especially when it came to one of her co-stars.

“I was in love with words, so I was going to [use] that. I was going to see how good  I could be. I was in competition with Harrison, who was quoting Kirkegaard. I was definitely going to win, but at the same time, I was making the the experience interesting for me.”

Despite  all the practice Fisher  was getting “eavesdropping” on herself, was there any way of preparing for the almost instantaneous celebrity she had achieve when she was barely out of her teens ? How had sudden, worldwide fame complicated her life from that time forward ?

“I did Star Wars as a goof,” she says, laughing. “I wanted to see how George was going to pull it off, and he did. And then I was stuck with celebrity.” Fisher likens her fast-rising celebrity to quicksand: she’s stuck in it forever. “You looked at with all this freight [of celebrity], and that is exhausting. Then I am ‘Miss Fisher.’” Projects Fisher did after Stars Wars seemed to have a bigger scope to her than they might have otherwise. “It’s  all amplified because I’m her. Because of this epic I [was] in.”

With her own legend in the way, Fisher has to go way back  find people who connect with her not as a cultural icon but simply as friend. “I recently went to the funeral of someone I went to highschool with,” she says. “and I saw all those people [again], and they are the only ones that could look at me without the freight. It is impossible for them to see me with all the stuff that came after fame, [but] I had to go really far back to find those people, and it was inadvertent.”

Growing up in a famous household prepared Fisher for fame. “I was always comfortable with that, and I never made that adjustment and said it was and honor or a privilege.”

Rehash of the Jedi

Until recently, Fisher’s daugter hadn’t even seen Star Wars. “I showed the trilogy to her out of order. I put them in the order of how I liked them. We watched The Empire Strikes Back and then [A New Hope]. By the time we got to Return of the Jedi, she was falling asleep. Then I realized, ‘Oh my God, there is me with the good body,‘ and I tried to wake her up. ‘You are going to get this body,’  I told her, ‘so pay attention.’ She doesn’t  care. But it’s not a bad body to get, and of course I did not know that at the time. We were all younger then.”

The body Fisher is reffering to is, of course, prominently dissplayed in the first part of Jedi. With more than a hint of archness in her voice, what she remembers most from the experience of shooting the scenes in Jabba’s palace is not so much being chained to a 500-pound slug but enduring take after take in the the bikini from hell. “It was like steel, not steel but hard plastic, and if you stood behind me you could see straight to Florida. You’ll have to ask Boba Fett about that.” The slave outfit was definitely and extreme couture departure for Fisher, who spent most of her screen time in  the first film in a white turtle-necked dress meant to emphasize her character’s put in. Pure “only by the color of the costume,” notes Fisher. “All I have to say is that [Natalie Portman] walks through a doorway and has a wardrobe change. I get one, sorry two dresses, and the first one [looks] the same all the way around.”

There is an aspect of the prequels that delights the wordsmith in Fisher. It’s something the original cast had to deal with and, in a way, is a passing of a torch form the old cast to the new. “I am thrilled to see other actors caught in the syrup of space language,“ she laugts. Original cast members often describes their dialogue as stilting and unpronounceable, but it is unarguable that more than a few of those lines have become past of the public lexicon.

While she deligts in pointing out the difficulties in reading some of the dialogue Lucas gave her, she takes a dim view of those members of the main stream press who unleash savage ctiticism on her friend. “[Reviewers] go back and they judge the new films against the old. The new standard becomes the first three films, and I suddenly get wonderful reviews. I promise you, the first reviews were terrible to begin with, so they are just doing the same thing again. Who knows what will happen with the time “Certainly no one else is doing visually what George does, and if he’s setting the standard and is being judged against himself, then hallelujah “ The bigger the target, the  bigger the artillery, so they should back off. It becomes personal sometimes, and [some critics] are really enraged. I don’t hold much in that tactic. I don’t go by what they say about this stuff.”

“But I love Ewan Mc Gregor”, she adds mischievously. “I could eat his head.”

Truth is [No] Stranger than Fiction

Time and triumph has proved for Fisher that there has been a life after Leia, and a pretty amazing one at that. In 1987, the success of her first novel, Postcards from the Edge, proved that she had a career as an author as well as an actress. Fisher later transform the book into a screenplay for director Mike Nichols, who enlisted a cast that included Meryl Streep and Shirley Maclaine. Turning Postcards into a screenplaly was not easy, and at one point Fisher gave up until an acquaintance convinced her to stick with it. The succes of the screenpay, as well as that of two subsequent novels, Surrender the Pink and of Delusions of Grandma, has led to Fisher becoming one of the Hollywood’s most desirable script doctors. A fourt novel is imminent. Titled The Best Awful There Is, the book promises to offer more of Fisher’s trademark humor and literary bon mot, in which she indulges with relish. “Sometimes I enjoy it so much again I cannot believe it”, she says.” I lost that for a while, [but] recently I got it back.”

Words, whether written or spoken, come easy to Fisher, and she has a particular love for the art of the mataphor. ”I have found  people that are not in love with words, and they try to understand poetry, let’s say, and they line up all the words and assassinate them with their ‘understanding’ rather than appreciate metaphor. I just bathe in metaphor. I think it’s cool.”

At one point Fisher considered writing her memoirs, but the autobiographical nature of her fiction seemed to make the effort redundant. To her, “They are all autobiographies. I started out trying to write my biography, but I couldn’t do it. I just didn’t know how.” The appeal of semi-autobiographical fiction is an issue of fun and control. “The truth is a stern taskmaster,” she says, “and I like to play within it. At times I stay close to it, but it is nice to have a little leverage in all things.” Most people, she konows, thinks that what she writes must be a direct mirror of her own life. “All of my books are pretty much about me. I now think that I am a diarist, “ Fisher quips. “If you write it, it’s true-that type of mentality. It’s like, with my writing, if it is close to what happened, then it is true. I am more comfortable with that when I read novels, and certainly when I write them.”

Small-screen succes

Another medium in which Fisher has triumphed is television. Her ongoing show on the Oxygen Network, Conversations from the Edge, features Fisher in one-on–one interviews with celebrities (An early episode featured George Lucas). Most of them she knows well, but even those she interviews for the first time open up to her in a manner atypical of most such shows. Her secret to generating this candor is simple and effective. “What happens is, I tell them my stuff too,” she explains. “I’ve said that soul searching is going through my pockets at this stage. [That] doesn’t mean that it’s worthless; it just means that it’s effortless. But if I do share with them, then there’s an exchange made, and people will tell me things that other people are shocked at. I am talking about regular life now, although I don’t know how to differentiate that from a celebrity’s life. Actually, I don’t know what that is either. There is a quote that I found the other day [from Oscar Wilde]: ‘Finally, conversation is the only intoxicant.’ That, to me, is true. It can be a very heady experience for someone that has those skills.”

Fisher’s skills have served her well onscreen, although in recent years she’s made very few films, preferring to do only small roles and cameos. Despite this, she will be appearing in several films this year, a fact that surprises even her. She appears as a nun in the Charlie’s Angels sequel, a born–again Christian in the director James Cox’s Wonderland (about the murder of adult film star John Holmes), and a “bitch mother” in Patrick Read Johnson’s 5-25-77, a cheaky homage to the original Star Wars. “I have always said to myself that you should pay attention to what you are cast as, as it says something about you,” Fisher remarked, dryly. She still prefers to choose parts that require only a few days’ shooting, but does get offered the occasional role that leaves even her speechless – but never at a loss for sarcasm. “They sent me a script recently, and it was huge part. I called the agent back and said ‘I can’t. I don’t want to do this.’ Plus, there was a nude scene, and I thought, ‘I have waited my whole life to be nude at my age now,’ so that was exciting.”

With all this activity going on, it seems that Fisher is in no danger of becoming bored. In fact, it’s quite opposite. Fisher writes most of the time, although she occassionally focuses too much on one thing, and projects begin to pile up.” I think of it as planes circling the one little runway of me. I stopped  working at Christmas,” Fisher says, adding that she has been working like a demon all year. “Stopping was like, ‘Oh my god, this is fantastic,’ and I couldn’t start again. I have only just started again, and it has not completely kicked over into [becoming a workaholic] yet.”

Despite all of this, Fisher is content with her life at the moment, even though she sometimes feels overwhelmed by it as well. She offers one both  erudite and earthy-in other words, pure Carrie Fisher. “My life is insane, and I do know that, but it is my life....In terms of someone else’s life, it is madness. I mean, I have always been this kind of weirdo. But I like being that person.”