'Rogue One' director Gareth Edwards on bringing CG Tarkin and Leia into his galaxy

With the clock ticking down on the biggest film of his career, "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," director Gareth Edwards wrestled with the high stakes ace up his sleeve: using computer graphics to digitally insert actor Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, into Edwards' new "Star Wars" film as the iconic villain Grand Moff Tarkin. "We were ultra-paranoid about it," Edwards told The Times ahead of the home video release of "Rogue One," which crossed the billion-dollar global box office mark just 39 days into its December release. "Even a month away, there was this feeling of, 'Is this going to work? Plenty of pressure already hung over "Rogue One," the first standalone side story in the "Star Wars" franchise. Anchored by a new heroine named Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), recruited into leading a team of characters on a mission to steal the plans to the Death Star, the prequel to 1977's "Star Wars: Episode IV -- A New Hope" would tell a darker, more violent tale than its predecessors in a galaxy far, far, away. "In the early conversations about the end of the movie, we knew we were going to hand it off in some form, like passing the gauntlet to Princess Leia," Edwards said of the film's final sequence, in which the Death Star plans land in Leia's hands, leading into the events of "A New Hope." In Austin, Texas, to speak at the South by Southwest festival last month, Edwards recounted the challenge. The task of creating a young CG Leia by digitally blending Carrie Fisher's face, and a single word of dialogue she delivered in 1977 -- "hope" -- with the motion-capture performance of actress Ingvild Deila, went to Industrial Light & Magic. Fisher, who died Dec. 27, did not film scenes for "Rogue One." "We knew we were probably not going to be able to get away without showing her without it feeling like a cheat," Edwards said. "You could do some gag where you just saw the back of her.