In her memoir released shortly before her death in late 2016, Carrie Fisher wrote, "I'm sorry it's not Mark [Hamill] — it could have been. It should have been. It might've meant something. Maybe not much, but certainly more," she said of her relationship with her Star Wars co-star. Of course, as we know, she didn't have a relationship with Hamill because during the filming of the movies, she'd had an affair with Harrison Ford, who at the time was married and in his late 30s.
In a long-lost documentary about the making of Empire Strikes Back that was recently discovered and published on YouTube, Fisher, Hamill, and Ford discuss their on-screen love triangle. What's funny, is given the context of what we know now about their personal lives, it's hard not to detect the actors projecting a bit of themselves into the plot.
"She's the princess after all and I'm an opportunist, but it develops into a love story as it were," Ford says of the section of the film where Leia and Solo go off on their own in the Millennium Falcon.
But, Hamill thinks if he'd has his chance alone with the princess, he'd have ended up with her: "Give me three weeks with her in hyperspace and I might make a few points. I'm so burned about that," Hamill says in the doc.
"Poor kid, it's quite shocking, he's of course fond of the princess himself," Ford says.
Fisher had the most astute analysis of the Solo, Skywalker, Organa relationship.
"It starts out as a love triangle and then I'm thrown together with Han Solo," Fisher says. "It ends up being one of those relationships like Tracy and Hepburn where we scream at each other for the first half of the film and then we end up liking each other."
They're all giggling through the interviews, of course, and it's really very sweet. The rest of the doc focuses on how the crew created the special effects for the battle of Hoth, which took an insane amount of effort in the days before CGI.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
