To call Kevin Smith a fan of Star Wars would be an understatement — he dabbles in fan theories, “wept” on the set of The Rise of Skywalker, and casts his movies with Star Wars alumni, including Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Look, if you had the opportunity to put Luke and Leia in your film, you would do it, too. During the May 4th (a.k.a. Star Wars Day) episode of “Silent Bob Speaks,” Smith shared a charming story about meeting Fisher and his subsequent interactions with her.
Smith and Fisher kept in contact after Strike Back (which she agreed to appear in, but only if she could be paid in not money, but two beaver chairs), so when someone on the View Askew message board mentioned that Fisher “shit on” the film during a live Q&A with her mom Debbie Reynolds, the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot director reached out to her via email. It read, “What the fuck, I thought we were buds,” basically. Her response is the “greatest gift Star Wars ever gave me,” according to Smith:
“She read my email, I guess, she wrote back to me in a relatively timely fashion and she said, ‘Oh Kevin, did you fall prey to the internet?’ And then she wrote about how like, ‘You’re like me, you get up on stages, you tell stories, you try to be funny. When you’re up there, you say anything if the audience attaches to it and laughs, you go with it. I was just being funny.’ She’s going, ‘You and I are friends, you know how I feel about you, you know what I think about your movie. Why would you let something somebody on the internet said change all of that?’ And then she dropped this truth bomb right in my lap, and I still use this today.”
The truth bomb Smith speaks of: “Carrie Fisher goes, ‘Sometimes you have to spin that microscope around, because the thing you’re looking at isn’t as big as you think it is.’ That came from Carrie Fisher herself. Now she may have just been like ‘F*ck, he caught me,’ but regardless, that is a piece of advice that I still adhere to today.”
Fisher was one of a kind. You can watch the entire tribute below.
