“Mother and I live next door to each other, separated by one daunting hill,” says Carrie Fisher in the HBO documentary Bright Lights, which had its North American premiere at the Telluride film festival on Saturday. “I usually come to her. I always come to her.”
Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’s cinema verite-style film about Fisher’s close relationship with mother Debbie Reynolds will doubtless draw parallels to Albert and David Maysles’s iconic 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, which centred on a similarly eccentric mother-daughter duo, who shared an equally deep bond. But Fisher likens the film more to a “surreal reality show” featuring “unreal people.”
“I didn’t think that we were the new Grey Gardens,” Fisher said during a conversation after the screening. “It’s really an ideal reality show.”
“My mother and I, we used to go shopping — not a lot, because it would turn into a show,” she continued. “And people would sort of linger because we had loud voices. They would stay in the store to listen to us. So [Bright Lights] captures that.”
The film finds Reynolds, now in her mid-80s, on the cusp of retirement and planning one last hurrah variety show in Vegas, much to the chagrin of Fisher, who would rather she rest. “Performance feeds her in ways her family cannot,” says Fisher.
She meanwhile is documented in the throes of staging her own comeback, preparing to reprise her role as Princess Leia in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“I had always wanted to show my mother off the stage, off the screen, because she’s such an amazing character,” Fisher said. “I wanted someone to capture that.”
Despite her wishes, Fisher admitted that she had “third and fifth thoughts about making it” once Bloom and Stevens came on board, mainly because she’s not fond of her own appearance on screen.
“I don’t like looking at myself,” Fisher said. “I’m just getting bigger and older. That’s not good. Meryl Streep does three movies a year, so she can watch herself age. I went from Princess Leia at 23 in a bikini to this broad. So that was distressing for me. I hate being vain and I’m working on it — and taking classes.”
Bright Lights will air on HBO early next year. It next screens at the New York film festival in October.
