Via Vanityfair.com:

In 2012, George Lucas surprised Kathleen Kennedy twice: first, by asking the esteemed producer if she would take over for him as the head of Lucasfilm (she agreed), and then, by notifying her that he was selling the company to Disney for $4 billion. Both moves have worked out. Disney has been a hands-off owner, and Kennedy has robustly revived the film-production arm of Lucasfilm—there has been or will be a new Star Wars movie in theaters every year from 2015 to 2020. In Lucasfilm parlance, the trilogy films, which are released in odd-numbered years, belong to the Star Wars saga, while the stand-alone films, which are released in even-numbered years (such as last year’s Rogue One), are called Star Wars stories.

Kennedy, 63, is based primarily at Lucasfilm’s headquarters in San Francisco, but earlier this year, I met with her in the Santa Monica offices of the Kennedy/Marshall Company, the production shop Kennedy founded with her husband, Frank Marshall. Here are excerpts from our conversation about the future of Star Wars and how the sudden death of Carrie Fisher in December changed everything.

Vanity Fair: Is there a palpable sense of relief at Lucasfilm that The Force Awakens and Rogue One have been well-received?

Kathleen Kennedy: There is a palpable sense of relief. For the first time, I think we can step outside of this a little bit and take stock, and ask ourselves, “What are the next steps? Where are we going?” It was really the release of Rogue One, because we knew we were moving on with the trilogy, but we didn’t know exactly how these Star Wars stories would be received. We didn’t want to create confusion, either. So it is a relief to see that people really embraced Rogue One, and they now know that we’re creating these new stories that could fall anywhere on the timeline and don’t necessarily have anything to do with the saga. From a creative point of view, that’s really liberating.

Click below to read the full article.