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.

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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.

And also, with The Force Awakens, two years ago, the public didn’t know who Rey, Kylo, Finn, and Poe were. The reception of those characters has been positive, and it could have gone either way.

We were incredibly fortunate that every single one of those characters has resonated to the extent that they have. I gather what you’re saying is that there are [more] opportunities with those characters. And, yes, that’s a possibility, too. That’s what we’re looking at: where do we go with the saga? Does the saga extend beyond the nine movies that George envisioned?

Well, does it?

We are having discussions about that right now.

For that matter, must the saga necessarily unfold in trilogies?

These are the questions we’re asking. They haven’t been answered yet. I always think it’s important to try to answer the “Why?” You can make any movie you want, and certainly inside Star Wars, now we could do a wide variety of things. But what exactly is the story we feel is important to tell beyond Episode IX—I think we have to answer that before we know whether we’re going to carry on.

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But even if, for whatever reason, you chose to put the saga on ice for a while, are you committed to continuing on with the story films?