Collider recently caught up with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker creature and special make-up effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan, and he's now confirmed that the sequence with The Eye of Webbish Bog was indeed shot by director J.J. Abrams.
For those of you unfamiliar with that, concept art (and an excerpt from the recently released novelization) revealed that Kylo Ren visited Mustafar and came face to face with the hideous creature who had been guarding Darth Vader's Wayfinder. Those Sith cultists he killed had also been tasked with protecting the ancient device which ultimately led Ren to The Emperor.
Here's what Scanlan had to say about the filming of that sequence:
"That was a character that was designed very early on in the day. Jake Lunt [Davies], who’s one of my concept designers, we were all playing around with this idea and talking about it and he did this drawing and J.J. saw it and went, ‘That is amazing’. It was one of those moments where it was like, ‘This has to be in the movie.’ So we actually did build it and we took it to a place called Black Park in the UK, which is close to Pinewood Studios, where we shot it in a lake on location, and that sequence exists. Unfortunately it didn’t make it to the movie story, plot-wise, etc. It was a fully practical character shot in a location, and it is amazing."
He went on to say that he's hopeful The Eye of Webbish Bog could return in a future film or TV show, and while he couldn't shed any light on why this deleted scene isn't on the upcoming Blu-ray, he did offer an explanation as to why he thinks Abrams decided to leave it on the cutting room floor.
"I think it maybe was too lengthy an explanation for something that [Abrams] was able to explain in the movie much quicker, eventually," Scanlan said. "J.J.’s movies move very quickly don’t they, and it was all part of Kylo Ren’s journey and I think he just felt that there was too much time being spent on something which he explained much quicker. So that’s all it was, really."
With zero deleted scenes on the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker home release, many fans are hoping that footage will see the light of day in some sort of special edition or even Disney+.