It's all confusion and rumour at the moment with the next Star Wars film, we know that Disney has a number of films up its sleeve and the first will be a continuation of the Star Wars franchise films, but apart from behind the scenes we don't know a great deal more than that.

Of course there's a lot of speculation about returning stars and the latest one to add their name to the list was Carrie Fisher. Except her PR team then withdrew it, despite what George Lucas might be saying.

Carrie Fisher apparently answered "yes" when she was asked simply if she was returning to the Star Wars franchise of films and then she followed that with the statement:

"She's in an intergalactic old folks' home...I just think she would be just like she was before, only slower and less inclined to be up for the big battle."

The comment comes through an article in Palm Beah Illustrated through The Hollywood Reporter and at first glance it appears to be a confirmation within a joke.

However the story through CNN and had something to refute her comments and a representative for Fisher said that she was joking and nothing had been announced. In fact when you read the quote above in context you can see the second part of the comment is in fact also a joke. It's actually in response to a question regarding what her character would be like today, not what her character would be in the film which it almost sounds like.

So she was joking, which makes me wonder how much we really know. The stars have been saying they've talked about it before and so is George Lucas who through Businessweek and The Hollywood Reporter is saying that he's started talking to the original cast for their return.

Who to believe? Well I recognise this quote as a similar one Lucas said when the Disney sale happened, here they quote him as saying:

"We had already signed Mark and Carrie and Harrison - or we were pretty much in final stages of negotiation...So I called them to say, 'Look, this is what's going on.' Maybe I'm not supposed to say that. I think they want to announce that with some big whoop-dee-doo, but we were negotiating with them…I won't say whether the negotiations were successful or not."

So he was negotiating with the stars for a Star Wars film he was going to make but then he sold up to Disney and there's no guarantee that the discussions he had with them are relevant now that someone else has written the story and Lucas is no longer really involved. Things could have totally changed or some of them could be coming back. He does confirm that no contracts have been signed.

So we're back to square one. From the rumours I'm hearing though I expect we may well see Luke Skywalker return, but he may be in ethereal form and we may take a leap from the end of the last film to avoid having to bring back the actors as we knew them, if at all.

One interesting titbit from the Lucas interview is his discussion of what he does now on the franchise which he describes as:

"I mostly say, 'You can't do this. You can do that,'...You know, 'The cars don't have wheels; they fly with antigravity.' There's a million little pieces. Or I can say, 'He doesn't have the power to do that, or he has to do this.' I know all that stuff."

You certainly do know all that stuff, the first three films and the re-edited originals are all testament to that.

Let's face it, we really know nothing about Star Wars: Episode VII, we can guess that some of the main characters are coming back but we might be right, we might be wrong. Time is going to tell.