Following a brief presentation at CinemaCon this week, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” director James Mangold has spoken with Total Film and offered some more details.
First up, he confirms that Harrison Ford spends approximately 25 minutes of the sequel with a digitally de-aged appearance designed to resemble Ford’s looks in the original trilogy. The majority of the film takes place in 1969, but that opening sequence takes place in 1944 – hence the need to de-age Ford.
New visual effects technology was created for the film in order to do the effects but a key component was also Ford himself, whom Mangold calls “incredibly gifted and agile” and had to “pretend that he was 35”.
This was done to overcome the biggest complaint about de-aged characters on screen – namely that their physical movement is much more akin to their actual age rather than the younger age they’re portraying:
“The technology involved is a whole other thing. We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day. I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced.
It wasn’t a year of effort to get to a first pass. It was an incredible technology, and, in many ways, I just didn’t think about it. I just focused on shooting what’s [approximately] a 25-minute opening extravaganza that was my chance to just let it rip.
The goal was to give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much. Because then when the movie lands in 1969, they’re going to have to make an adjustment to what it is now, which is different from what it was.”
The result has impressed the film’s producer and director of the prior four “Indiana Jones” films, Steven Spielberg. Speaking at the Time 100 Summit this week, the legendary filmmaker has nothing but praise for Mangold’s efforts:
“I just had that experience two nights ago. Bob Iger had a screening for a lot of the Disney executives and I came to the screening along with the director James Mangold. Everybody loved the movie. It’s really, really a good Indiana Jones film. I’m really proud of what Jim has done with it. When the lights came up I just turned to the group and said, ‘Damn! I thought I was the only one who knew how to make one of these.'”
Disney will premiere “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” at the Cannes Film Festival next month ahead of releasing the film in theaters nationwide on June 30th.
