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TheRaider.net News Indiana Jones 5
 

Indiana Jones 5 News

July 1, 2023
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Karen Allen: "There was a period of time when Steven was going to direct the film. It was my understanding - although I never read any of those scripts - that it was being developed very much as a still-ongoing Marion-and-Indy story. When Steven decided to step down and James took over and brought in new writers, I knew it was going into a different direction. Having not even known what it was before, it was even more mysterious after they took it over. So I really didn’t know anything for a long period of time until they had a script. And I have to confess, I was a bit disappointed that she wasn’t more woven throughout the story and didn’t have more of an ongoing trajectory. However, the way in which she does come back into the story was very satisfying. I just thought, okay, I’m just going to embrace this. I certainly would have been wildly disappointed had Marion just sort of vanished into the ether. It’s funny. When I first started working on it, I just decided that Indy was the love of her life. I just decided to make a deep commitment to that and to play through Raiders of the Lost Ark with the feeling they’re soulmates. When we end up married in Crystal Skull, I wept when I read that script. Steven and George had this experience as young boys with these Saturday afternoon matinee serial films. They were just a little bit older than I am, so I kind of missed that. I don’t have a reference point for that. So I don’t think that I necessarily understood the genre of film we were making. I thought we were making Casablanca. I really, truly did. So I sort of defined my character in that sort of genre - which I think weirdly enough works quite well for the film. I never imagined Marion as a damsel in distress in any sort of way. I was always pushing back against that, and in the end, Steven was supportive of that. She’s sort of at the core of my growth as an actor and certainly my relationship to the world. As I move through the world, I’ve become very identified with that character. There was maybe a brief period of time where I found it annoying. But that passed and now it’s just this character that I love. I can’t imagine anything more satisfying to have had the chance in life to create a character that has some meaning for people. (Shooting scenes with Ford in Dial of Destiny) was fantastic. We shot it all in one day or maybe two days. To just imagine these two people that have been wrenched apart through grief and loss and then she’s coming back with this hope that they can move forward. When we played the scene, that was very, very affecting. We were both very affected by it and a little teary. And the crew was a little teary. (Keeping my role in the film secret has) been excruciating. (laughs) I never have to do anything like this again. People have come up to me and they’ve been so upset because they didn’t see my name on IMDb. People would be so mad I’d have to stand there and just be like, what do I say? Do I say, yeah, isn’t that a drag, or, you never never know, wink wink. I’ve had to say I just can’t answer any questions about Indiana Jones - which I feel like is sort of saying that I’m in the film. It’s a lose-lose situation. (laughs) (It caps things) more so for Harrison than for me. He’s such a fully developed character and has done all five of these. With Marion, I’ve kind of come and gone. But she will always be a character that moves through life with me. I don’t know if I really have a sense of it being over. There always was a sense that one more would be done, even if it took 20 years. Now, they’ve been very clear that this is the last one. So it is a letting go."

July 2, 2023
COLLIDER
Boyd Holbrook: "Oh gosh, they’re not too kooky (the villains). They’re not too, you know, twist-the-mustache."
Mads Mikkelsen: "There’s a framework in Indiana Jones, but the parameters are fairly wide and you can stretch that. You’ve seen that before. But there’s also a reality sense that you have to be honest to. It’s very hard to put a finger on, but you know what it is when you see it. It’s like, this belongs or this doesn’t belong, right? But you can’t put a finger on it."
Shaunette Renee Wilson: "I think the fact that (Mason’s) this young black woman, that she was able to kind of blend in a little bit with the younger community in New York, especially as she has this edge. Maybe she was recruited to do a little bit of COINTELPRO or something, but then got assigned to this situation and maybe is initially already frustrated with that and the lack of respect that she’s been able to glean from these guys knowing that there’s a lot of tension with the ideology and racism and all these things. So that was just a little bit of something that I put in there for myself. The journey was incredible just from the fittings and the fine-tuning of this jacket as opposed to that jacket, and the length of hair this way or the fro being a little bit longer. And then getting to my first day on set, and it was out in Glasgow and exterior, just a big sweeping, I mean, the fact that they were able to turn Glasgow into New York, 1969 was just wonderful. I feel like there are so many incredibly talented people involved in this process, and all I have to do is just kind of walk here, say this line, ignore this guy (points to Holbrook), flip open a little pad (laughs), and you know what I mean? It’s just like, oh, this is insane! But, you know, it’s just that so much work has gone into these intimate moments and the relationship with these characters, so yeah, it was surreal for sure."
Boyd Holbrook: "Jim said he didn’t want to offend me, but, I have a role for you, read it and then we’ll talk. And then I read it, and I was like, man, I’m the bad guy, that sucks, I wanna be the good guy. But you have to make these characters work. On the screen, my character is a lapdog to Mads’ character and that may seem very simple, but to me, trying to wrap my head around why would a guy be affiliated with this party, and then just going in deeper and finding out, well, he’s not really accepted anywhere, and this is really the only club or tribe that will accept him. So, (he’s) going not so much with the ideology, but just more of the acceptance, and that’s my loyalty to Mads’ character, and I think that’s what kept me in him. Yeah, a lot of therapy after this. (laughs)"
Mads Mikkelsen: "Oh, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things that you do and it might not end up, but it might just be in the back of your head when you do it. I think I was trying to make this character nervous to a degree when he was not the boss of the room, and the second he was the boss of the room, he wasn’t nervous at all. So I would just go back and forth with that and see how that played out. Like, a man who wasn’t completely secure all the time. I’m not sure it comes across, but that’s what I did!"
Shaunette Renee Wilson: "It was my birthday on set and Phoebe got me a cake and a little card. You know, she plays with a deck of cards in the film and gave me a little card, I think it’s the queen of hearts in an illustration of my character, and it was wonderful. You know, when you have to work on your birthday, it can be a kind of love/hate relationship where you’re like, I’m in all day and I’m at work, I would rather be... Whatever, but I think everyone, crew as well, just decorating, it was just really lovely, and again, Phoebe with the cake and everything, so I really felt like I was being celebrated, and that was touching."
Mads Mikkelsen: "Can we spoiler alert? There’s a scene where she kind of doesn’t make it out of there alive. (Laughs) Sorry about that. So you shoot that again and again and again, right? And then camera eventually turns around and it’s my turn. And this is what it’s all about, that you’re still doing the same thing, you’re still acting out, you’re still throwing that disbelief towards me every time. And this is what we want from each other. It’s not always the case, but I think we did it 20 times and you kept going there, tearing up in your eyes, even though you were off-screen. This is what it’s all about."
Boyd Holbrook: "I don’t know if I could top that. Just the memory of Harrison welcoming, truly feeling like you’re welcome here. We love what you do, you’re as important as we are. I think that just makes a really good place to make good work, and Harrison has always shown that he’s not the star who’s in his trailer all the time. He’s, I don’t know, he’s just like your dad hanging out. He’s just there."

July 2, 2023
FADE TO BLACK PODCAST
James Mangold: "The existing script was written by David Koepp. So that's why he gets a credit. And there were elements in it, the idea of starting in 1944 and the idea of Indy having a goddaughter Helena was in it. But that was pretty much where we kind of, they were chasing a different relic. There was a different villain. There was a, and more so the movie wasn't about what I really wanted it to be about. It was just another adventure."

July 2, 2023
LOVE OF CINEMA PODCAST
James Mangold: "I had hesitations taking on this film for the reasons. You're pinch hitting for one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. So you're bound to leave people wishing that Babe Ruth had come to bat instead of you. Jez and John-Henry Butterworth and I worked for a year right about when Covid hit."

July 3, 2023
CONAN O'BRIEN NEEDS A FRIEND PODCAST
Harrison Ford: "God, I hope they go to the theaters to see it, if they're going to see it at all. I wish they, I hope they'll see it in the theater. Your family are not an audience, you know, at home? It's not, it's not fair to the movie. I mean yeah, you could see it at home if you wanted to. Maybe later. But give it a chance. Go to a movie theater in the dark with strange people. (Cannes) was about 10 days ago. This is June 5. But they weren't like a real audience. I mean they had tuxedos and beautiful gowns on and stuff like that. I want to see it with ordinary rabble."

July 3, 2023
SOUNDTRACKING PODCAST
James Mangold: "Harrison and Kathy came to me, and then Steven wanted to meet with me and discuss the same thing. In each of the meetings, I was just open to hearing what everyone had to say. But I was a little hesitant. I was of course honored and kind of struck down by what was the nature of what was coming to my doorstep. But I was probably quite sensibly a little hesitant. First of all, I wanted to read what existed in script, because I kind of, because that's in the end what I have to work with. And when I did, I saw that I didn't think that they were there yet. And when it came to me, they were also like, we need the movie starting production in three and a half months. And I was like, so my initial answer was no actually, or a conditional no, which is that I need a lot more time because what I don't want to do, and what happens too often with blockbuster movies, is you're not making a movie, you're actually making a date, meaning making a release date. So they came back to me a few weeks later, and I think they had to talk to the even higher powers that determine these calendars, and found a year to push it off, so that myself, I kind of penciled out a treatment, and then Jez and John-Henry Butterworth who had worked with me on Le Mans 66 came on, and we all worked on the script through the start of the whole pandemic, and then launched into production in the midst of the whole pandemic. So I had to be aware that there were a lot of landmines in the field I was going to run across. When I first penciled out my own treatment of what this movie was going to be, I actually was calling it Indiana Jones and the Magical Mystery Tour. I'm watching (John Williams), and at this point the movie was 3 hours and 25 minutes, and so John is just riveted to this Berlin Alexanderplatz length Indiana Jones movie."

July 3, 2023
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
Tom Cruise: "Harrison Ford is a legend; I hope to be still going; I’ve got 20 years to catch up with him. I hope to keep making Mission: Impossible films until I’m his age."

July 3, 2023
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
James Mangold: "(Spielberg) welcomed me. He was part of the contingent that approached me about doing this, so I certainly wouldn’t have even thought of this as being a possibility if Steven and I hadn’t had a private engagement with each other about what was happening. And then I understood I had his blessing and his support. I was going to need it. Steven was involved as myself, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth wrote. I would send pages to Steven, Harrison, Kathy Kennedy and George, so I’d hear from everyone. I wrote an original treatment that shaped what the movie was going to be, involving the Antikythera, time and a character based on Wernher von Braun in the space program, and I presented that to Steven. And then, as we entered prep, I would show Steven animatics of action I was planning, and as I shot, Steven would watch dailies. He was shooting Fabelmans here in the U.S. while I was shooting Indy in England, and we would talk. The time difference almost worked really well for us, because Steven would often call me during my late night and his early day, and on weekends. So I’d say we talked at least once or twice a week as he watched dailies. Steven then came in very early on, and I showed him the movie when it was just an assembly that was well over three hours. One of the reasons I agreed to make the movie was because these Mount Rushmore figures of motion picture history came to me on such a personal and human level. I didn’t feel like I had won a bake-off. It felt like a one-off engagement with me thinking about this possibility, and there was such warmth and such a lack of political complexity to the relationships with everyone. I was ready [for that]. I imagined this would be the most politically complex movie I’ve ever made given the astronomical, legendary status of all the people involved. Power is very evenly divided, and all sides become highly collaborative. Everyone is very comfortable with each other because there’s such mutual respect, and so I credit this to Steven, Harrison, Kathy, George and John Williams as well. I felt so welcomed into the family, and it was one of the least complicated movies that I’ve ever made on those kinds of levels. So, what was it like showing the movie to Steven for the first time? I probably showed it to Steven seven times, meaning that he was just really involved and engaged all the way through: before we mixed, after we mixed, when effects came in. He was a marvelous producer and mentor on the movie. John (Williams) is a vital and creative 91-year-old composer who just finished writing over two hours of music for my movie in pencil, and then he conducted that music with a 300-person orchestra over a period of a year. If you hear the energy and the passion of the music, I just couldn’t consider him done writing music. But I do have to tell you that I felt the honor and the awe in my heart, particularly the first session, when John started to play what he had written for my picture. I felt like I was watching an EPK for some other movie, only it was in my own eyes and I was living through it, first person. I could not believe I was hearing this music, and John was turning to me from the podium and going, shall we try this, or shall we try that? And if you don’t know him, he’s one of the kindest, most charming guys. He is a jazz musician. He came up as a jazz pianist. He’s from Queens. If you call him, he’ll often go, hey, baby. He’s this really disarmingly charming man, without any of the pretense of maestro as it were. While at the same time, he has all of the grandeur within him to conduct an orchestra like that. There’s a point where these characters become symbols more than characters, and so there becomes this anxiety that if you examine the humanity of a hero, you somehow weaken them. And honestly, I can’t speak for how fans relate and wrestle with these questions in relation to other movies, but certainly in relation to mine, I think your question almost has my answer built into it. I mean, I think you’re in a sense already addressing it. Good drama gives a hero a problem. If a movie is about a beautiful hero who is capable of anything and is virtually indestructible and is without any personal issues or concerns, then you just have a fashion video with action. I am a fan of starting a character in one place to go to another. Movies are a continuum. By definition, in drama, a character starts in one place and ends up in another. So, if people want to be divisive (in the age of social media), they can focus on where a character starts, as opposed to where they end, or they can focus on where they end, as opposed to where they start. In reality, for Harrison who’s playing this character, he’s tracing an arc and he’s changing through the whole picture. So it all depends on where you’re landing and where you’re pointing your finger on that timeline. There was one point when Harrison took off his jacket. He made the decision at a midpoint in the picture to take off his jacket, and I was a little nervous that he was starting to look Clear and Present Danger, so I know exactly what you mean by Richard Kimble. In my own analysis of how the film works, we open with this 20-minute segment in 1944, and I’m trying my best to give you a Golden Age version of Indy in the 30s and 40s when all the elements of the Indiana Jones palette are so harmonious: the John Williams score, the sense of balletic action, the virility and capability of the star, the sense of lighting and color, the fedora and the Nazis at the height of the war. And John was just letting the orchestra run wild to all of it. He was letting the horses out of the barn, if you will. And then the most fascinating cut for me was that cut to 1969 when we find Indy, now 70, in his apartment in New York. And the big question the movie asks of the audience is, how did we get from there to here? And what happened? So the movie begins to answer it. But the other aspect that gets to your Richard Kimble part is that while John and I talked early on about letting the full Indy theme run in the beginning, I thought that when we got to 1969 and found Indy having lost his mojo, there’s no better definition of a character losing their mojo than they can’t quite hear their theme anymore. And so John immediately started scoring. I said, I think you will be scoring a kind of 70s picture, a Three days of the Condor. And he goes, I can do that. I am a 70s composer. And so the movie then shifts and becomes more of a score of that time and less of the themes of Indy, until he gets to Morocco and puts on the hat and starts to find his mojo again. The theme returns with that. So it’s a very interesting flow that John and I trace musically. The movie almost ends up being a gigantic overture at the front and then a loss of that theme, and then a slow rebuilding toward the final reels when John once again lets the horses out of the barn, if you will. Helena’s card trick scene on the boat was actually inspired by Barbara Stanwyck in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve. One of my thoughts before we had even written the script was that we had to get Phoebe in this movie. I saw her as a kind of Stanwyck or Kate Hepburn in a modern era. I mean, Phoebe’s a thoroughly modern woman and modern character, but in a way, there’s also a throwback quality to her articulateness, her verbal almost musicality, the way she handles dialogue and her comedic style and chops. There’s so much about her that reminds me of these Golden Age heroines of the 30s and 40s, and yet she’s someone who’s thoroughly modern. But anyway, it was Barbara Stanwyck in that movie, and that was where the deck of cards came from, if it came from anywhere. I never presented (the plot) as time travel. I never really thought of it as time travel. There’s this way the press can frame a story that can then help drive the story. We worked for three years on the opening sequence, but only in the last 30 days have people started calling it the AI sequence at the beginning of Indiana Jones. So I never thought about this as time travel per se, although they certainly go through a portal in time at the end of the movie. But the movie isn’t about time travel. It’s about time, it’s about getting older and it’s about the world changing around you. And as long as there’s been Indiana Jones movies, the power of the relic has always had some kind of dialogue with the theme of the movie itself. So it was no shocker. When I came on the film, even before I committed to the film, I auditioned this idea I had about making the movie about time itself, but not turning it into an H. G. Wells movie any more than Raiders of the Lost Ark. Someone in this age could go, Raiders of the Lost Ark is a biblical prophecy movie. No, it’s just a movie where someone opens a box that contains Christian relics and angels come out and the sky opens up, but it is not necessarily a kind of a religious picture. What it’s all really about is this continuing dialogue between a secular hero driven by science and fact, who lives in a world of books and history, and is continually confronted with things beyond belief. These things come from history and somehow lead us to confronting miracles of all different kinds, whether it’s a Knight of the Round Table living for 2000 years in a cave or voodoo warriors reaching into chests and pulling out hearts or creating zombies or the Ark of the Covenant exploding the heads of only people with their eyes open. (Indiana Jones movies) are always a kind of fanciful interaction between an aspect of history, science and miracles, and so my goal with the end of the picture was to have a big swing, which is a staple of these movies at the end. I wanted Indy to be confronted with something that would not only challenge his notions of belief, but also tempt him in a way. Life in the modern world had gotten disillusioning enough that the idea of actually living in history might be a temptation for him. (Helena) loves him and she needs a father. She needs him. If the movie has anything to say, it’s on the simplest level. You have a father who’s lost a son and a daughter who’s lost a father, and both have become lost in the world. Helena is lost through cynicism, and Indy is lost through a kind of malaise and a feeling of being obsolete. And so to me, they’re in desperate need of each other while they’re battling each other through most of the picture. They’re also in desperate need of each other’s influence, and I never saw Helena as without a heart. I always saw her as wounded by the fact that Indy vanished from her life at a certain point when she needed someone like that. She says to him, “Godfather, what does that really mean anyway?” but she was the living definition of someone needing a godfather. Her father died when she was young and the godfather never showed. And so this movie became a chance for this particular father to prove himself again, and in his own way, climb out of the grief he felt about his own loss. Jez and John Henry came up with (the ending with Marion). When we came up with the idea of Marion coming back at the end, that idea came to Jez and John Henry pretty early and was pretty brilliant. And we shot it pretty early, because we shot Karen’s scenes in the second or third month of production, and the power of her coming in really landed. I mean, it landed more when I could see the whole journey in getting to that scene and bringing those two together. But Karen literally came to set and worked two days. She landed and just dropped in, and the chemistry between her and Harrison was, of course, immediate. It’s something they had developed over many years."

July 5, 2023
BUZZFEED CELEB
Boyd Holbrook: "There’s a movie coming out."
Phoebe Waller-Bridge: "We are very excited to be here selling the s*** out of it, Dial of Destiny."
Harrison Ford: "We’re here to sell Dial of Destiny, and we're gonna fail unless you go to the movie."

July 5, 2023
MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION
Phedon Papamichael: "Hearing how great it was from (Steven Spielberg and Janusz Kaminski) and them being generous about it was a really good feeling. We wanted to connect with the tradition and the historic aspect of the franchise, which is a challenge, of course. For me, it was about not applying what I normally do, which is thinking about natural light and not trying to stylize things. But to embrace more atmospheric smoke, backlights, beams of light, hard light, shadows, colors, patterns, saturation. All that was fun to do. Jim and I always loved Steven’s work, so it wasn’t a big stretch for us to continue this style of filmmaking. We very much wanted (the opening) to feel like lost footage. Like something Spielberg shot on Raiders that didn’t make the cut. Although people are on the move, it’s always about connecting with the characters. Jim is very focused on what the characters are feeling and what they are experiencing. That’s what’s making all the action really emotional and effective. Hopefully, the audience will embrace the movie. Everyone will have their own way of thinking about what this last installment should be, but it’s an Indy movie. You should have fun with it. I think we captured some great Harrison Ford moments, and the villains are great. I think we continued the tradition with great pride."

July 6, 2023
SOUND + IMAGE LAB: DOLBY INSTITUTE PODCAST
Phedon Papamichael: "So you know the reactions (at the Los Angeles premiere). That was great. Of course there were lots of fans dressed up. It was a very enthusiastic crowd. But it's great to see. I kept turning to Mangold, because Cannes we had a Premiere. It was a different crowd. I'm not saying people don't like it, but it was nice to see every little thing we were hoping like got its appropriate response and reaction. So it was fun to watch it with a lot of fans in the audience. But it's all in good fun. It's a good spirit and you have to remember it's an Indiana Jones movie. I mean you can't be too precious about it."

July 6, 2023
LUCASFILM
Ethann Isidore: "I’m trying to understand how a plane works. I’m trying to be a pilot and Teddy’s taking it very seriously. And Harrison helped me. He told me which yoke I had to pull at the right moment and which gauges I had to look at. It helped me a lot and I can say that I had piloting lessons from Harrison Ford. It’s a pretty good fun fact, I guess! I used to watch (the Indy films) almost every weekend with my mother and my dad, so I don’t really remember the first time I watched an Indiana Jones movie. I just know I grew up watching these movies and they’re amazing. Like, who didn’t watch them and who didn’t love them? Who doesn’t love Indiana Jones? I just wanted to have fun during the audition. I had a piece of the script and I was like, I know what’s going to happen in the next Indiana Jones! I didn’t think that I was going to be the one chosen, I was just so excited to be part of an Indiana Jones audition. Teddy’s a kid like me and he’s always trying to be an adult. He’s trying to find his place between Helena and Indiana Jones and I think that’s pretty much how I feel as a kid with adults. Harrison told me something that was pretty fun: that acting was actually like being a child, but you get paid for it. I think that’s pretty true and that’s a good way to understand the work of being an actor. He helped me a lot to know how to use my energy because I was giving a lot of energy, but sometimes maybe too much. He looks and acts like Indiana Jones all the time! He is Indiana Jones. I thought I was going to meet someone else, someone I didn’t know, but actually I knew him. It was quite a surprise that Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford are the same person. When I first met (Phoebe), she was very funny and she was very nice. We had, like, kind of a big sister/little brother relationship. We didn’t really work (at the dynamic), we just had fun together and it worked. And they signed (a guitar they gifted). So, every time I feel a bit bad, I look at it and I’m like, OK. Life is actually good. It’s an amazing, amazing feeling. I feel like I’m in a dream right now. I’m so excited!"

July 7, 2023
LUCASFILM
Mads Mikkelsen: "I think we all felt that to a degree watching the first film. It’s a quality stamp for any film that you, as a kid, just want to join the people up there on the screen. You don’t want to be the actor. You just want to be that person. I mean, since I can’t be Indy, I can be the baddie. And it’s been a wonderful journey to see this home. I went outside my trailer and Harrison was outside. That was the first time I met him. It wasn’t Harrison, it was Indiana Jones. He had the hat, the whip, the jacket. (It was) surreal. Watching him work, it’s just been, you know, an experience of my life. Because, all of a sudden, I’m part of it."
Boyd Holbrook: "I was really excited and also a little bummed out that I was going to be in a film like this, but (playing) a bad guy. Trying to figure out how to portray a character like that was hard for me to wrap my head around. Why is this guy not in, you know, San Francisco, Haight Ashbury, doing other things? I just wanted him to have something that put him out. We made these teeth that actually aren’t that present in the film, but for me it was kind of a good crutch to lean on."
Shaunette Renee Wilson: "Thinking about black women as these action figures and heroes, it is such a delight to try to give homage to that and to recreate a little bit of that energy and vibe and ownership of your badassery. It was fun. I’m from New York and so to kind of like, literally, time travel. The set design was incredible on this. The details! So many aspects of that set (were) just incredible to witness, just the scope of it. It’s interesting, because there are moments when I feel like these characters are trying to get her on their side. I think Agent Mason is very much about the business, but they’re just taking things way out of hand. You know, they’re killing people. We’re blowing up this parade. We’re running around. It’s just like, what are we doing? This is not what I signed up for! And to be assigned to this is just so frustrating."
Mads Mikkelsen: "If you have certain ideals, like Mason does, and your bosses are making a pact with the devil - and you have to defend that - that’s not a nice job. Every time there’s something (on set) that looks cool and doable, they come out and they wet it down. And then all of a sudden, it’s just tricky. It looks good with rain, but it’s very difficult to work with."
Shaunette Renee Wilson: "My stunt guy gets all the credit. I couldn’t jump off a moving motorcycle while I crashed, even though I wish I could. But, you know, these are world class sets in every country that we went to, so hanging out on set, you got front-row seats to the greatest show."
Mads Mikkelsen: "Nothing has shifted for me. It was a film (that as a child) I was just watching it and loving it and wanting to be up there doing the things they were doing. And, well, now I got to do it. A lot of people in my generation, especially a lot of my friends who are directors, that’s what started everything. They watched (Raiders) and they went, I want to make films!"
Shaunette Renee Wilson: "It’s cool to actually collide generationally. This is such a timeless franchise and a timeless piece. It was wonderful to be representative of that."
Boyd Holbrook: "I think about Ke Huy Quan. I just wanted to be that kid, and just really getting the sense of adventure, that you can have these adventures, too. That, as cliche as it sounds, is the magic of cinema. I see somebody come up in my peripheral and it’s Harrison. And he’s like, I love what you’re doing. And that kind of made it real and took away a lot of the pressure. You know, when am I going to meet Harrison? How’s that going to go? (It) really normalized everything and made you feel like you are a part of the gang."

July 7, 2023
LUCASFILM
Ben Wilkinson: "It was kind of mind blowing (getting the gig). Where do you go after that? We’ve got to get this right. We can’t mess this up. We started off and we made a version of (the Lance of Longinus) and then it was like, you know what? We kind of know it’s a fake anyway, so let’s take that and let’s do our own version of it. So, it’s not a copy of something we’ve seen. It had a bit of weight to it because the metal work was real. It was just something that our prop maker Christian (Short) made and carved, and then we molded. So it felt a bit more real than just a plastic molded thing. But it was nice and I loved the way that, when you see the film and they open the case, the metal work really sort of shines out. (Its crate) was just kind of really exciting. And I remember the concept artist that we had that was working on the case was like, I can’t believe it. I’m just working on a wooden crate, but I know it’s for Indiana Jones and it’s awesome. It’s amazing. I remember Jim saying, oh, I like (the Graphikos), but it looks like an iPad. It’s like, he’s right. But I suppose it’s kind of an iPad of the day, maybe. We played around with the size quite a bit, just to try and get away from that. There were lots of tests (melting wax). You had the complete version (of the Antikythera), the version that goes together. One that they could chuck, one that they could kind of stunt with, one with a bit of size so when they’d done the closeup, we could get all the mechanisms inside to get the dial spinning. We’d seen it a couple of times and then Jim called us over and was like, oh, what could we do on the back of it? It just needs a little bit more. So then we added to it while it was even shooting. You’ve got the dial and that was blowing me away, because I was seeing it on posters, like behind the characters. As I’m watching it, and I gotta watch it again, because I was just distracted going, oh my God, there’s this! When he opens a drawer and the dynamite’s there and it’s like, oh, that was us! Even the real little things, everything’s exciting."

July 7, 2023
WIRED
Andrew Whitehurst: "Each of these things is a pencil; now we have another pencil. So it’s just enabling us to make better choices."
Robert Weaver: "There are idiosyncratic characteristics that each individual has with the way that they blink, the number of times they blink, how the eyes sit at rest, and those types of nuances lead to a perception. Many times, we weren’t quite getting the right balance of the eye-opening and the shape of the overall eyes, and were continually having to reference both older footage and what was shot in camera. From my perspective, there’s nothing that we can’t do. Given enough time and resources, we can accomplish anything."

July 7, 2023
VARIETY
Andrew Whitehurst: "We knew we would have to use all of the tools we already had and develop some new ones. (We use) machine learning-based reference material from previous Indiana Jones films. (We first) scan(ned) Harrison’s head so we had a current cast. We made sure we were shooting with extra cameras attached to the main unit camera so we could get as much reference as we possibly could. (It was an) intense collaborative process. (Mangold laid out) the action beats that would have to be featured within it. (In post-production, he was) so open to hearing ideas from others."
Robert Weaver: "(The 3D CG asset) involved putting Harrison through the process of recording all the facial performances and all its extremes, and the marrying of various technologies by the artists to blend between one and the other to get the final performance that you’re looking for. The important aspect is that there’s not a single recipe that was cooked up that could be done for all shots. On the ILM side there were a few hundred artists involved in the process from start to finish, working on the various shots. They were working on every nuance in every shot. But we were able to achieve that because the reliance on the performance of Harrison was of utmost importance. He was the major driving force of what we needed to do for that opening act and make a younger act of that exact performance. We were just in awe as to what (Ford) is able to deliver, how fit he is and how much we could rely on him driving every aspect of the performance."

July 9, 2023
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Andrew Whitehurst: "It’s called ILM Face Swap. It’s using an enormous number of techniques."
Robert Weaver: "Face Swap essentially is replacing the face with another face, whether it’s a younger version or somebody entirely different. In this case, it was the younger version. And as Andrew was saying, we utilized every trick in the book as far as what it would take to get each individual shot to the level that it needed to be. It employed using machine learning. It employed building a full CG asset to highly critical detail. This work doesn’t lend itself well to having a very consistent recipe. It’s completely dynamic to the individual shot. So there were times that we were leaning more on the CG asset, and there were times that we would be getting a bit more out of the machine learning passes."
Andrew Whitehurst: "The one continuous element throughout all of this is having really great artists with really great eyes making those choices with Robert and me. And we had an enormous amount of reference material from earlier Indy films, which we got scanned, and we could use that and we could frame through that and understand what exactly the likeness was that we were trying to hit. And it’s building it up. We would initially do a low-resolution pass that we could give to the edit. So they were always cutting with an age-appropriate Indiana Jones, even if it was not a final quality, so that they could judge the performance in the cut and understand how that was working. And that meant we then got better notes back. It’s building it up, and it’s using a huge variety of techniques, but it’s all down to artists looking at stuff, talking to us, really getting their heads around what the character is, looking at the performance that Harrison gave that’s driving all of this underneath, and then working and polishing that to get to the finished result."
Robert Weaver: "There were times we would rely on key frame (hand) animation."
Andrew Whitehurst: "(In other instances,) we can shoot with multiple cameras at a performance, we can extract the 3D performance from that, and then we can use that to be mapped onto a different 3D face but maintaining that same performance."
Robert Weaver: "That one component (was based on The Irishman), yes, but the technology was better and the artists have learned more (since The Irishman was made). All of these other components are equally as useful, or in some shots, more useful. It was incredibly instrumental for the machine learning process to have that repository of imagery (of Ford at Lucasfilm), for sure. But as Andrew also alluded to earlier, the artists are really the key component here. In addition to the machine learning, we also had a program that we call Face Finder that would, frame by frame, find a similar pose from that repository that artists could then reflect back on and see what in actuality it looked like in the past, and then draw comparisons and know in a very instructive way where we needed to do a bit more work to get what we needed."
Andrew Whitehurst: "That’s one of the key things for me, when I was looking at the work coming in, is that ability to have a frame-by-frame reference to compare and go, “OK, well actually, you know, when he does this smirk around his cheek, there’s this little crease that always comes in. Maybe we just need to enhance that a little bit.” Getting a performance is a very holistic thing. It’s not just a physical, sculptural quality. It’s a lot of everything."
Robert Weaver: "There are absolutely components to (machine learning) that we rely on. Definitely. And that’s part of the evolution of us doing more successful digital human performance. (To teach the computer,) we primarily relied on the older Indy films and that target age. But we also captured present day. "
Andrew Whitehurst: "Yes, exactly. We shot a lot of reference material, as well as the actual shots from the film we were making. We went and deliberately set up the cameras and got Harrison to perform as he is now. We learn, the computer learns, but I think it’s also worth saying that even within feeding the footage, you need to be careful and select your footage, because some footage might skew results in a way that actually isn’t helpful for a particular shot. So there’s a lot of kind of skill and judgment in terms of selecting what you are going to use as reference."
Robert Weaver: "Exactly, that curation process that Andrew was just talking about was incredibly important. Artists would make determinations as to what is helpful."
Andrew Whitehurst: "Whenever possible, it’s Harrison. There were times where, for either shoot timing issues or because it was a more of a stunt type scenario, we had to use a stunt performer. So the body there would be the stunt performer. And there’s a couple of times where it’s a digi body, but it’s mostly newly shot Harrison. Everything involving actors (in the train sequence) was shot on a stage. We did go to the Austrian Alps and shot a load of material that we were able to use for some of the backgrounds, and we did a lot of scanning of that kind of that environment. We were then able to do a fully CG environment, because the nature of the narrative for that sequence meant that we had very specific requirements for the environment in different places. An awful lot of it ended up being fully CG-generated because there is no place that was going to give us what we needed. (When filming the actors onstage) we used bluescreen (instead of virtual production) mostly just for speed of getting through shots, and also we needed the flexibility in post to be able to change the background because we were still slightly adjusting exactly what the backgrounds were going to look like when we were shooting. We knew what the overall background would be, but in terms of, well, we need more trees here, or fewer trees here, or the sky, you know, dawn is, is happening over the whole sequence. And that timing is extremely difficult to do upfront. We start in pitch black, we end up post-dawn on a cloudy day. (Mikkelson’s villain surviving his fall from the train) was a long conversation, with a lot of iterations. The thing that he gets hit by is a very lightweight hose that they use for putting water into steam trains, which itself can rotate. So he’s being hit by as soft a thing as you can be hit by that’s going to be hanging by a railway line in 1944. But, yes, it should be a little bit of a surprise when he shows up again later."
Robert Weaver: "It boils down to him being a very tough bugger. (chuckles)"
Andrew Whitehurst: "The one thing I will say is that when Mads does get knocked off the train, he did that. We put some crash mats there, and Mads Mikkelson knows how to take a punch and how to look like he’s been hit by something heavy. We had to make him travel back further because the train was moving at speed, and obviously we weren’t doing that on the stage. But in terms of the physicality of the performance, he did that. (For the tuk-tuk chase) we had a whole amazing second unit crew directed by Dan Bradley who went out to Fez, which was where we were actually filming. This was a sequence that we had prevised and boarded. Because there’s a lot of dialogue that happens in the scene, we knew there was going to be process work back at Pinewood with our principals. And we needed to know how we were going to stitch that into location-based stunt material, also how we were going to acquire the materials to put in the backgrounds of the process work. So the previs and boarding was essential. That whole process was based on visits to the location and understanding that environment and what could be done there. They just went and filmed some really amazing stunts, and we were able to shoot multicamera backgrounds, plus scanning everywhere. And so we were then able to build either fully digital versions of backgrounds or projected photography onto digital assets to create the backgrounds for the process work that we shot back at Pinewood. There were a couple of stunts that we did at Pinewood just because there was no way of being able to get them on location for various reasons. Usually safety, or just the streets - they are super cramped - so you are limited into where you can put a camera, what kind of camera you can put in there. (For the underwater dive sequence) we used every technique, including actually filming things in the Mediterranean. We shot in tanks at Pinewood. We did some dry-for-wet work, particularly close-ups, because it’s so performance critical. And then there’s a lot of full CG work and CG enhancement work on top of that. We were able to storyboard and previs the whole sequence upfront, which meant we could take a look at each shot and go, well, this shot should be full CG. This shot we think we can get on location, this shot we can get in a tank. And we were able to divide and conquer using that approach. There are a couple of fully CG shots in there, particularly wide establishing shots where we just couldn’t get the location to look right or that matched our requirements and the tank at Pinewood is just not big enough for doing that kind of work. The art department was able to build us some sections of a wreck, but because of the safety requirements for working underwater, it means that people have to be able to get in and out very quickly and safely. So there was a lot of enhancement work that we needed to do to really make it feel like an enclosed and threatening environment. And then of course, there’s the eels on top of that. The close-ups were all dry-for-wet, and we were using stunt performers in the Pinewood tank. Because we had the scene earlier on of 1969 New York, we sort of set our world up as being a real place. And then we extended that and we needed ancient Syracuse to be the 213-214 B.C. equivalent. It had to feel like a real, lived in city. And that’s a huge amount of work."
Robert Weaver: "It was a massive build - building ancient Syracuse and being accurate to the time period. You could have taken the (virtual) camera at any point and flown down into the city and through the streets. All the props sitting on wagons would all be appropriate for 200 B.C. And that of course involved building the various boats and the ocean and the buildings that would have to get destroyed at various points in time and building all the tools that Archimedes employed to fight the Romans back in the day. It was quite an endeavor, but it was very rewarding."

July 9, 2023
DAILY MIRROR
John Rhys-Davies: "Well, is the part going to be worth the plane journey? Oh yeah, of course it will be. Oh yeah, right! But how can you let down the audience for what might be the last in the five? Was there anything new to be found in the part as is given? I have to see the film again, I don’t know. Personally, I felt underused, but I’m not allowed to say things like that. Oh dear! I think it is going to be one of the big ones of the summer. (Ford has) become one of the great stars of the latter part of the 20th century. It would have been disrespectful, actually, not to go and do (this). But right now, cinema needs blockbusters. Real blockbusters - not those wretched superhero things. Like Indiana, let’s have a hero who can get knocked around a bit."

July 10, 2023
GQ
Harrison Ford: "I really don't think there's something that distinguishes Dial of Destiny from all the other films. I think there's a continuum, and the whole film is about time and about wrinkles in time. And these are the wrinkles, and the time I think is apparent. We wanted to make, I wanted to make a film about the end of his life. I wanted to see all of the development of his personality that we've seen. And then I wanted to see him after the passage of the 15 years that actually exists between the last film that we did and this one. I've changed. I'm not the young buck I once was. I'm an older man. I would like the audience to appreciate that in the context of his life and to see what effect time has on the character. The cut from the first previous 25 minutes to arriving in 1969 on Moon Day is one of the favorite things I've ever done in movies. I think it's just a great visual construction and a great character moment. I think the locations are essential to the Indiana Jones films and I'm so glad that we are committed to working in real physical environments. It's occasionally very useful to stand in front of a blue screen and imagine that you're gazing out from the top of the Eiffel Tower over the city of Paris and you're not. If you don't have to do that, you can smell Morocco. You can feel Morocco. Your extras are actually Moroccan. It's just nothing like being in the real place and seeing a real place. How many of our audience will get a chance to visit those environments? Sicily, where we had actual ruins from Greek and Roman history. That was a wonderful environment. Places like the caves, part of the caves are done in actual physical caves and the others are sets because of the complicated scenes that we had to do in them. No eels were harmed in making of this production because there were no eels. That's just what you do. Shia's character, Mutt, our son. We have this confined story about him. It was the screenwriter's invention to have lost a child. To complicate the relationship between myself and Marion in order to retrieve that relationship."

July 11, 2023
GQ
Mads Mikkelsen: "Everybody wanted their hands on the brilliant scientists that was working for the Nazis, and everybody was agreeing that they should just shut their eyes and not talk about it. I’m a history buff, I know quite a bit about that part. I also know that it was not only in the States that these things happened, it happened obviously in the Soviet Union to a degree, in UK as well. So we did look at a lot of photos of Wernher von Braun, in particular. And it was interesting to see, you know, that there was a certain dandiness around him, he had a curve in his hair, cool glasses and he was just walking around, you know, people and working with Americans as if there was no past. And that’s shocking but it was also interesting to see that with what kind of an ease that they just transformed from that period to the next. I think I remember the most, obviously, working with these fantastic people and working with Harrison, of course, is the top thing. I mean, normally he would just see me wherever I was randomly far away and he would scream, there goes a Nazi! Right, okay, thanks Harrison. That would be like an entire new crew who didn’t know the story and everybody thought I was a Nazi, great. So, that was his way of warming up and I liked it. He’s a teenager in his energy and everything about him, he’s a legend on so many levels, right? For his talent, for the stuff he’s done. But he’s predominantly, in my world, a legend because he doesn’t behave like a legend, he just brings everything down to earth and makes everybody comfortable around him so we can make and create a scene that works."

July 14, 2023
LUCASFILM
Duncan Broadfoot: "I grew up watching Indy. As soon as he donned that leather jacket, hat, and whip, he become something other than a professor. This adventurer was very appealing to me as a young boy. I have vivid memories of watching the movies. I’ve always been an avid photographer as a hobby, so location work paired my hobby with my career. I also loved traveling, and slowly but surely, this felt like the right fit. The famous graphic of the Indiana Jones franchise is that red line going across the map. It sort of weaves its way through everything. The locations themselves are integral to the stories. Indy is an explorer, so there’s a requirement to have him travel to places fitting for him. It was a challenge that I relished, but it was a little daunting as well. We had to keep up a certain standard. (In 2021) the film had been around in various guises already, so there had already been some scouting and research done. But the script had evolved and we were looking in new directions. It was a good time to join, but it was at the tail end of Covid, which did have its own challenges. Any travels in foreign countries resulted in weeks lost to quarantine. Sometimes it’d be 10 days quarantine in the country and then ten days upon their return. So we tried a new remote scouting technology for the first time. Essentially, we had a team on the ground with an iPhone camera. The footage they captured went through an app and was beamed back to our control room in the UK, kind of like a broadcast scenario. Then that was fed into a Zoom call. The director in Los Angeles, the designer in New York, and the producers in London could be on the same call with a high-definition link to real-time footage of the location. They could speak to us and direct the camera around the location. We could even move between different countries and teams on the same call. We were limiting the traveling of the team so there was less exposure to Covid and less time in quarantine. There is definitely value in being there in person to settle on what the final location is going to be. In every scenario, we established that we were in the right place and it was worth visiting. When we traveled there, we quite often wandered elsewhere and found other options as well. (Upon visiting Jaisalmer and Jaipur in India) there was a terrible outbreak of Covid, and we had to leave the country and reevaluate. Katmandu in Nepal was considered next, but then a similar Covid outbreak happened. Morocco came together very quickly after that. We had multiple teams in England, Scotland, Sicily, and Morocco. We also had visual effects shoots in Austria and New York. Each country requires a large team for a project of this scale. The location managers and assistant location managers handle permissions and oversea the direct interface with the public or property owners. They’re also assisted by a dedicated floor team who take care of the more practical elements of filming. Another crucial role are the location office coordinators, who are the heartbeat of the department. They’re not only dealing with the mountains of paperwork, but are looking after the welfare of what can be quite a large team. I’m from Glasgow, so it was quite special to film there. I’d never filmed anything in my hometown before, and we shot in the city center for two weeks. It was dressed to be 1960s New York, including the moon landing parade. There was a real buzz in the city. In the evening, the public would come down to see the set dressing. It was a spectacle and a great experience. It’s primarily Victorian architecture, built from red or blonde sandstone. The streets and city center are laid out in a grid system, which is similar to most US cities. Glasgow City Council also offers a huge support for filming. You can do things in the city center that you can’t do in London or many other cities. There’s only a handful of cities in the UK that enable those levels of control. (The Ear of Dionysius is) a limestone cave, and its name comes from the fact that it’s shaped like a human ear. This was the first thing that drew us to Sicily. We also needed an archaeological temple site, and Sicily is loaded with these types of things. We visited many of them, and once we had located both the Segesta Temple and the Ear, we realized we could get most of what we needed there. When we were scouting Sicily, the portrayal of the final act was still in development. We stumbled upon the Tonnara del Secco, which is an abandoned tuna factory on the coast. It’s got these magnificent walls around it. Adam fell in love with it, and envisaged extending these walls and having Syracuse behind it. That was the first incarnation of how that could be shown. The location was a pleasant surprise. It helped us show ancient Syracuse in a realistic manner. (Morocco is) scripted as Tangier in the movie, but it was actually shot in Fez. When the main unit completed in Sicily, we joined the second unit there for the tuk-tuk elements with the principal cast members. There were a few pick-ups back in London after that, but the majority of work was done after Morocco. We had three main time zones in this film - technically four. There was the 1944 stuff during World War II, which was fascinating in its own way. Then we had the modern-day 1960s. We had the ancient Syracuse stuff. Three completely different time periods. And then the scene at Basil’s house is a flashback to the 1950s, so there are actually four. I’ve been living a nomadic lifestyle and have been traveling for work over the last 10 to 15 years. It’s been a good way to see the world. I love to imbed myself in the local community, working and living with local people. It’s an authentic experience, and when I leave a place, I feel that I know it well. I’m lucky that way."

July 15, 2023
Pablo Hidalgo: "Aside from some souvenir magazines in Japan I do not know of any tie-in publishing with this film. Presumably the publishers didn’t see something worth pursuing there. Novelizations are very much a throwback these days."

July 17, 2023
LUCASFILM FEATURETTE
Harrison Ford: "We've always had a convention of presenting a earlier adventure which links the rest of the story."
Steven Spielberg: "Nothing like this had ever been done since the old days of the Republic Serials."
Kathleen Kennedy: "You want to get dropped back into Indiana Jones, and have that feeling that you had when you first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or Temple of Doom. You sat down, there was Indiana Jones and you knew you were immediately going to head off into a new adventure."
James Mangold: "In this case, doing a sequence, and a really elaborate one, with Indiana at his prime fighting Nazis. I felt like I wanted the chance to make a movie with a young Harrison. The ambition in me wanted a crack at it. So, we wrote a sequence, a kind of elaborate adventure that opens the film. An essential element of an Indiana Jones film is that we see the world. It's inspiring us about how much there is to find under our own roof on this planet."
Phedon Papamichael: "The opening image you know, we're coming out of the Lucas logo. Steady inside the van. Actually, in a very traditional way with the dolly track. No fancy equipment. And it all goes from a micro-shot to huge scale."
James Mangold: "Then there's the question of well, how are you gonna shoot Harrison in 1944 when he would be 37 years old?"
Harrison Ford: "The methodology used footage of me from 40 years ago, that was in the vaults of Lucasfilm. It's very, very effective."
Andrew Whitehurst: "We've got two really important things in our favor. One, the best bunch of people with the right kind of technology. And two, Harrison Ford is really good at playing Indiana Jones."
Harrison Ford: "I recognize that my voice has changed as I've aged. And I can force it into a higher register. And I can add a little extra energy to it."
James Mangold: "You could see that it was getting what he was doing. Meaning, it was coming from his soul. He was driving the expressions, the intensity, the passion of the character."
Ben Cooke: "Smashing through stuff. Falling through floors, breaking here, breaking there."
Simon Emanuel: "We wanted to try and make this feel like something that is of its time. And of its time, means the 1980's in those original movies."
Donald Sylvester: "There are certain sounds an Indiana Jones must have and that is the over-the-top punches. Big guns. The very big, iconic sounds. We wanted to really enjoy and celebrate Indiana Jones' legacy. We had a lot of discussion about the Wilhelm scream. We had a little vote where it would go. And we put it in six or seven places. And the one that you hear now is the winner."
Harrison Ford: "I think people will recognize the style of the earlier films."
James Mangold: "Phedon and I would go after the kind of Dougie Slocombe feel. Which is also inseparable from Steven's own sense of staging. So, scenes with shadows or scenes where an actor comes big into lens up to minimum focus."
Phedon Papamichael: "Using a lot of those classic devices in terms of lighting sources. We have a lot of, you know, Dougie Slocombe references."
James Mangold: "In making a movie like this, it's kind of like you're making a visual score. All these little pieces that all have to make a whole. Is this a process shot? Is this a stuntman shot? Is this Harrison doing for real? You have to plan out all these locations. Each one of these choices you're making for each shot. But the summation of all these choices is what we love about movies."

July 20, 2023
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
Boyd Holbrook: "Harrison cuts the mustard, man! He gets it off the plate really quick. It’s like a construction site. That’s what I also love about Jim Mangold. He’s just very to the point; direct, blunt and has a good sense of humor while doing it, which makes for a great work environment. Harrison had this saying on set, alright, let’s shoot this piece of shit. And it just cut the air out of everything. So we gave it 10 tries, two tries, 20 tries until we got it. And that’s what acting is all about. Jim called and said, listen, I don’t want to offend you, but have a look at it. I don’t know if it was because of what the character did or who he’s associated with or the size of the part. We talked about doing another project before this, but I looked at it and it was Indiana Jones. So the character was a similar second-in-command bad guy who does all the bidding. That was the similarity, and that was my hesitation when I read it. But then there’s the pull of, wow, this is the last hurrah. This is the last run of Indiana Jones. So I didn’t want to repeat anything for Jim, and we were very adamant about that. I think the character was even written as German in the beginning, but I couldn’t figure out why this guy was hanging out with these neo-Nazis. Why was he not in Haight-Ashbury, smoking a spliff or something? (Laughs.) But then I got into it and thought, well, he wants to be a part of this gang or club because nobody else wants the guy. He’s just a vagrant mess. And then he’s trying to learn German to fit in; he’s eager. So I just had to figure out how to humanize it and make a character that I could actually believe, instead of just the surface or veneer of whatever. So we talked a lot about that. I thought about it as Voller being this enterprise that was starting up, and Klaber was getting equity in the startup as the first on board. So the loyalty and the dedication comes from, well, I’m gonna be first in line and at the top of the totem pole when we get to the new island. He was a mad lapdog. I based it all upon being accepted by Voller. It’s a classic archetype of approval. You’ve gotta find something real in there. Birds of a feather flock together, but I don’t think Voller’s ideology came first. I think Klaber was just desiring a real primitive acceptance that he’s never had. So, somebody didn’t love him. I thought (time travel) was a bold, earned choice. It’s so cleverly speckled in throughout the film. Those seeds are planted, and it’s preparing you for it, subliminally. You don’t really know it until it’s happening and it’s so elegantly done that it’s not farcical whatsoever. It bottlenecks to a really touching moment where you feel that Indiana has earned this moment and wants to stay. When I saw it, I was surprised that it grabbed me by the throat. I was a little emotional even though I’m so close to it. You remind yourself every day that this is the last one, and so there’s a really special feeling that it puts off. There was a fantastic scene, and just watching Harrison work was a true master class. It’s mainly a scene between Dr. Schmidt and Indiana where he’s shot, and Dr. Schmidt is about to transform back into Voller. And Harrison just used the rocking motion of the (plane) to come up into this line of dialogue. So there were just moments like that that I got to be around all the time and soak up, and so it was a great experience. A real experience."

July 20, 2023
LUCASFILM
Andrew Whitehurst: "The trickiest thing about a movie like this is that it’s an odyssey. Almost every single scene is in a different location or has a different component to it. So you have to break up the project into all of the various places that we are and things that happen within those places. My background is in fine arts, so I tend to draw and paint a lot for two reasons. One, for me to start to get my own head around how things might look or the things that are going to be tricky. And also, then, to communicate, how about doing things this way? to Jim or Adam or, Phedon Papamichael the DP, or Mike McCusker the editor, and so that they’ve got something concrete in front of them as a drawing or as a really rough, sketchy animatic or a painting or something. They go, well, I like this, I don’t like that, what about doing this? I tried to get things going visually as early as possible, often in quite a rough, loose way. You definitely have to be respectful. Looking at the previous films, the way Douglas Slocombe shot the first three has a very certain look to it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily what Phedon and Jim were shooting for when they were coming up with a visual style for this film. But again, particularly in the opening sequence, because it does have that more historical aspect to it, we were certainly riffing on those ideas. I think it’s more being respectful towards the ethos of the movies rather than a very particular aesthetic. All of our cameras are grounded in reality. Even if it’s a full CG shot, I will sit down with an artist and go, well, look, if we were going to shoot this for real, it would be a camera on a stabilized head on a crane arm attached to a car. So when we’re animating the camera, we can’t do some super smooth, flying through space kind of camera move because that’s not part of this world. And it’s that kind of aspect of grounding things that I think was really important for us to respect. But then also, the franchise has always had this wonderful, magical, slightly fantastical element of the supernatural aspect, which happens within them. And so that gives you a little bit more license to play. (The de-aging) was something that grew. And obviously it was the biggest unknown in terms of what technology we are going to use. How are we going to make this work? How are we going to shoot it? So we were doing a lot of technical tests, working directly with Harrison Ford, to see what sort of de-aging techniques we might use. We were kind of going a hundred miles an hour in creative experimentation and technical experimentation. And I remember, one of the first conversations that Jim and I had about this, and he said, well, how are we gonna do this, what techniques are we gonna use? And I said, all of them. If you do a magic trick the same way eight times in a row, people will start to spot the trick. They’ll see what the slight of hand is. Whereas if you do it once in a slightly different way, and then in the next shot you do it a different way, it keeps things fresh. (The dailies were) our ground zero. Now how do we make it cinema quality? And that was, as I say, why we used every single technique. One of the first things I did was, I went through the first three Indiana Jones films. I made my own document of time codes - what shot it was, whether it was close up or front three-quarter, what the lighting direction was, and what the type of performance was. You know, like, angry, happy, conversational, whatever. And I made those lists, and then I handed those over to Lucasfilm and said, ‘We would like these at 4K, thank you very much.’ For a lot of them, they actually had the scans already from when they’d done previous restorations for Blu-ray releases or whatever. And other bits they went and pulled for us. So that was something that we could then start incorporating into our FaceSwap process as reference material. It gave us, as artists, a library of what Harrison looks like. This is how Harrison moves his face. This is how he smiles. This is how he grimaces. By having this reference material readily on hand, it made that job much easier for all of us involved. Because we could literally point at this shot from this movie and go, well, look at that, that’s basically what we’re shooting for here and we haven’t quite got that yet. So all of the source material was used directly in developing the final look of Indiana Jones, and it was also massively useful for both artist reference and for me. You could continue to refine things for forever. And one of the reasons why you could continue to refine things for forever is because there isn’t one single objective truth that is out there. I mean, people look different day to day. You absolutely can drive yourself completely and utterly crazy. Let’s just back up. He saw some of the very early tests, which he was very encouraged by. And then once we were in the edit, he certainly came and watched the movie and there were, you know, bits we go, I’m not sure about that, or I really like this bit, or we would get the notes back and we would go, okay, and work accordingly. He was intimately involved, both in driving the physical performance and developing the look. As much as possible, it’s Harrison Ford. It turns out he’s extremely good at playing Indiana Jones. We felt we were onto a winner with that guy. Any questions you’ve got on ancient Greek naval architecture, I have a pretty passible working knowledge of a trireme. And for the city, we did our research. What were ancient Greek houses (like)? How did they lay their cities out? So it has that reality to it. When I was talking to Robert Weaver and his ILM team about (Syracuse), I said, well, look, we have New York City in 1969. It feels lived in and it’s got signs that are busted up and there’s rubbish in the streets and all of that. We need to do the same thing, but for 200 and a bit BC, Syracuse. It needs to feel like a real living city. I want the roads to be sensible and the city blocks to be sensible. And so we knew that that was how we were going to conceptually build the city. At the same time, we have our narrative as to what’s happening in the plane, who are we following, what’s happening where. We worked out that we were going to need to have a big inlet that the plane flew down before it banked over the city, literally because this was the narrative order that events were going to happen in. I spent a lot of time working with Clint Reagan, the pre-viz and post-viz supe, figuring out what this city would actually look like to achieve all of the things that we needed it to in the order that they happen. Then once we got that, then we could hand that to ILM and go, right, okay. That’s now the layout of the city. That’s now the layout of the coastline. The sequence was very fluid, and it did change a lot as we understood what it needed to be, which I think is to the credit of everybody working on it, because it was a really genuinely collaborative process. I’m personally very fond of the cloud - the portal we see when we get to Syracuse. I kind of love the shape of that. It’s got these moody arms coming around, and it hopefully has a little bit of that Doug Trumbull-ness to it; like a giant cloud tank. And, you know, the whole New York sequence I just think looks great. One of the sequences that I always get a kick out of is when Helen was on the motorbike chasing the plane in the driving rain at night. That’s Phoebe on a bike in front of a blue screen and she let us blast wind and water at her all day long, like a trooper. And she’s awesome. I mean, she just totally sells it. We’ve got some shots in there, which were stunts, right on a motorbike on a real airfield. But most of it is Phoebe against the blue screen and there’s some really super cool shots in there that I really love and, again, feels absolutely on point for the world of Indy. Well, it’s got to be right up at the top (of the resume) there, hasn’t it? I mean, I’ve done a lot of movies, but none of the movies that I’ve worked on to date were a key part and fundamental part of my childhood. Indiana Jones, the fun, the excitement, the going to crazy places, the bravery, and just the general courage are so foundational and were so important to me growing up. But to be part of that is incredibly special."

July 21, 2023
ALLURE
Sherry Hitch: "We have a lot of footage of Harrison to look at and dive into. Because this is the Raiders franchise, we have a lot that offers different takes on (Ford). He would be looking to the left or the right, (his) profile, his hair. Different lighting environments. What does he look like in the dark?" Tweaks which included hand-painting of areas like eye bags and wrinkles. "I'm constantly pushing pixels around with a pen. It really is very artist driven. (Harrison) really dug in and was Indiana Jones. Of course, there were some areas where we needed a stunt double, (when Indy was) running (he needed) to have that same agility that he did (40 years ago). This flashback sequence has been a part of the idea for the movie for a long time. It's a story driven thing. It's not meant to be flashy. It’s supposed to tell a story and be a part of something that makes you feel a little bit nostalgic, of course, like I did, because I grew up on Raiders. That's how I feel it should be used. Just because you can, (doesn’t mean) you should do it. When we turned (Face Swap) around for dailies, we'd watch it play back and it's like, holy cow, that's really cool. My biggest thing is I really wanted to be a fly on the wall when Harrison saw it for the first time. I would love to have heard what he said to see himself so much younger."

July 31, 2023
EULALIE MAGAZINE
Dick Westervelt: "To me, it was just such a pleasure to work in the Indiana Jones sandbox. This world that I grew up with and was such a fan of. I think for so many (working) on the movie, that was the case. Just even having the opportunity to work on it was something. The two biggest sequences I worked on were the Tuk Tuk and the underwater sequence, and I’m proud of both of those because I think they were challenging. I was really excited with how those turned out."
Stuart Allan: "Well (the Tuk Tuks are) silly aren’t they? It did start to feel kind of like a movie jungle gym, which was really great to work on as an animator. Because everywhere’s fair came. Another part I really enjoyed was they could get in things like the Three Card Monte situation where they’re hemmed in by two other cars, but they have a unique vantage point, where Helena would reach out and break the back end of one of the cars. Teddy is very jealous of Indy, this old man, and Helena is deciding whether she likes this old man, and really she doesn’t at this point, but also holding her own and establishing herself as an interesting lead in the movie. I was just glad to use the versatility to highlight the story that finally came through."
Clint G. Reagan: "I would break down, what are the kind of shots that they’re using? What are they, and how fast is the cutting? Is Indy doing really dramatic actions, or are they restrained actions? And I get my mind into the worlds that are being created previously, and that starts to give me a reference card for when I’m directing the artists. Whatever the technology is, that influences us, but that’s not the key. The key is the filmmaking, and the filmmaking is story. How does this shot, how does this camera, how does this motion, enhance the experience of the character and what we should be feeling? (Indiana Jones is) what got me into the business. I was in the back of a theater, probably my fourth viewing for Last Crusade and I was bringing everybody I could. I brought my mom and dad, and I paid for them as a high school student. It made me emote and feel so much. I said I had to be on that screen someday. I had to put my name up there and help other people feel what I was feeling that day. My heart did a backflip (when offered the chance to work on this film)."
Patrice Avery: "Seeing Jim jump into this is like, what’s he going to do with this one and keep it true to its history but still make it new? So I was really excited to see what Jim would do with it, and Clint too. They’re all very passionate storytellers and filmmakers, so it’s just very fun to see them get into the nuts and bolts of it all."

August 8, 2023
VFX VOICE
Andrew Whitehurst: "We started by looking at archival material and building our CG head and A/B between the two, which was a useful comparison. Early on we had scanned Harrison Ford, so we had him as he is now, which could also be used for checking proportions. There was never ever a particular shot that we thought, this is the one we’ll use to test. We all knew that the bag coming off of the head was going to be the most important shot because it’s the first time you see him, and it was also going to end up in the trailer. That was shot early on, and we got working on it earnestly."
Robert Weaver: "It’s was a terrifying challenge that I wanted to step into and take on. Things are always evolving, and we’re good at keeping up and leading development in all areas that are necessary to perfect the techniques. Andrew had a good summary of it by stating it’s an umbrella suite of tools. By adding the machine learning to the mix, it’s contributing yet another tool to the arsenal to accomplish what is needed. We did rely on archival footage from past films, and it helped tremendously in many different ways, but it didn’t replace our previous techniques, which we still need to build a fully CG asset that is believable standing on its own as well. It was necessary to treat each shot individually."
Andrew Whitehurst: "What we have is a selection of tools and the ability to mix between the various outputs of these processes that we can look at and go, we’ll take the eyes from here and some of the skin tone from this. To be able to create like a painter would be in that final likeness, and to maintain that performance. The brilliance of it is having the ability to use a little bit of this and more of that. For another shot it is not working, so you have to use a different combination of approaches. The long and short of it is, Harrison is super fit and energetic. He will act like 40-year-old Harrison for those moments."
Robert Weaver: "We took a lot of time to study his running (a cross between Jack Sparrow and Tom Cruise) in various films, and we had an all-CG shot of him running across the train. Essentially, we had to get those mannerisms into that run while working out the cadence of what is necessary to step over the pipes and jump between cars."
Andrew Whitehurst: "Mads as younger man is fuller in the face, which didn’t feel right for the character. When we started looking at how we were going to FaceSwap Mads, we decided not to refer extensively to what Mads actually looked like when he was 30. It was more about figuring out what young Jürgen Voller looked like. That was done with a whole bunch of paint tests. We figured out the look for that, and then were able to roll that through the shots. It’s interesting because young Jürgen Voller kind of looks like young Mads Mikkelsen, but also not - that benefits the character. There are probably more closeups of a 40-year-old Indiana Jones in this movie than there are in all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The important thing was being able to accommodate how they wanted to shoot it. I don’t want anyone to ever feel compromised. If it means pushing in and getting close because narratively and dramatically that is going to have the most impact, we should do that. For the closeups, the train is CG. We had a beautiful set build at Pinewood of the whole station and a little bit into the tunnel. Then we had a long black tent that extended out so he could ride a horse down (the tunnel), so we were able to shoot the plates. But the train was always going to be CG. The actual tunnel itself is CG as well. (Tangiers) was shot in Morocco. We have a guy in a tuk-tuk who will then jump into the other tuk-tuk. We did a CG takeover of the tuk-tuk that he leapt from and have a CG van colliding into it. I’ve worked with Ben Cooke, who was Supervising Stunt Coordinator a couple of times. Dan Bradley is an incredibly experienced second unit director. Once we figured out where we wanted to shoot the tuk-tuk, which was Fez in Morocco, Dan went there. The dialogue needed to happen, so we roughly knew how long the sequence had to be, as well as where we were going in and out of it. But the script didn’t describe specific action beats. Dan walked around Fez and said, we could do this with the tuk-tuks right here. On the basis of that, we were able to previs the sequence. We scanned and photographed Fez and the vehicles down the whole route because we knew that there was going to be process back at Pinewood for all of the dialogue between our principals. Because everything was previs, we knew what the angles were going to have to be. We decided to put the edit together as we were shooting the process work so we knew that everything was going to cut together okay. Then it’s a case of paring things down in the edit and refining until we get the completed sequence."
Robert Weaver: "There are some fantastic escapades that happen with the airplane going through the eye of the storm and coming into 214 B.C. They did an amazing job on set shooting a partial version of the airplane, and we would add an extended version of that through CG at various times. There were other times where things couldn’t be filmed practically, and it would have to be completely CG, partially airborne and jumping out. We do a lot of dynamic studies and various simulations to see what our perceptions are. A lot times in our work, things that are physically correct are not what we’re looking for, so we need to augment them. But in the case of the airplane and all of the atmospherics, James had a clear idea in his mind as to what these atmospheric dynamics should be, and he essentially likened them to a waterfall flowing out into the past. That was our cue to build this massive storm and put the dynamics onto the planes that are believable, getting enough wind flex that is believable but doesn’t feel like those wings are going rip off in any minute. It was a fine balance to walk."
Andrew Whitehurst: "(The rig) was amazing. We could rotate that plane through multiple axis a great deal, and it was full size. But it could also shake around, so we were inside a lot. The physicality was real. That made it tricky because the camera is shaking in the inside, or the plane shaking against the background that shouldn’t be shaking, but the believability of the motion that you get from the people inside of the plane is worth the pain because it sells it. Then that helps when we cut to the exteriors and have felt this violence, and now we can see that in the wider shots. I always push to get as much as we possibly can in-camera, particularly if it’s something that is interacting with the characters because you get better performance. The physicality is there because it’s real. If you can’t do that, we try to find reference that is as close as we can get to that and then analyze it even for the small things. For example, the hanger doors open, we see the bomb for the first time and the engines fire up. One of the things with old airplane V engines is when the propellers start to spin, too much fuel is going into the engine, so it’s not up to speed yet, so you get this big blast of flame that comes out through the exhaust. We did that, and it looks cool as well. It adds that extra flavor and verisimilitude to it that there is a bit more texture. Indy films are slightly earthy, grubby-real, but then have an element of the supernatural on top. We stylistically absolutely had a precedent in the previous films. One of the things that James and I talked about a lot was a Douglas Trumbull cloud tank, where it’s something that feels physical and real but has an interesting aesthetic quality to it as well. Certainly, we were looking at that when designing the inside of the portal as we fly towards 214 B.C. and when we come out of the other side. We designed something that had an interesting physicality to it so it felt like something that nature might produce. We had these arms wrapping around the horizon as if it was coming to Earth trying to grab [it], with this portal in the center of it. There was an oddness to it. But we were also referencing actual cloud formations and odd storm footage a lot to get the movement and the shapes within that form. There was an overall sculptural design aspect to it that we wanted it to narratively feel like, which was threatening, but also getting that naturalism into it that is very Indy."
Robert Weaver: "(CG Syracuse) was down to the level of being able to fly through the streets. Basically, we wanted to take away any limitations that James may have in telling the story. Wherever he wanted to put the camera, it was going to be completely believable and period appropriate."
Andrew Whitehurst: "The tricky thing with a movie like this is, there were so many locations and numerous times where every single scene is something new. Somebody asked me, what was it like to make this? It was like doing 12 commercials simultaneously, and a lot of them are very different. That’s the hard part. There is a little action beat towards the end when Helena is on a motorbike chasing Voller. I loved it when we did the previs. I thought it was going to be a fun moment. We shot it with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on a soundstage. She was awesome, and we blasted her with water and wind all day long. Phoebe just did it and completely sold it. Also, there is an awesome shot with Phoebe right under the tail of the plane as it’s bouncing down the runway, and you feel it slam down just next to her. I love that whole beat. It feels exciting, present in the action. The performance is great, and the work is beautiful."

August 9, 2023
WALT DISNEY Q3 EARNINGS CALL
Bob Iger: "We're seeing tremendous engagement on Disney+ with the previous Guardians of the Galaxy films, the original Avatar, and the first four Indiana Jones movies."

August 14, 2023
BRITISH CINEMATOGRAPHER
James Mangold: "I think my role as a writer and director is all about the orchestration of units of narrative. First the screenplay, units of story. Then after the process of rehearsals, scouting and set design, the blocking of the camera and the actors, units of composition and movement (the cinematography). All these choices I make are guided by the breakdown of shots which I imagine I will need for the editing patterns I have planned. The photography of the film is when I make these scraps of paper and dreams into something tangible. It is also the time that I react to the light and performances and the actors’ behaviour and faces. Phedon Papamichael ASC GSC has always been a wonderful partner in this exploration. He helps me try to get what I envisioned but also often awakens me to possibilities I haven’t considered."
Phedon Papamichael: "I talked to my friend Janusz Kamiński who did the last one, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and he said before I embarked on this, that was the hardest movie I’ve ever had to do. It is hard and a lot of work because dialogue and humour are constantly being delivered in the middle of all this action. The lighting of Douglas Slocombe is more stylised than my normal work. But even in this case, I always try to apply my instincts of a light that is motivated and makes sense while also embracing these elements of beams and sunrays, and using more atmosphere than I normally do."
James Mangold: "We were obviously influenced by Dougie Slocombe’s work with Steven on the first three films. But we also have our own style of composition and the use of the widescreen frame. The truth is that the two of us happily live in a widescreen cinematic world that is very adjacent to the style Steven often occupies. We love wider lenses close. I am always pushing us to minimum focus, I love changing screen sizes in a shot, not only through camera movement but also blocking."
Phedon Papamichael: "Similar to Spielberg, Mangold and I are strong believers in not randomly covering with multiple cameras. There is always a specific shot or a shot that we design and if we are able to place a second camera in a way that makes sense and is not compromising the A-shot then we will try to place that. There are sequences that are action driven and we are using at least two cameras, sometimes three. I fell back to the large format 2.40:1 aspect ratio for which we chose Panavision Anamorphic C and T Series. Mostly T this time because they have a better close focus. It’s basically the same approach we took on Ford v Ferrari because we find it quite cinematic in the way the image falls off, but they also reflect and embrace the original Indy movies which were shot with Panavision C Series. Even when we shoot closeups we like to shoot it on the 40mm or 50mm because you still get a sense of the environment. The lenses were customised by optical guru Dan Sasaki so they could be expanded to cover the large format. It’s not exactly a 50mm but it’s somewhere in that range. It might be 55mm and then the 40mm is going to be a 47mm. We didn’t use LiveGrain but rather actual film grain shot on gray and layered on top. We can adjust the size by blowing it up or changing the opaqueness."
James Mangold: "If visual effects or stunts are involved, I come to set with boards I have worked out with an artist or more often I just have a list of the shot units I think I will need for the way I want the cutting pattern of the scene to work. At minimum, I try to think about the last shot of an outgoing scene and the first shot of an incoming scene. To me, the transitional cut is the most creative and interesting cut of all, jumping through time and space. But the planning serves simply as a recipe, and once Phedon and I start cooking we often don’t look back at my lists. We absorb them and then live in the moment with our crew and actors. I just shot (the opening) as I would any other scene or sequence. Although, of course, I had to be aware of Harrison’s physical performance as he was playing himself as a younger man."
Phedon Papamichael: "The idea was it was lost footage from when Raiders of the Lost Ark was shot and didn’t make the movie. I could shoot in the lighting that I wanted to create because they had so much footage of every possible situation with him from when he was young and were able to draw upon that. We shot with two other reference cameras sometimes attached to the main camera. Please don’t ask me exactly how that works! I tried to ignore it as much as possible and to shoot the way I would shoot. The great advantage is that we were actually shooting Harrison. Once I feel like I’ve established a mood for, let’s say, the lecture hall where Indy is a professor, we’re able to maneuver between setups quite quickly. I was certainly using numerous LED lights and was operating a lot with this wireless remote called DMX-IT which is a mobile 12 channel board for lighting. My gaffer David Sinfield and I worked out a system where, for example, all of the 360 SkyPanels could be programmed on channel seven. I gave the second DMX-IT to David. We have a sequence where the plane takes off in a storm at night. While the plane is taxiing on the ground, I would give him the runway lights and I would control the lightning and other changing light effects. I had a lot of Astera tubes and smaller LED light units that were handheld by electricians assigned a particular position to be in and move with a certain actor. It all becomes like a big intricate dance with electricians walking with lights and me controlling the levels from my DIT tent. We all communicated on this HME system. I still use stronger light sources like Maxi Brutes or T12 big tungsten sources to create beams and to fill up the space."
James Mangold: "The most elaborate shots are not the most difficult. It is the synthesis of performance, movement, and nailing this relationship. Phedon and I are very sensitive to getting the subtle shots right and often we will use a long slider mounted on the dolly to allow him to feel his way through a delicate shot. The shot that introduces Teddy is not obviously complex, but it is a 180 degree move around him while starting as an insert and becoming a medium shot; but the corkscrew move had to be perfectly in sync with Ethann Isidore, our young actor. It was really hard in that it just had to fall in place."
Phedon Papamichael: "(The plane flying through storm was difficult) because of the hydraulic rig being elevated and the interior space being confining and having the entire cast of Mads Mikkelsen, Harrison, Boyd Holbrook, and Phoebe in this tube. And there is another plane with Teddy, the little kid from Tangier. It’s complex with the turbulence. The plane spirals and goes into a spin dive. Then having to do all of the onstage interactive light at the right timing."
James Mangold: "On a movie this large the challenge is staying fresh and being kind. The crew was quite wonderful and we were happy working at Pinewood but the shoot was long, the longest I have ever directed by far."
Phedon Papamichael: "The scale of dynamism and action is nothing that I’ve ever had the pleasure or task of trying to accomplish. The opening sequence on the train in Nazi Germany starts off the movie with a bang and you go, wow! That’s a real Indy movie. You cut to New York and his retirement days as a professor you think is going to be uneventful and then you go into this outrageously exciting sequence with the horse and subway. People are going to be blown away by it. It takes it to another level and never lets up."

September 5, 2023
BELOW THE LINE
Phedon Papamichael: "(Mangold) had been working on the script for a while. He told me that Steven signed over the torch to him but of course, Steven was involved as executive producer and that he liked where James was taking the script. Harrison also was enthusiastic about it. I knew all along that it’s probably going to happen. Of course, it came together during the height of Covid so then it was about, when do we go to the UK? Where do we shoot it? We had a whole lineup of locations that were being scouted remotely. One included India, Rajasthan, which ended up being the Morocco sequence because just as we were going to go to India, it was peaking there. It was low in Morocco, so we flipped everything around. We scouted Morocco, Adam Stockhausen, the production designer, and I. Ironically, when time came to travel, it was peaking in Morocco and it was sort of diminishing in India. But anyway, it was very challenging because of all these variable factors. Also, Harrison having a shoulder injury in the middle of the shoot. It was a marathon just getting this whole thing done. I think when you see the movie, you realize how much work has been put into that. But yeah, we ended up shooting in Scotland, Glasgow doubled for New York, then of course, a lot in Pinewood and all the stage work, and then location work in Sicily and in Morocco, and then back to Pinewood to fill in all the missing pieces that we couldn’t get on location, especially the tuk-tuk sequence that takes place in Morocco. That was mostly shot by second unit, all the action, wide shots, and then we shot all the actors to integrate them into that sequence back in Pinewood. It was a technically very challenging. We had our hands full. We had approximately 180 shoot days and then there was a second unit that Patrick Loungway was the cinematographer and then we actually kept him on. Even back in London, we had Patrick on. We had Cory Geryak, who came on. Initially, he was a gaffer of mine way back on Identity but also for Wally Pfister on Inception and all that but he’s a cinematographer now. I brought him as additional camera. Everybody got their own little unit. We were just on multiple stages at the same time trying to get this thing done because we had multiple little shutdowns because of Covid. It was just a lot of extras, especially that hotel where the auction takes place in Morocco. That set was in London. The exterior was in Morocco in Fez. That was a big sequence with tons of extras and every time somebody got it, we had to shift sets. It was logistically very challenging because we have to leave a lot of sets up on 5-6 different stages in Pinewood, including the 007 stage, a big one, because we had to go back and revisit them all the time so we couldn’t really strike them. This is a franchise that we all grew up with and are familiar with. I mean, a lot of our crew, I mean, I’ve had several people say, well, I got into the film business because of Raiders. It’s a challenge, but also, I embraced it and was very looking forward to it, also to try something lighting-wise and stylistically that is not my first instinctive approach to how I photograph stories, which I always like to be a little more subtle and less stylized in a way but looking back at Douglas Slocumbe’s work and Janusz Kamiński is a very good friend of mine, who I’ve known for 35 years and shot Crystal Skull. He used to work with me. He was my gaffer at Roger Corman’s. I called him and I go, what is it like doing one of these things? He goes, oh, it’s the hardest thing I ever did. I have to agree with him. It is very hard because, although it’s not so much of a stretch for Mangold and I, because we think of ourselves as classic Hollywood filmmakers and we tackle different genres. Ford vs. Ferrari technically is also an action movie, but it’s always centered and we focus on the characters and the subtleties of the interactions between the characters. In Indy, it’s very similar. It’s all about the charm and the humor of Indiana Jones and the interaction with his collaborators. Of course, Phoebe Waller-Bridge being a great comedic actress, but also very smart and very good about the writing and the dialogue. The challenge is, everyone is in constant motion. They’re running, they’re in action sequences, but we’re not just doing an action movie. It’s about capturing all the little finesses of the character interactions, and that’s something we like doing. Of course, a movie like this, you have to pre-viz and storyboard and that’s also not really something, I mean, we do it, of course, because a movie of this scope, you can’t budget even or determine what will be the effects and but we like to still be very reactive on the set. The way I work with Mangold, this was our sixth collaboration, we like to bring the actors, we like to block it, we like to see what they do physically, their body language, and especially when you have Harrison, Phoebe, and Mads Mikkelson, who’s also amazing physically. We always like to first explore being on the set and then we create a shot list and we decide our coverage. There’s still a lot of, not improvisation, but it’s still a lot of room that we allow to take advantage of what the actors bring us although it’s a very designed and structured movie. Our approach to this wasn’t that different from when we normally work together but in terms of lighting, I was happy to embrace some of the more stylized choices, use more atmospheric smog as normal part of backlights, warmer lights, beams, references to bit harder lighting, playing with the shadows, with the silhouettes, the hard shadows, projections on the wall, and that was all fun. As Kathy Kennedy said to me, don’t get too precious with the lighting because Steven always said this is a B movie. It’s a B movie franchise so embrace that. We do and we’re, I think, very much in the spirit of it. Of course, I can’t do something that’s completely not logical in terms of the lighting approach. I always try to still make it look not completely unmotivated so there’s some of my own style is, I’m sure, reflected in it. In terms of how we shoot and move the actors into camera moves, we always do traditional. We like dollies, we’d like sliders, we don’t like living on a remote head. A lot of it is very similar to the way Spielberg shoots anyway. My collaboration with Mangold, we look at movies like Catch Me If You Can and we always like the way it’s covered, Bridge of Spies, not just the Indy franchise. But even Indy, it’s something that it comes in a way that’s natural to us. It’s not like we’re really straining to copy that style. It’s something we kind of like, anyway. We have a similar approach: single camera, wider lenses, physically close to the actors. We don’t try to just hose things down with multiple cameras and then put it all together. We’re pretty specific about our shots, we understand our editorial patterns, we know where what shot will play in the sequence, and we don’t just randomly move camera. It’s pretty designed because Jim and I have very similar sensibilities and taste about how to shoot something like this. And again, it’s really important that we also very much like Spielberg’s work and classic Hollywood filmmaking. This is a historic franchise and it’s a great honor and very exciting to be part of this. It’s kind of part of history. We know it’s gonna be Harrison’s last appearance as the character, and I’m very honored to have been part of it. That opening sequence, the whole castle in the beginning, that’s in Scotland and that’s all location. I must say, sure, a lot of it was done on stage, but this is a movie that’s really a location movie. I mean, a fan could theoretically travel to all the locations that were used and stand at a certain spot and say, this is where this was shot, this is where this is shot. It’s not like a fully seated CG, we do have a lot of add-ons in the background, but everything was shot on location and natural light. Only elements were comped in and then coverage was shot with plates that were generated on location. That sequence in the castle and then the train, of course, the whole train sequence, we also did have a real train that was moving. There are sequences, of course, that are done on stage, where we built the wagons, especially the train roof, but yeah, that was one where we really wanted to create a feeling that this could be lost footage from a Raiders movie, something that Steven did 30-40 years ago and it never made a cut. It was great to design something like that and really pay tribute to the whole franchise. The subway sequence, like I said, all the street work was done in Glasgow. Adam Stockhausen, again, amazing job dressing that and all the extras and creating New York, ticket tape parade, and astronauts but then once they go underground, that was on the 007 stage. The building had two subway stations with a functioning train. The 007 stage is huge but we even had to extend it so the train could pull into the station and was functioning. When the train is chasing him down the tracks, all of that was done practical. It’s incredible detail in terms of texture and production design. It was nice transitioning from the World War II look into New York in the 60s. We were always excited about that transition. I love that shot where we find him in his lounger sleeping and waking up and then we reveal him at his current age in boxer shorts. We always knew that’s going to get quite a reaction. And sure enough, when we had the premiere at the Chinese, people just gasped and they applauded and he grabs a baseball bat. It’s just something where you have to, we don’t hide the fact that he’s in an advanced age. I mean, he’s playing a professor on the day of his retirement. We don’t try to tiptoe around it. There’re lots of references to him being old, creaky, his joints are hurting, and he’s been shot multiple times. It was very important for us, for the audience, to really just kind of embrace him as the age that he’s portraying it in 1968-69. I think that was quite effective transition from the opening sequence. Every time you’re on a boat, a train, or an airplane (is challenging). The World War II bomber set was very challenging because we have quite a few players in there. It was elevated maybe 20 feet high on a hydraulic rig. It starts at night. It comes through a heavy storm, exits this vortex and goes diving into the sunny Sicilian landscape. That was very challenging because I had to have a lot of moving lights or have hard lights on cranes, creating the sun patterns that are moving inside the plane, I had to change the ambiance. We didn’t really have footage. We didn’t really use LED Volume-style walls to feed in anything because none of that had been created yet. It was always challenging reassuring myself with VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, okay, what are we going to do here? What is actually going to be in the background? I’m shooting the beach in Syracuse and the Romans are attacking. We are actually on a beach and there were set pieces of the fortress and all that and we had extras, but of course, not to the extent of what it’s going to be in the final. We got unlucky with the weather. It was raining and we would sit in our little tents and it would stop raining for five minutes, we’d go out shoot a little piece, and then it started. I kept saying, I’m gonna light it like sun in the foreground. I’m putting the actors in hard light because I’m assuming when we generate this, the elements in the background, you can give me patches of light and we can have clouds that justify that we’re going in and out of sun. It’s all very theoretical at that point, really, to balance the levels right and see how it’s going to play in the final composite of all things. That’s the most challenging thing. I’d rather just shoot a real location, real time and deal with adjusting for the changing lighting conditions without having all these additional elements that are going to be created later. On Ford vs. Ferrari, we had similar challenges. I think they were solved very nicely because the race, 24 hours of Le Mans, takes obviously over a 24 hour period but we have lots of changing lighting conditions and they were handled very well. This one is a little bit more just because it’s the period of 300 BCE and where are the ship’s gonna be and where are the Romans, it’s also harder to get explained and imagine what exactly is going to be put in, how long will the city extend for along the coastline, and all these things. It’s a little bit of a guessing game and you hope that you provide the best elements for the VFX team to work with later. I think, in general, those were the most challenging, the plane, on that beach, and final sequence. The tuk-tuk, also, because it’s stuff that is shot by another unit months before. You have to go with the actors and plug them all in with your shots. We’re on stage now. I’m riding this DMX, this little wireless dimmer, with 12 channel and I’m watching playback of the pre-viz and all the shots that have been shot. I’m watching the sequence as it’s assembled with what we’re shooting with the monitor that’s shooting our actors, and I’m trying to, okay, they’re in making a left turn, they come out of frontal sun into a dark alley, and I have to adjust all these because it has to cut in. That was extremely challenging, but also fun to really do something like this because I haven’t really done much of that. I had a great crew in England and we had all the technology that we needed, but using a lot of LED lighting and a lot of these wireless dimmers that I could be very flexible, walk out of my DLT tent and actually see everything behind, and then go back and during the tape, really play it off the monitor, almost like a live mixer at a concert so it was great. It’s nice when you have a plan, but it’s all theoretical. and it’s nice when you see the final product and go, that ended up working."

September 29, 2023
Gabriel Hardman: "As far as Indy 5 goes, I started on it before there was anything like a script. I started on it actually the day before Los Angeles shut down for Covid. So the only in person meeting I had from the whole movie was going to the studio that first time. Talked with Jim a little bit, and actually to read the old drafts from Spielberg, David Koepp, those people. Just to kind of get a sense of where the project was at that point. But there was no sense except, like literally in the room it was kind of like, maybe he’ll be in New York, and maybe he steals a police horse, maybe he rides it in a subway? These were just ideas that were kind of being vaguely thrown around, through the course of things, Jim working with the Butterworths writing the script. It was a weirdly organic process because we were always available for these virtual meetings all the time. The initial thing I did was more like key frames, one panel illustrations that give an idea, a shot or a sequence, or give things in broad strokes. As Jim was working through treatments and early drafts of the script, I was just churning out key frames to suggest different versions of stuff. There were many earlier iterations where there was a big chase sequence through the Plaza Hotel at one point. The pull back through the window, past Indy as they’re putting the noose around his head, that’s just something I made up. There was an alternate tag scene that almost made it in, that (Ke Huy Quan) would have been in, that he probably knows nothing about, because they didn’t end up going forward with that little tag scene. I argued for lots of things. I spent a lot of time arguing for things on this movie. I think I was one of the bigger Indy fans who worked on the movie. I really did make an effort to steer things in ways I thought were good. Just talking about it. Just pushing different ideas. Some of that gets in, some of it doesn’t. It’s a big process. It’s what Jim Mangold wants, what Steven Spielberg wants. There were alternative ending things that I boarded, and I pushed for different stuff that didn’t necessarily get in there. There were all sorts of things. I wasn’t making up an ending for the movie."

October 7, 2023
VARIETY
Mads Mikkelsen: "For a Danish guy, it’s insane to be in these films. My friend made a list of all the franchises I’ve been in and went, this one you haven’t done. It was Indiana Jones. A week later, I got the phone call. It’s surreal when you think about it, so I try not to think about it. Sure, it’s Harrison Ford and he is a legend, but I will kick the s*** out of him anyway. We were all there when he did his very last scene as Indiana Jones. The humble man that he is, he wanted to get out of that room as fast as possible when everyone was clapping, and at the same time he wanted to stay there forever and embrace the moment."

October 11, 2023
DISNEY FOR SCORES PODCAST
John Williams: "I’m delighted that I was able to do it, because I think Harrison doing this performance that he did at age 78 or 9, something like that, to us senior citizens is already an inspiration. And I love being tried to put with him. I think he did a magnificent job as he always does with the comedy and even the action in this present calendar year. He moves beautifully still. And the other reason I would have wanted to do it is I absolutely adored Phoebe Waller-Bridge who exudes such intelligence and humor and wit in everything she does. I haven’t seen her other work, but people tell me she does brilliant work on television, and she’s well known, particularly to young people. I’ve noticed they all seem to know her and adore her. I found the combination of Phoebe and Harrison absolutely delicious. Their banter and witty dialogue was delivered so beautifully and with such fun and such ease, always a little tongue in cheek, never taking things too seriously, and moving on through the most dangerous Perils of Pauline kind of situations on the screen. It was always done with lightness, with one glance at the fourth wall, I guess you might say, a wonderful playing in all of those scenes in that style and that manner. When we meet her, we don’t know exactly what her history is. We don’t know that she’s conducted auctions with questionable articles and antiques of questionable provenance. We learn that she’s had an interesting personal background. She’s a little bit like the femme fatale of earlier film periods where you had gorgeous women who smoked and drank and were adventurous and wore a lot of makeup and had mystery in their lives and in their faces, doing all of it while looking ravishingly beautiful. And so in that sense she was a kind of classical woman of mystery if you like. And by the way I loved Jim Mangold, the director of the film, very very much. I found him very talented rhythmically, and in editing and development of character and writing and so on. So the first visions I had of Phoebe, just as an aside, I said Jim, this is like a classic female woman adventurer movie star. And he said, why don’t you write a theme for her like that? And I said, okay I will. The film is something you might hear in the 1940s, I think if I could say, deliberately so. At least for me, it brought a kind of nostalgia to that character. And the problem was going to be, how would that fit within her action scenes? And I think I did as well as I could with that challenge of it. And I think it works fairly well. So we decided to insert the film wherever we could to give her a kind of melodic identification that would enrich of add another layer to her character, to what you hear and see from her. I found, even though stylistically it might have been in contrast to some degree with the action you were seeing, it seemed to work. I did play a couple themes for Steven, which he seemed to enjoy. He was very sweet. He supported my efforts, ran up to him and said, have you heard my themes, and he loves them, that kind of thing. Which is generosity, very typical of Steven, as we both know. And apart from that, one little session that I had with him at Dreamworks, as the way I usually do with Steven, sat at the piano and went through the various themes and ideas that I had, and got his support and his enthusiasm, which is of a very high order, as you very well know. I think it guided the whole thing, very possibly through the writing also. I think the process (of working) with Jim was very similar. Once we had a few initial discussions, I went about my writing, and he was patient to wait to hear anything until we had the orchestra on stage. And it was great fun, because he would come out and say, he’s got a great sonorous voice, which I think was very wonderful. I think it frightens some people, but it’s really a source of great delight, I think. And it gives a classical expression and a rendition of a colorful director, and a very talented one. The orchestra loved him also, because he would speak to me in his operatic voice, at Wagnerian levels of conversation, which are always delightful. And he had good ideas, like almost all good directors have suggestions of louder here, softer there, slower there, and so on. He was a great partner and a great collaborator. I truly enjoyed working with him, it was delightful, I enjoy him as a person, very bright and keen and enthusiastic. I don’t know how old Jim is, but he seems to me to be young and full of energy and promise. Still some other very fine things of course. I think he has that ability, that energy and talent. To some degree, yes (these shifts in time) do (require different musical approaches). There is a hint of antiquity in the music that we not only hear when we see Archimedes, but when his presence and influence is even mentioned and alluded to in the earlier part of the film. I think to a subtle degree, I hope it’s enough in there to write and measure in the right way. To go back a little bit, the early part of the film where we’re dealing with the Nazis and so on, the music is very very heavy and very ominous, almost to the point where we’re exaggerating, which we’ve always done with them in the Indy pictures. The villains are always described musically in almost operatic degrees of weight. And of course then we have Helena. But the antiquity, I use some string instruments, and not ancient harps, but to put it this way, a subtle suggestion of what that musical atmosphere might be. I didn’t want to overdo it, and I moved into some area of an accepted practice on that, but rather just to say it again, subtly suggest what we think to be pentatonic scales and antique string instruments, and so on, that we associate with music of the ancient world, or the modern antiquity of the Greeks and the Romans I guess. If we could go back in time we might discover the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians were very good at writing fugues. But we don’t know. We may not have given them their due yet. But yes, there are some coloristic changes from section to section of the film. It is, certainly it is (unusual recording took place over nine months, from June 2022 to February 2023). But it happens, post productions go on and on for some reason or another. I think when we started, all the photography hadn’t been done. I think I’m sure it hadn’t. It went on through the fall, and we kept getting sequences and so on. So it was a longer post production schedule than one usually has. But it’s not unique. From my point of view, given the challenge aspect that we talked about, I loved it because I had a little more leisurely time when I didn’t have to rush in some cases where I might otherwise would only have to do. So it was a close production at least from a musical point of view. We loved it. We had well spaced sessions with the orchestra, and the orchestra began to know the material as we developed it, and performed it. Whatever the complicated post production reasons are that I can’t give you, I’m delighted and grateful that it happened that way. I wish it could happen more often. I loved it. I’ve been doing a few things with Anna-Sophie (Mutter) in the last few years. When Helena’s theme came along, I thought, well why not have Anna-Sophie record it? Everybody said great, let’s have her record it. And then we might have said well, there is no violin score in Indiana Jones, that’s about as far as you can go away from Indy. And then I think the general feeling on the part of the record company and production company and so on was, we have the presence of one of the world’s greatest artists, and Anna-Sophie’s excited about doing it, and so she recorded it. We didn’t know quite what we would do with her of course. We always could put it on the CD. People might enjoy this rendition of Helena’s theme. And since, we’ve performed it, I mean she’s performing all over the place. I’ve done some performances of it without her in concerts, just the orchestra, and also with Anna-Sophie. So we have our little original unique combination of talents with the film, and I’m delighted with it. I think it was a wonderful thing to have her be so enthusiastic about it and so willing to play it. And people interested in Indiana Jones may take a particular notice of Helena’s theme, this particular characterization of Helena, and enjoy both treatments of the theme, orchestral and solo violin. I wouldn’t have it any other way (conducting all five films), if I had any particular special control of the situation. I’ve always loved these projects, and loved writing music for them. Both series, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, have been major parts of my musical life. To the fact that I’ve been able to get along with them this far gives me great satisfaction."

November 7, 2023
TWITTER
James Mangold: "Many movies feature economical coda scenes that don’t show all the shoe leather of how characters got there but, when done right, the audience should be able to put together the logic. And yes, I was conscious of the motif that SS/GL & LK used in Raiders as we were writing the end of Dial! Interesting to note, SS told me the last scene in Raiders of Marion & Indy on the steps was shot later after it felt like they needed a scene where the audience got to see Marion & Indy still together. We had written a bit of dialogue that took care of this (wanted for murder) issue but it felt cumbersome to the emotional values of the ending. My logic - clearly spelled out in the start of the film - was that Indy was vulnerable to arrest w/o the Dial and Helena to vouch for him. Also, by the time the agents get to Morocco (helicopter scene), it becomes quite clear who the murderers really are to the agency. But I understand your yearning for greater clarity. Exposition and emotion are often at odds with each other in a movie ending. I usually go with emotion. Who said (Indy) never wakes (heading home)? Indy has prescription meds at his bedside & his arm is wrapped in a professionally applied sling. I never meant to imply he traveled through a time portal out cold until his eyes opened the next day. But I used him waking up more coherent the next day as a point of story economy. Anyway, my point is not that you are wrong for raising these issues, but that I considered them along with my esteemed collaborators - we did care very much - and made what we thought was the best decision that saved you five minutes of traveling back the way same way they came. The dial presents itself at first as what you described. An ancient compass that points toward natural time fissures and offers you the option of picking where you want to go. But that option did not really exist (hence what happens in the film). It was a device built to point you only to Archimedes’ time. He built it to bring someone from the future to his time help in defend his people against the Romans. Thus like Helena said, it was a forced deck. No matter where in the deck you pluck your card, you only get the card he wanted you to get."

November 8, 2023
TWITTER
Q: "During the deleted scene with Atlas, did Indy quote Archimedes’ famous phrase: Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world?"
James Mangold: "Yes. For people (like Helena) who are lifetime hustlers, when is it ever enough money? Neither had made their turn for the good at that point mid way through the story."

November 10, 2023
TWITTER
James Mangold: "On the subject of George, one must acknowledge that he created the entirely original and unique concept of the character of Indiana Jones from nothing. Indy is a profound extension of George’s own personality - part maverick, part theoretician, part adventurer, part idealist, part wise-ass, part academic and 100 percent unstoppable. Secondly, George also created the unique tone, combining classic golden age adventure films he loved with modern film making tech and humor. In terms of DOD, George read our early scripts and offered notes and guidance as well as watching the cut as it progressed. He is a brilliant man and I am grateful that this film gave me the chance to collaborate with so many of my heroes. Of course it’s true that all 3 of these geniuses were central but HF & SS would be the 1st to say it started with GL. But that’s not the tweeted question that proceeded my reply. The question I was answering was asking specifically about GL. It was a Disney financed film, not Paramount. Thus, Paramount’s logo came first up because it was a legacy credit. Disney and Lucasfilm followed and so, to preserve SS’s traditional match-cut into the first frame of picture, I had to make it work with the Lucasfilm logo."

November 14, 2023
LOS ANGELES TIMES
John Williams: "Very frankly, I thought to myself, well, I really don’t want somebody else to do that. It was like when I was doing Star Wars, you know. I thought, if I can possibly do it, I should try to do it."
James Mangold: "There’s probably not a score I don’t own. John was making the sound of movies that inspired me to want to be a filmmaker. John did with movie scores is not dissimilar to what Steven and George did with movie storylines - which was this kind of return to a classical, highly unself-consciously exuberant level of orchestral majesty and passion and expression, and unapologetically, proudly aware of its lineage."
John Williams: "I found (Helena) to be complex. She was a gambler, and she was cosmopolitan, smoked, drank, was funny, witty. I said to myself, what would I write for Lauren Bacall?"
James Mangold: "One is: What a magnificent piece of music it was. And two is: I thought it was not right for the movie. My big note to him was, it doesn’t feel naughty enough. I felt like, she’s trouble, and this theme is just so in love with her. He never really paid attention to me because I think he knew he had done something really wonderful. I thought (her motorcycle scene) was some of the best work in the movie. He took her theme and let the brass play it and let it become a heroic romantic theme. Because, interestingly, that’s where she evolves. I find that the work John does inside scenes, and driving through action, is the one place where I think John may even undervalue his own genius."

November 21, 2023
Sean Patrick Flannery: "I have no idea where they’re going to go. I don’t know where it goes. There’s so many moments that are priceless, if they can bottle that and put it out, I will be the first person with 25 bucks. I hope they try to come close to that. You’re never going to match it."

November 22, 2023
DEADLINE
Mads Mikkelsen: "Indiana Jones was in the editing room for a long time, because so much stuff has to happen with CGI. It’s interesting to make a film that you almost spend as much time doing the PR for as you do shooting it. That’s the nature of those big animals from America, especially this one. We were everywhere, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I grew up with it, as did everyone in my generation, way before I started watching French films and falling in love with this category or that genre. Indiana Jones was just a milestone in moviemaking when it comes to adventure films, one of those thoroughly charming films that stays with you forever. That was the first reason. Then sentimental reasons. When I read it, and I realized that it was a goodbye to him, I was like, damn, I want to be part of this. It’s a beautiful ending for this beloved character."

 

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