Director James Mangold on De-Aging Harrison Ford for 25-Minute Scene in INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINEY
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is going to open with an adventurous 25-minute sequence set in 1944 at a castle overrun with Nazis, and as that plays out, a younger Indiana Jones finds himself on the run on a moving train. We’ve seen little clips from this sequence in the trailers that have been released and a lot of fans are impressed with the VFX work that de-aged Harrison Ford. It’s pretty wild how great it looks!
During a recent interview with Total Film magazine, director James Mangold offered some insight into what it was like shooting those scenes: "I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35." Mangold went on to call Ford an "incredibly gifted and agile" leading man. "But the technology involved is a whole other thing."
When talking about that filmmaking tech used to de-age the actor Mangold explained: "We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day. I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35- year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced.”
It’s amazing how far this technology has come, and it’s only getting better and faster! Mangold added: "It wasn’t a year of effort to get to a first pass. It was an incredible technology, and, in many ways, I just didn’t think about it. I just focused on shooting what’s [approximately] a 25-minute opening extravaganza that was my chance to just let it rip. The goal was to give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much. Because then when the movie lands in 1969, they’re going to have to make an adjustment to what it is now, which is different from what it was."
The movie is set in 1969 during the Space Race, and Indiana Jones is pulled into another grand adventure, which involves Voller, a NASA member and ex-Nazi involved with the Moon landing program, who wants to "rectify the world and make it into a better place as he sees fit." He’s looking to correct the mistakes that Hitler made when he was in power with the Dial of Destiney artifact.
It was explained: “The simple fact is that the moon-landing program was run by a bunch of ex-Nazis. How ‘ex’ they are is the question. And it gets up Indy’s nose…” Pitching Indiana – a man always looking to the secrets of the Earth rather than the stars – into the era of the astronaut finds him even more a man out of time. “It’s not just that the model of what a hero is has completely changed. It’s not just that they’re looking for something where there’s nothing up there – it’s like Reno without the gambling, or whatever his line is. But the people that are behind it are, you know, his sworn enemies.”
The film comes from producer Steven Spielberg, and it also stars Mads Mikkelsen (Another Round), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Boyd Holbrook (Logan), Shaunette Renée Wilson (The Resident), and Thomas Kretschmann (Avengers: Age Of Ultron).
The film will open in theaters on June 30, 2023. I can’t wait!