Mads Mikkelsen Says INDIANA JONES 5 Gets Back to the Original Indy Feel and That It's "Dense and Epic"
We really don’t know much about director James Mangold’s Indiana Jones 5. The creative team has managed to keep the story details from leaking out, but Mads Mikkelsen (Rogue One, Hannibal), who is playing the villain in the film, shared his thoughts on the movie in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He says that the next film has the original Indy feel using the first two films in the franchise as an example.
"[Raiders of the Lost Ark] was one of my favorite films, and it just oozed that golden period of serials from the 1940s — and that’s in the fifth film as well. They’re going heavily back to the first and second film and getting that original feel, the original Indy, something dense and epic."
Mikkelsen went on to say that Indiana Jones 5 the feels “like a Spielberg film, though it’s obviously James making it with the same vision.” That’s great to hear! I was actually wondering if it would feel like a Spielberg film, so this makes me happy. The actor then shares his experience of meeting Harrison Ford for the first time and described him as a “very nice monster”:
"It was the first time I met him, and he’s an insanely powerful person. Not just as an actor, but physically. I remember the first day we were shooting, it was a night shoot, then we stopped at 5 a.m. — and then he got on his mountain bike and went biking for 50 kilometers. Harrison is a monster of a man, a very nice monster."
When previously talking about his approach to the new Indiana Jones movie, Mangold said:
"I'm always trying to find an emotional center to operate from. I think the most important thing is, in an age when franchises have become a commodity, that serving the same thing again. At least for me, in the dances I've had with any franchises, serving the same thing again, the same way, usually just produces a longing for the first time you ate it. Meaning, it makes an audience wish that they just had the first one over again. So you have to push something to someplace new, while also remembering the core reasons why everyone was gathered. And to use Logan as an example of that, when you're dealing in a world of a very pressured franchise."
Mangold went on to explain his use of Logan as an example, saying:
"For all of the things, and there were many that I freed myself from in the canon, in the baggage, to try and make the best story. The core values of Logan, of Wolverine, and Charles Xavier and the X-Men, were something that I felt we never abandoned. The core ideas of their honor, their sense of duty, and the uniqueness of this particular set of characters that they were outcasts, oddities. Beings that had no home in this world, and yet we're trying to do good. Were trying to do something right and find their way. Those core issues were at the heart of the movie. And in any franchise I take in, I'd always be trying to capture and make sure that we preserve those core ideas that are at the center, because that's why these stories are more than franchises. They're the fairy tales of our contemporary culture."
Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg, Frank Marshall, and Simon Emanuel will serve as producers. The fifth installment of the franchise will start production this summer and it will be released on July 29th, 2022.