When it comes to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, fans weren’t always kind. A campy tone that included Shia LaBeouf swinging like Tarzan, and Harrison Ford riding a nuclear shockwave in a fridge, didn’t work for everyone. In a new interview with THR, Harrison Ford, while brushing off much of the criticism (“They were imposing their rules on what the movie should be”) notes that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be different.
Crystal Skull “was not as successful as we wanted it to be, perhaps,” he says. “But it didn’t create an attitude or a behavior that carried over into this film.” One big change? There won’t be a lot of old-age jokes. “[T]here were a lot of old jokes in the script. We took them all out,” Ford says. “There is a moment where he observes himself in this situation and says, ‘What the [expletive] am I doing in here?’ But I hate what I call ‘talking about the story.’ I want to see circumstances in which the audience gets a chance to experience the story, not to be led through the nose with highlights pointed out to them. I’d rather create behavior that is the joke of age rather than talk about it.”
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As for any worries that the film won’t feel right because James Mangold is now directing rather than Steven Spielberg, Ford reassures everyone that, “Steven’s still on the picture and has always been on the picture. He’s not the director this time, but he’s intimately involved.”
Regarding Mangold’s take on Indy, “What I love is that we’re meeting him at a different point in his life to where we’ve seen him in these other films. It’s a logical place for him to be at this stage, considering his behavior and what he spent his time doing. It’s a very interesting script Jim came up with.”
What do you think of Ford’s comments? Let us know with some of your own!
Recommended Reading: The Complete Making of Indiana Jones: The Definitive Story Behind All Four Films
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