We’re still more than six months away from Indiana Jones 5 coming out in theaters, but the promotion machine is starting up strong with a feature series in Empire magazine about the upcoming film, where Harrison Ford dons the Indy hat for what is very most likely the last time. We won’t just see old Indy in the fifth film, however — Ford gets submitted to the de-aging process, and he has some not-surprising feelings about it.
According to Empire, director James Mangold wanted to start out the fifth film back in the past. “I wanted the chance to dive into this kind of full-on George [Lucas]-and-Steven [Spielberg] old picture and give the audience an adrenaline blast,” he said.
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Mangold does so, apparently, by starting out Indiana Jones 5 in 1944, where Harrison’s Indy is in a castle swarming with Nazis. “And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969,” Mangold said about the film’s first few minutes, “so that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ‘40s and ‘60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days … and then the beginning of now.”
To make 80-year-old Harrison Ford look like a young Indy required the de-aging techniques from ILM, including a software that looked at Raiders and other archival footage of a 1980s Ford to come up with the actor’s new de-aged look.
“My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago,’” producer Kathleen Kennedy told Empire. “We’re dropping you into an adventure, something Indy is looking for, and instantly you have that feeling, ‘I’m in an Indiana Jones movie.’”
Ford himself had his own feelings about his de-aging process, of course. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” he said. “It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works … doesn’t make me want to be young, though. I’m glad to have earned my age.”
You can see a de-aged Harrison Ford when the fifth Indiana Jones movie comes out on June 30, 2023.
