Harrison Ford says that James Mangold and himself got rid of the old man jokes in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
At 80 years old, Harrison Ford isn’t exactly a young man, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be kicking ass in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. The last film in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, included more than a few jokes about Indy’s age, and the original script for Dial of Destiny included even more, but Harrison Ford told THR that they ditched all of them.
“Yeah. In [Dial of Destiny] there were a lot of old jokes in the script,” Harrison Ford said. “We took them all out. There is a moment where he observes himself in this situation and says, ‘What the fuck 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.” That’s not to say that the script will ignore Indy’s age; it just won’t make a joke of it. James Mangold said, “The mistake you can make in movies is when someone is of a ripe age but the movie continues this charade that they’re not that old. Every challenge he faces is through the reality of what someone of that age would be dealing with.“
While Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will primarily feature Harrison Ford at his current age, we know that the opening sequence of the movie will peel back the decades as it flashes back to the second World War. In the shots we’ve already seen in the teaser trailer for the movie, Ford looks damn near identical to how he appeared in the late 80s, and the actor was very impressed by the digital de-aging done by the VFX team. “I never loved the idea until I saw how it was accomplished in this case — which is very different than the way it’s been done in other films I’ve seen,” Ford said. “They’ve got every frame of film, either printed or unprinted, of me during 40 years of working with Lucasfilm on various stuff. I can act the scene and they sort through with AI every fucking foot of film to find me in that same angle and light. It’s bizarre and it works and it is my face.“
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be released on June 30th.