Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny star Harrison Ford recently admitted that he was hesitant about de-aging the title character until Lucasfilm showed him how it would be achieved.
"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 explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "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."
Shots of Ford as a de-aged Indiana Jones were previously included in the film's first official trailer, which premiered at Brazil's Comic Con Experience in December 2022. Dial of Destiny director James Mangold has also confirmed that the fifth film will begin with a 1944 setpiece featuring the de-aged title character at a castle swarming with Nazis. "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," explained Mangold. "And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969. 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."
Fans had previously speculated that the fifth Indiana Jones film would include flashbacks to the Raiders of the Lost Ark era after June 2021 set photos showed Ford wearing motion capture dots on his face. Lucasfilm and Mangold used several techniques to pull the sequence off, including newly developed software from ILM which would scan archived footage of Ford in his younger days, before matching it to the footage shot in present-day. The actor also wore the original Raiders jacket for shooting before a replica was created.
Dial of Destiny Takes Indy to the Late '60s
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny takes place in 1969 against the backdrop of the Space Race. The upcoming film will pit Indiana Jones against Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a NASA member and ex-Nazi involved with the moon-landing program, who wishes to make the world into a better place as he sees fit.
Joining Ford and Mikkelsen in the film are Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Helena, an adventurer and the goddaughter of Indiana Jones; Boyd Holbrook as Voller's crazed lapdog Klaber; and John Rhys-Davies, who reprises his role from previous films as Indy's friend Sallah. Thomas Kretschmann, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Antonio Banderas, Toby Jones, Olivier Richters and Ethann Isidore also star.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens in theaters on June 30.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter