Digitally aging actors must be an enticing proposition for a film studio. Not only can you capitalize on multiple generations of nostalgia, but you can also skip the backlash that comes with recasting a beloved character. All the better if, like in the new Indiana Jones film, it’s just about one scene. This allows you to provide the kind of connective tissue needed to legitimize a new sequel — especially one made 41 years after the original.
This latest detail about the long-in-development film arrived Monday as part of a History of Empire Magazinewhich revealed a few facts about the new film’s opening, including the fact that star Harrison Ford would be reduced to his age in the original trilogy.
According to director James Mangold (logan), the film’s opening will take place in a castle full of Nazis in 1944, while Indy undertakes all sorts of adventures to free himself. And reportedly he’ll do it all while looking like his old man Hunter of the lost treasure itself, although that remains to be seen.
After all, Disney, which is producing this film under 20th Century Pictures, has a complicated history with aging and is responsible for some of the strangest and most contradictory uses it’s had to date. The company famously recreated Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin and Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, with unintentionally weird and somewhat frightening results, e.g Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. The series also had mixed results with its digitally aged Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorianwhich retires the actor’s voice through the decades to 1983.
But perhaps the most notorious de-aging belongs to Netflix, not Disney. This studio is solely responsible for Martin Scorsese The Irishman, recreating Robert de Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino over several decades of film history, with decidedly mixed results.
To avoid all of these problems, Mangold worked with visual effects studio Industrial Light and Magic to work with new software that would stitch together countless archival footage of Ford’s younger self and match it with newly shot footage to bring the two together to merge, which the team hopes to look seamless.
Indiana Jones 5 Producer Kathleen Kennedy, who also produced all of the above Star Wars items, is optimistic about some of the new techniques that have emerged since digital de-aging first made its grand forays into film.
“I hope you just look at it and say, ‘Oh my god, they just found footage, although that’s being talked about in terms of technology. That was a thing they did 40 years ago,” Kennedy told Empire.
The notoriously dour Ford also shared some of Kennedy’s optimism. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” the actor told Empire. And while he’s certainly quite obliged to say nice things about the film, it’s worth remembering that of all the franchises he’s done, Ford has never been shy about calling Indy his favorite, or his desire to go back there. And so much love for the franchise has to be worth something, so Ford might not have come on board with de-aging if he didn’t really believe it worked.
Whatever the end result, we’ll have to wait until either the first footage of the film premieres shows, or perhaps the June 30 release date.
