The upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be the last time Harrison Ford plays the character, and the film is expected to open with a bang. The movie largely takes place in 1969, but the opening sequence takes us back to 1944 with a de-aged Indiana Jones escaping from a castle full of Nazis. It turns out that we’ll get quite a lot of young(er) Indy as director James Mangold has confirmed to Total Film that the sequence runs for approximately 25 minutes.
James Mangold discussed shooting the extended flashback sequence, but despite the incredible technology on display, the director states that he just shot it as he normally would. “I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35,” Mangold said, adding that Harrison Ford is “incredibly gifted and agile.” Thanks to the amount of footage of Harrison Ford in the Lucasfilm archives, Mangold was able to see the results of a de-aged Indiana Jones very quickly. “We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day,” Mangold said. “I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35- year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced.”
James Mangold continued: “It wasn’t a year of effort to get to a first pass,” Mangold adds. “It was an incredible technology, and, in many ways, I just didn’t think about it. I just focused on shooting what’s [approximately] a 25-minute opening extravaganza that was my chance to just let it rip. The goal was to give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much. Because then when the movie lands in 1969, they’re going to have to make an adjustment to what it is now, which is different from what it was.“
In addition to Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny also stars Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Antonio Banderas, John Rhys-Davies, Toby Jones, Boyd Holbrook, and Ethann Isidore. The film will hit theaters on June 30th, but will first premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on May 18th.