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on 2008/5/21 5:51:13
If George Lucas had had his way, the new Indiana Jones movie would be called "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men From Mars," and the iconic archeologist adventurer would be battling space aliens instead of Communists.
But both Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg firmly rejected the idea. So Lucas went back to the drawing board, and the wrangling between these three powerful, opinionated men continued for the next 10 years or so.
"There was a point where I thought George [executive producer for the film] and I would never agree on the story, and I was fine with that," recalls Spielberg. "George and I are best friends, and we always argue, and we always debate. That's been the nature of our relationship since we met in 1967."
Harrison Ford, who at age 65 has now donned Indiana Jones' fedora and leather jacket for the fourth time, says dryly: "It takes time to get Steven, George and me on the same page. George is very stubborn with his ideas."
The star and the director of the massively successful Indiana Jones franchise spoke in Los Angeles shortly before leaving for the Cannes Film Festival and the first public screening last Sunday of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." The movie will be released tomorrow.
Unlike the previous adventures, which were set in the 1930s, the new movie acknowledges the passage of time. It is set in 1957, and the villains are not Nazis but Soviet agents.
Spielberg admits that for five years after the release of the most recent adventure, "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989), he thought the saga had ended for good. "I shot Indiana Jones riding a horse into the sunset because I thought that brought the curtain down on the story," he says.
But Ford pushed to resurrect the screen hero for another outing.
"Harrison presented me with the Best Picture Oscar for 'Schindler's List' in 1994, and when we went backstage, he said he was ready to make another Indiana Jones movie," says Spielberg. The development started soon afterward.
"It had to be right," says Spielberg. "I wanted to recapture the magic that we were able to achieve in three movies in the '80s. I wasn't trying to improve on Indiana Jones; I was just trying to reanimate the character. My goal was to make this movie a blood relative of the first three."
There followed 14 years of script rewrites and dashed hopes.
Finally, writer-director David Koepp, who worked with Spielberg on "Jurassic Park" and "War of the Worlds," produced a screenplay that jettisoned aliens in favor of crystal skulls while retaining what Ford calls "the mysto-crypto stuff that's part of every Indiana Jones movie."
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