‘Indiana Jones 5’ Director James Mangold on ‘Pinch-Hitting’ for Spielberg

Before Indiana Jones entered director James Mangold’s life, Harrison Ford told him he was worried Indy was looking too old. 

It was the fall of 2019, and Mangold had joined the team working on the film adaptation of “The Call of the Wild,” in which Ford plays a rugged frontiersman, to help with reshoots. In their downtime, Ford began confiding in Mangold about the fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, which had been bouncing around in development for the better part of three years. Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp had conceived a roughly five-minute opening sequence set during World War II, in which Ford would be digitally de-aged. Ford wasn’t sure it was a good idea.

“Harrison told me he was nervous, because he felt like if people saw him younger, when they confronted Indiana in his 70s they’d be disappointed,” Mangold says, sitting on a cream-colored couch inside his sunlit office on the Fox lot in early June.

At the time, the filmmaker had no reason to think he was auditioning to be the guy to solve Ford’s dilemma. But Mangold impressed the actor. “He seemed to have a keen perception of what was required,” Ford says. “I just found it very easy and comfortable to work with him.” So much so that when Spielberg decided later that year that it was time to bequeath Indy’s signature whip and fedora to someone else, Ford recommended Mangold.

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who has produced every “Indy” film since serving as Spielberg’s assistant on “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” recalls, “It was pretty much immediate that Steven said, ‘Oh, he would be fantastic. Let’s do that.’”

It’s easy to understand why. Starting with his feature debut, the 1995 Sundance hit “Heavy,” Mangold has built a career steeped in the old-school Spielbergian classicism that is embedded in the DNA of the “Indiana Jones” movies. “I’ve always been a little behind the curve of what’s happening in the moment,” Mangold says. “I mean, I made a wordless film about a fat guy in a diner when everyone else was trying to emulate Quentin — when the hot thing was clove cigarettes and rock-’n’-roll soundtracks.”

For decades, that approach has served Mangold well, as he has turned out a procession of quite disparate studio features, from the psychological drama “Girl, Interrupted” and Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” to the Western thriller “3:10 to Yuma” and the historical entertainment “Ford v Ferrari.” In the 2010s, he even stepped inside the Marvel sandbox and brought a brutal humanism to the comic book adaptations “The Wolverine” and “Logan,” the highest-grossing movies in his filmography.

Increasingly, though, Mangold has been feeling out of step with the franchise-building imperatives of a modern film industry fixated on sustaining an ongoing series of interconnected movies. “I am interested in making something that works from beginning to end — to curtain,” he says. “Otherwise, I’m working on the world’s most expensive television show.”

So when Kennedy approached Mangold in late 2019 about directing the fifth and final “Indiana Jones” movie, Mangold was not an instant yes.

“Oh, he was incredibly intimidated,” Kennedy recalls with a laugh. “He was immediately excited by the potential of it, but he was very daunted by stepping into Steven’s shoes.”

Still, Mangold was captivated by what was by any measure a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, even as he was acutely aware that it came with the singular hazards inherent in taking over a franchise that has meant so much to so many for so long. “There are a million land mines,” Mangold says. “But the idea that I would get a chance to play not just in the backyard of my heroes, but with Harrison, with Steven — it was so profoundly moving to me. How many people get a chance to make a movie with these people?”

Mangold spent a year with his “Ford v Ferrari” screenwriters Jez and John-Henry Butterworth to craft the screenplay for what would become “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” Mangold’s goal was to make a film worthy of the iconic hero and the movie star embodying him — and, perhaps, explicate his own feelings about the world passing him by. Because while the 59-year-old filmmaker’s success has brought him into the orbit of two other marquee franchises, “Swamp Thing” for DC Studios and a new “Star Wars” movie for Lucasfilm, he remains ambivalent about being seen as a franchise filmmaker at all.

As Mangold talks with me in his office, I can’t help noticing the 22 framed index cards filling the wall just above his head, each with a handwritten rule for cinematic storytelling. For example: “Self-expression (talk without action) is BORING!” And: “What is happening NOW is not as exciting as what may or may not HAPPEN NEXT.”

All of the rules were created by the late filmmaker Alexander “Sandy” Mackendrick (“Sweet Smell of Success”), who mentored Mangold as the dean of the CalArts School of Film in the early 1980s. Mackendrick had the cards hanging in his own office, and, Mangold explains, “he would point at these different rules as he was analyzing your eight-page screenplay.”

When I ask Mangold how often he’s turned to his mentor’s directives over the course of his career, he smiles wistfully. “Every day,” he says. “I’ve lived with these all my life.”

As we converse, I begin to grasp just how much these rules have provided Mangold with the intellectual scaffolding to build a story that feels at once exciting and emotionally connected. Take that WWII prologue that had so concerned Ford. Mangold thought it was a brilliant idea, because it tackled one of his biggest issues with 2008’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”: That film barely acknowledges that Indy is not only older but has aged out of the 1930s and ’40s era that he’s meant to embody.

“What’s so beautiful about the best of the ‘Indiana Jones’ movies is that thematically they know what they’re about,” Mangold says. “I didn’t feel like I knew what ‘Crystal Skull’ was about. He’s living in a world that has overtaken him — a world that has found new heroes in John Glenn or Elvis Presley. No one in the film is really thinking about the past; everyone’s focused on the future.”

Mangold says he “spoke plainly” about these feelings in early discussions with Spielberg and Kennedy about what he’d want to do with “Indy 5,” which he felt was at risk of making many of the same mistakes as “Crystal Skull.” The MacGuffin at the center of the early script, for example, “was just another relic with power, similar to the relics we had seen,” with no clear connection to Indy or what he was going through. So he changed it to the Antikythera, an ancient mechanical device invented, in the new script’s conception, by the Greek mathematician Archimedes to allow its user to manipulate time.

“Indy had spent his entire life exploring time,” Kennedy says. “Once Jim seized upon that as a theme, it emotionally resonated, frankly, with all of us, who have in excess of 40 years invested in this storytelling.”

Mangold also understood, however, that audiences would show up with an image of Indiana Jones in his prime fixed in their memories. So rather than cut the prologue, he expanded it to a 25-minute sequence set in 1944, when Indy encounters the Antikythera for the first time on a Nazi loot train. Effectively, Mangold wanted viewers to be disappointed by the shock of cutting from Indy as a younger man to Indy in his late 70s. “It might be a really good opening gambit for the present-tense part of the movie — that much about growing older in life is disappointing,” he says.

In spite of his trepidation, Ford applied himself to the sequence with his typical aplomb. “I tried to raise my voice into a higher register, which seemed to be appropriate for the age, and physically tried to move with all the grace and youthfulness that my old ass could muster,” he says. “I had not anticipated that the process of de-aging, if you will call it that, would be so successful.”

Neither did Mangold. The director knew Ford would need to be de-aged with a level of verisimilitude that has proven elusive to filmmakers so far. The process involved drawing from hundreds of hours of archived footage of Ford as a younger man and mapping that onto the older actor’s face. But when I ask Mangold how he ensured the technology was up to snuff before he started filming, he just shrugs. He hadn’t.

“You have to believe that they’re going to be able to do something better, but you don’t know,” he says. “Every movie is a leap of faith. People are like, ‘Can Joaquin Phoenix sing?’ And you go, ‘Yeah, absolutely. He’s incredible.’ And you don’t know. You’re just believing in the people around you delivering.”