The Final Goodbye: Director James Mangold Discusses the End of Indiana Jones

‘Yes, I am the guillotine!’ laughs 59-year-old director James Mangold halfway through the conversation during the Cannes Festival. “If you want to finish a character after years of success, call James.” Earlier, the American director buried X-Men hero Wolverine with a successful swan song Logan (2017). Now, under his leadership, the world is saying goodbye to Indiana Jones, one of the other great Hollywood icons, after nearly half a century.

George Lucas invented the archaeologist in the early 1970s, but left after the success of Star Wars (1977) directed by Spielberg. The charm of protagonist Harrison Ford did the rest. First movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is now seen as a classic; four sequels and a television series followed.

Yet in both cases James Mangold tried to separate the story from the famous sequences they were part of. “I am not a fan of exploiting success,” he explains. “You should not make a sequel because it is possible, a sequel must have an essentially new story to tell.”

“I’m an old-fashioned creator – you have to be able to see the story on its own, without much prior knowledge. I also don’t like cliffhangers at the end: a film must have a clear beginning, a middle and an end.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQfMbSe7F2g

Final goodbye

That was also the message he shared with Steven Spielberg, now producer, when he personally asked Mangold to let the fans say goodbye to their hero with one last part. “We couldn’t pretend he’s still the same man from before – fifteen years have passed. He has lost his mojo, he can no longer physically do everything he could before. As a maker, I would not have found it interesting at all if we had seen the same man as in the previous four parts.”

The themes of transience, time and regret also formed a common thread Logan, notes Mangold himself. “What the passage of time does to you has always been an infinitely fascinating fact for artists – think of Proust,” he cites as an example.

All the main characters in this fifth Indiana Jones film struggle with time. Indy’s goddaughter, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is haunted by her late father’s obsessions, and Nazi villain Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) hopes to create a chance to revive the Third Reich.

Yet there are also essential differences between the finals of Wolverine and Indiana Jones, Mangold emphasizes. “The first is a superhero who has struggled all his life with the fact that he has been used as a weapon by bad people – he tries to make peace with that,” the director explains. “For him, the imminent death was almost a relief. That does not apply to Indiana Jones. He’s not a superhero. He is a man who tries to do the right thing and usually has to improvise along the way to save his life.”

Read also: Indiana Jones: still going strong, but a bit slower

Adrenalineshot

Mangold warns that, by the way The Dial Of Destiny is also ‘just’ an old-fashioned Indiana Jones, full of bizarre chases, impossible escapes and inventive fights. “Steven wanted to go back forty years with Raiders of the Lost Ark making a playful homage to the screwball comedies and adventure films of his youth,” says the director. “I didn’t want to lose sight of that basis.”

The nearly half-hour prologue, which shows how Indiana Jones and villain Voller met before at the end of the war, was one of the most difficult scenes he ever shot, says Mangold. We wanted to start the film with an adrenaline shot,” he laughs. “As many different locations as possible, as many vehicles as possible. Everyone was allowed to let off steam before the opening: from the stunt people to composer John Williams.”

Read also: An antique analog computer slowly revealing its secrets

For the prologue, actor Harrison Ford, now 80, was digitally made thirty years younger. “We had to decide four years ago whether the technology was far enough advanced to do that credibly. That was a gamble,” Mangold now admits. “Without that beginning, the film wouldn’t have worked. But sometimes you have to follow your gut and say: we now decide that we are all going to do this together. I knew when I Walk The Line prepared and Joaquin Phoenix didn’t ask if he could sing for the role of Johnny Cash.”

“Fans preferably want the same thing they already know and remember, but also something new”

At the world premiere in Cannes The Dial Of Destiny mixed reactions. Mangold smiles. “As soon as I said ‘yes’ to this film, I let go of the idea that I could appeal to all fans,” he explains. “Fans preferably want the same thing they already know and remember, but also something new. Those two graphs are never completely compatible anyway.”

During the making process, the director has continuously tried to follow his own path. “Yes, this film is very much indebted to the road Steven has paved for me. But it wouldn’t have been right if I had tried to imitate him. Even if Steven and I both prepared a chicken in exactly the same way and followed the exact same recipe, it would still have turned out a different chicken.”

Pleasantly anomalous Indiana Jones final

Harrison Ford (80) filled up again and again in May at the premiere of his fifth and final Indiana Jones film in Cannes. A sense of consummation? Here was someone who, after twelve years of struggling on television, had already half reconciled himself with a life as a carpenter in Hollywood when he finally became a superstar at the age of 35: as scoundrel Han Solo in Star Wars and as a grave robber in Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark.

His friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg saw it sharply: Ford was a charismatic ‘rogue’. A rascal with a golden heart, improvising, mesmerizing, grumbling. Ford recently guided two of those iconic anti-heroes to the grave: Han Solo The Force Awakens (2016) en Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Two down, one to go: in The Dial of Destiny also let Indiana Jones crack the whip for the last time.

In a James Bond-esque introduction – Indiana Jones is retro-colonial James Bond – a digitally rejuvenated Harrison Ford rescues the ‘dial of destiny’ from a train full of Nazis and looted art in April 1945. We also get to know the enemy there: Dr. Jürgen Voller (Mad Mikkelsen), appropriately cold and rigorous.

Flash forward to 1969, when Indiana Jones retires as an archeology professor. Voller, inspired by Wernher von Braun, is now the man behind the American space program. With his accomplices – including the colossal Dutch muscleman Olivier Richters – he hunts for Archimedes’ Antikythera, a time machine with which Voller still wants to win the war for the Nazis.

This ‘dial of destiny’ is the MacGuffin who keeps changing hands in an endless chase in the Kasbah of Tangier, during scuba diving in Greece and caving in Sicily. People chase each other on horseback, motorcycle, car, tuk-tuk, boat; anything so Grandpa Ford doesn’t have to run. Phoebe Waller-Bridge takes on a lot of the action as Helena’s goddaughter. The sets – Glasgow digitally converted into New York in 1969 – look chock-full and pleasantly artificial. Although you don’t really believe Ford on horseback in the metro, the momentum continues towards a pleasantly different finale.

You know, where the MacGuffin – ark, grail, crystal – reveals its magic and the temple collapses. Not this time; there is a nice sentimental epilogue where we also shed a tear for Harrison Ford. Sunset. Cloth.

Coen van Zwol Action movie

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Directed by: James Mangold. With: Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Length: 154 min

●●●●●

Newsletter NRC Film

The best film pieces, interviews and reviews of the latest films

A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on June 28, 2023.
2023-06-28 01:13:53
#Indiana #Jones #whip #cracks #time