2024

February 2, 2024
BUSINESS INSIDER
Mads Mikkelsen: "They de-aged me as well, but with a different technique. In the beginning, they thought it was enough just to dye my hair completely black. And then I told them, you know what? My hair's black, but I look like an old woman now. So let's just do a little thing. I mean, we had to jump 25 years, right? They did something, but not the same technique. The idea of us having to be forever young, I'm not a fan of that. I don't think anyone is a fan of that. But once you can control it like that, jumping back and forth, I think it's absolutely worth using. You have to be ethical about it. (Ford) was just goofy all the time. I remember one of the first days, I was walking on the street in my personal clothes. It was in the studio. There were a lot of people around and he was far away, and then he just pointed at me and shouted, there's that Nazi! And everybody turned around and looked at me and I was like, oh geez, Harrison. Now I've got to explain to everybody I'm not a Nazi. He always did stuff like that. No, I loved him. I just got to see him the other day at a party here and he's just an amazing man. A kid by heart, but also very serious in what he does. And I think the reason why he is a legend, well, there's a ton of reasons, but one of them is that he does not behave like a legend. He makes everybody feel at home in the scene around him. He's a real gentleman."

February 2, 2024
COLLIDER
John Rhys-Davies: "Sallah is wonderful. He was very different. You do realize that Sallah is probably the only Arab hero in contemporary Western culture that we recognize. I mean, that's a major failure of two cultures there. I like him. I'll tell you how I think Sallah ends up. I think he ends up like that wonderful fellow Waleed al-As'ad, who is the keeper of the museum in Palmyra. And when ISIS came or I think it was ISIS, he refused, he'd hidden all the treasures and he refused to give them out. And they said, if you don't, we will kill you and he refused. And I think he was 82 years old and he was forced to kneel and they beheaded him. That's a man protecting his culture. That's a man protecting history. And I believe that's the sort of man that Salah might have become."

February 19, 2024
KUSC
John Williams: "I'm very grateful to Jim Mangold and our producer Kathy Kennedy, who both of them gave me the opportunity to do it or not do it. I looked at the film and thought I would write the main thematic material, and I wrote three pieces actually for orchestra which were recorded. A piece for the Archimedes antiquity tinted areas of the film, and a lot of new Nazi music, slow, fast, loud, and soft. And Helena's theme. And then as I was looking at the film, I began to be nostalgic first of all, having done four of them. I love Harrison, I've done a few films with Harrison, Star Wars being the beginning of it I think. And I loved him in the film, and I particularly loved Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Then I became very jealous about the idea of anybody else doing the music. I thought oh dear, I need to accomplish this and I need to be part of that duo. I love them together and wanted to write the music so I began to do it, and it was enormously pleasurable for me. These actors are a very big part of the inspiration I think that people draw from films. A lot of things move us emotionally, and hopefully musically when it's the right thing. Harrison is certainly one of those people. He's been fun on and off the screen all these years. I guess (swashbuckling) is in a long theatrical and film tradition of handling with a swagger adventure scenes that are particularly not really taken so seriously. Jim Mangold said to me, write a theme for Phoebe, or Helena is her name, that's in the mode of the 1940s movie stars. I loved that suggestion. What I found with Phoebe's character, she smoked and she drank and she gambled and she had adventures. She was always beautiful in a sort of very seductive, don't touch me way. And Phoebe had all that quality and also a little tongue in cheek humor, again matching Harrison's throughout the film. So I have to say Phoebe and the writing and the filming by Jim were all the inspiration I needed. I remembered pieces like Laura from David Raksin, similar qualities that might produce a kind of an aspect of their characters, difficult to define, a little bit obscure, giving the sense that there's a lot in their background that we don't know and we're not going to know. But we sense there's complexity there. The stability of a Mercedes against that little (tuk-tuk) was a tremendous variation there. Frankly I hadn't thought of it, I didn't treat it as a different creature. There may be a musical difference that I didn't catch. I arranged (Helena's theme) for (Anne-Sophie Mutter). She wanted to play it in concert and we have done it together a number of times. The idea occurred it would be nice and fun even though it's not in the film. And now we have the piece for orchestra, as well as the piece for violin and orchestra."

March 6, 2024
VARIETY
Harrison Ford: "As I often remind John (Williams), his music follows me everywhere I go, literally. When I had my last colonoscopy, they were playing it on the operating room speakers. It's a delight to see him work with the orchestra, just the pleasure of being able to sit in a room and process the remarkable attention that each beat of the music gets. And their respect for him and his respect for them is just so much fun to watch."
James Mangold: "These are extremely laborious scores. It is all handwritten by John, with pencil, on a piano. It is such a connection to Golden Age scoring methodologies. Writing on a computer and MIDI just doesn't translate the same way, like oil versus tempera versus digital painting. John's adherence to doing things his way is not merely obstinacy or age, but dedication to a kind of woodworking, as it were, that is largely not done anymore. I was in tears (at the final Dial of Destiny scoring session) not because I thought it was John's last score, but because I've grown up in a cynical time, in a cynical business, and watching him do his job was a confirmation of pure idealism."
John Williams: "I wanted very much to do all the Star Wars films if I could, to keep the whole thing in one piece in a way. And I've been asked why I wanted to do five Indiana Jones films. Same reason. Now they're doing a lot more with Star Wars, of course, at a volume that I can't keep up with."

April 17, 2024
SCRIPT APART PODCAST
Jez Butterworth: "What tends to happen, as you know, at the end of an Indiana Jones film, is that it slips its moorings and goes off into the supernatural. They each do it to different degrees and to different degrees of success. I think that we knew we were going to have to do it. And what they tend to do, like in the first one, it's done in a way where you almost forget that that's what's going on. Don't look at the casket or whatever it is. And they get it over with as quickly as they can. Jim's decision, and it was Jim's decision, to go all out into the time travel idea was really brave, was really courageous and was really fun, I think. But I don't think it was John Henry and I driving that. I think that was Jim's brainchild."

May 1, 2024
AD WEEK
Frank Marshall: "I couldn't talk James Mangold into (a Dan Rather cameo)! He said, we don't have time for that, we gotta get to Indy. (Laughs)"

May 3, 2024
THEFORCE.NET
Tom Hoeler: "No plans for us (RHW/Del Rey) to do (a novelization). I would imagine that if Lucasfilm were going to, they already would have - even delayed post release. Releasing any official film novelization more than a year post release really doesn't make any sense to me, so I'd be surprised if there were one."

May 5, 2024
CAPITAINE CINEMAXX
Ethann Isidore (translated): "(The chase is) a scene that took a very long time to shoot. I remember that the stuntmen were already working on sequences when I arrived on the first shoots. I saw the stuntmen perform feats and I was amazed and impressed. I couldn't wait to experience what he was feeling at that moment. But it is not without risk. I had an accident on set with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. This is the scene where we leave Indiana Jones alone in the Tuk-Tuk and we go to find another one. We start to drive off, the car we are supposed to be chasing stops at the moment of CUT, except that Phoebe couldn't brake. We took the car. I was propelled forward. Fortunately, we were not injured. However, there was panic. That's when I realized that I was really in an action film (laughing). We mainly shot the close-ups in the studio, because it is difficult to take close-ups in real time on set. But the majority of the chase took place in Tangier. I think shooting on real locations really added to the aesthetic of the film. This is what I would remember from filming Indiana Jones, it's the immersion. If some sets were filmed in the Pinewood studios in England (the school, Indiana Jones' apartment and part of the reconstructed cave without a blue background), a majority of the filming took place in real natural settings. And the atmosphere. Everything seemed so real, that we didn't need to make any effort to play. You just had to look around. Even the figuration. When we filmed in Glasgow to do New York, because the architecture of the city is closer to that of The Big Apple in the 60s, the decor had redone all the streets where we filmed. So there were lots of people dressed as hippies, vintage cars, etc. It was visually incredible."

May 18, 2024
WXYZ
Karen Allen: "Really fun, really fun. I was really happy that the film got to end the way it did and that you see them back together. No spoiler alert if people haven't seen it. It's very satisfying to think that they're going to end up together. He and I never had that conversation, I don't know that that he wanted to (be killed off). Certainly in the story he had his little moment where he could have died or been left behind in the way past, but that was not the direction. I don't think he wanted to go in that direction either. I think it was beautiful to bring the two of them back together."

August 27, 2024
GALAXYCON
John Rhys-Davies: "There were a few more scenes in it that I was shown as temptation to sign the contract, and of course as soon as I did they sort of vanished. In many ways it's a very, very clever film, but to me it was soulless. It didn't seem to have any real abiding relationships. I think that that wonderful moment when Karen comes in right at the end and literally steals the show, that is really an example of the Nostalgia value that we should have had in the picture, really. I mean, you don't wrap up a great Indiana Jones sequence, with the last film probably, without wanting to bring in all those wonderful echoes of the first one. They were there, but pretty tenuous, and I admired it, but I was not moved by it terribly, until Karen came in, and then one thought that was wonderful. If I was the main character in an Indiana Jones movie it would be the quest to find Indiana Jones, wouldn't it? And I would have to have some of my family with me. Now by this time Sallah is a grandfather and probably a great grandfather, so he would need a young assistant, his granddaughter, perhaps or his great granddaughter to help him."

December 6, 2024
DEADLINE
James Mangold: "You have a wonderful, brilliant actor who's in his eighties. So I'm making a movie about this guy in his eighties, but his audience on one other level doesn't want to confront their hero at that age. And I am like, I'm good with it. We made the movie. But the question is, how would anything have made the audience happy with that, other than having to start over again with a new guy? Here come lifelong heroes from my childhood into my life going, we have something for you to work on. (It was a) joyous experience, but it hurt in the sense that I really love Harrison and I wanted audiences to love him as he was and to accept that that's part of what the movie has to say, that things come to an end, that's part of life."

December 19, 2024
ESQUIRE
James Mangold: "With any of these franchise movies, the last thing I want to do is tarnish or diminish something I've loved since I was a child. You want to do them if you feel like you can take them somewhere new, which means you have to take risks, and the risks could inflame the fans. "

December 19, 2024
LUCASFILM
Ethann Isidore: "(The last scene) was really emotional, everyone was crying on set that day. I was waiting for my turn on set, and then they got me and said it was going to be my first time acting with Harrison Ford. I was so excited but I was also nervous. The first time I saw him, I remember thinking that I was in front of Indiana Jones and Han Solo at the same time, which blew my mind. We shook hands, and he looked at me and said, terrible casting for Teddy. (laughs) I was so confused, so I laughed, even though I didn't know if it was a joke. Then I saw the whole team laughing, and Harrison started smiling at me. I realized, okay, he's a funny guy. (laughs) I had been stressed and unsure how to act, and then he made this joke, and I knew he'd be joking all the time. Teddy is like Helena's Short Round. Then this old, grumpy man who he doesn't know anything about comes into their life and starts to run the show. It's really annoying for Teddy, and at first, he hates Indiana Jones. Teddy has to accept the fact that this guy is now a part of his life. Both of them have their own ideas and don't let others tell them what to do or how to act. Both of them think they know everything about life. One is younger and the other is older. It's a common relationship you can find in everyone's lives. What's amazing about Harrison Ford is that he speaks with everyone the same way. Something admirable, in my opinion, is that he didn't want people to call him Mr. Ford. He wanted people to call him Harrison, or Harry. To him, he was like everyone else. I really admired this. He talked to my family the same way he talked to the crew or the actors. My little brother, Lennie, and him were like best friends on the set. They'd kid around. Harrison and Phoebe even went down to the swimming pool with my family while they were rehearsing the underwater scene. They let my brother try on the mask to breathe underwater. We had a conversation about acting, and Harrison told me something that was both fun and true. He said that acting is like being a child, but you get paid for it. (laughs) When you're a child, you play with your imagination all the time, and that's what being an actor is. You play with your imagination and try to build this world, this character's background, in your head."

December 20, 2024
Tom Hoeler: "No plans for new Indiana Jones content (at Random House)."

December 22, 2024
SQUARE MILE MAGAZINE
Boyd Holbrook: "When (Mangold) called about Indiana Jones, I was like: you know what, Jim? I love working with you. So sure. And it just went fantastically. I had one of the greatest experiences of my life making that movie. It was a fun character, and I got to work in five different countries during Covid. I (originally) had that whole thing: the really long, shaggy hair, the receding hairline, a straggly, creepy look. And it was really cool, but it wasn't it. So we went more in the military, 1950s, crop-top direction. And boom! That was it. But that's always been the process with Jim. (Ford) kind of just lit up (about carpentry). It was a night towards the end of the job, and he wanted to hear my story. Of course, I already knew his story, and I wasn't about to lie about mine. We definitely did not talk about (both playing The Fugitive). I just let that one slide beneath the rug. Me and Mads just got along so well, and I think he's so amazing. So (Last Meals) finally feels as though it's going to happen. It's somewhere down the road, at least, this really beautiful prison drama."

December 22, 2024
THE LONDON TIMES
Mads Mikkelsen: "When you watch (Ford) work, what you see is a child running around, playing Indiana Jones at the age of 80. He's a kid. It doesn't mean that he couldn't be grumpy and complain, but you could see his eyes shining when he was in the zone and doing what he loved. And that's worth bringing to the table every time."

December 24, 2024
NEW YORK MAGAZINE: VULTURE
James Mangold: "To me, there was only one way to make the movie, and that was to make Indiana Jones's age part of the story. You couldn't ignore it. But also the response was two or threefold. There's obviously this hot and bothered group who's angry that there's any woman in the movie, and I can't help them. Every Indiana Jones movie features a significant female protagonist who sometimes bails Indy out of trouble. But the audience responses weren't at all lackluster. It just had a challenging commercial response. It had been so long since the previous installment that maybe there just wasn't that built-in want-to-see for audiences under 40, which is strictly a business decision. My decision to make the movie was that I had been working on A Complete Unknown, which got shelved because of COVID. There was no way to make a mid- to low-price movie through the pandemic, and Timmy had commitments on Dune. So I was going to have to be off for at least two years from the Dylan project. At that moment, my phone rang, and it was Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg and Kathy Kennedy asking me if I wanted to join them and do this movie. Well, you'd have to ask them (why they called me), but it was on the heels of Ford v. Ferrari, which I think Steven really admired. Harrison I had actually known for a while, and he'd been following my work. But I suspect that in trying to follow in the footsteps of these heroes of mine, I had developed a fairly diverse body of work. Steven obviously has a style, in the way he blocks and moves actors in the camera, but he also has tremendous versatility. The same filmmaker who made Close Encounters also made Munich and Tintin and Jaws, which is essentially a horror adventure, and Schindler's List. And George Lucas, too, if you actually look at his full resume. So, maybe, in some way, they saw that, but I couldn't begin to say. For me, it was a deeply personal chance for me to collaborate with these heroes of mine. With Indiana Jones, I wanted it to connect to the other films, but you also have to be saying something new with each picture, as Steven did. Raiders is much more a classic Hollywood adventure with humor. An Errol Flynn movie, if you will, with a more modern sardonic hero. And Temple of Doom is more of a pulpy EC Comics version of Indiana Jones. And then Last Crusade becomes a completely different thing. It's a father-son movie against the clock and is much more a screwball comedy. And with Crystal Skull, Steven is trying to move Indiana Jones into the '50s and out of the period that the previous three had existed in, that direct context of World War II. And that shift is tricky, because much of the tone of the Indiana Jones movies is that they exist within the golden age Hollywood period of the '30s and '40s. The second you take those characters and move them into an age when Jackson Pollock is painting and Elvis is on the radio, there's a dissonance between the beautiful idealism and old-school heroism of the Indiana Jones mythology and the way the world is changing. You have to become immune to (disappointment). Raiders is an almost perfect movie. As a pop confection and as a character piece and in a million other ways, it's just an amazing display of cinematic talent and storytelling and irreverent acting, comedy, panache. You could almost say the same for Star Wars and maybe Empire Strikes Back, viewing them together; everything that follows, there's complaints about what's missing. And that goes along with the beloved IP territory. My greatest lesson in that was Logan, in the sense that I had the full confidence of my star and the studio, and I made a major departure in tone from what any previous existing X-Men or Wolverine movies had been like. And there was a certain element of tissue rejection that happened as fans sensed even in trailers where it was going. At the time, there was a great deal of anxiety about it. But either you're going to enter a known universe and push it to someplace new, or you're going to enter a known universe and replicate what has existed before. Some people will be upset no matter what. And that's part of being a fan. I can't take that away from them."

December 26, 2024
BUSINESS INSIDER
James Mangold: "Well, Dial of Destiny has an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, yes, they would have hoped it made more money, but I actually don't have a lot of shame about a movie that's liked by 87% of its fans. The issue with Star Wars isn't my worrying about if there's an angry or resentful group that is somehow disappointed in what I did in Dial of Destiny, honestly, that's their prerogative, that's part of what makes movies great is you can think they're awesome or you can think they're terrible. I can't please everyone and I'm sorry they don't like it. We do our best, if I could please 100% of everyone all the time, I would, but that's a tough thing."

December 28, 2024
NEXT BIG PICTURE
James Mangold: "I got to spend so much time with my childhood hero Steven Spielberg and George Lucas John Williams and Harrison Ford. To me the movie was such a joy because I got to actually hang out and become friends with people who I had only seen on a kind of Mount Rushmore from my Upstate New York home."