Indiana Jones director on de-aging Harrison Ford for ‘25-minute opening extravaganza’

Harrison Ford is back as Indiana Jones one last time in the franchise’s fifth movie, Dial of Destiny – but there’s a twist.

The film, directed by James Mangold, is mostly set in 1969, but a 25-minute opening sequence will go back in time to 1944, with Mangold using de-aging technology on his leading man to make him look decades younger.

“I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35,” Mangold told Total Film magazine, calling Ford, who was 79 when the movie was shot, an “incredibly gifted and agile” actor.

“We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day,” he 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.”

Mangold added: “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.”

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny comes out on 30 June, co-starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Jones’s goddaughter and Mads Mikkelsen as the main antagonist, a former Nazi official.

When the trailer came out last year, many fans imagined what the dialogue might be like between Indiana Jones and his goddaughter in the film, given Waller-Bridge’s reputation for wry asides in Fleabag. They tweeted: “Indy: It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage. Phoebe Waller-Bridge (to camera): It’s the years.”