Harrison Ford is happy with how the de-aging technology worked in his latest “Indiana Jones” film.
The 80-year-old actor, director James Mangold and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” costars Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Shaunette Renée Wilson, and Boyd Holbrook sat with SiriusXM’s Jess Cagle in an interview posted Tuesday in which they were asked about the de-aged sequence towards the start of the film.
“Well it was fun for me to see how well it worked because I feel very strongly that it’s the best example of de-aging, if you will, that we’ve seen yet,” Ford told the SiriusXM host. “It’s not a photoshopping kind of thing, it really is my face from 40 years ago.”
The actor added that he was “gratified that it worked” because it was an impactful narrative device for his fifth and final outing as Indiana Jones.
“I’m very happy about it as a dramatic device because of where we’re going to go with this character, I thought it was a great way to start,” he said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Mangold recalled the gamble he and the film’s creative team took by banking on the potential for better de-aging technology when they included the sequence in the film. He made the process sound simpler than one may envision.
“It wasn’t complicated to shoot in the sense that we just shot it. Harrison put on the outfit and played younger and I shot him, and we fixed it,” he said. “One of the nice things about the way that technology has progressed is I didn’t have to — everything wasn’t 100 dots and levers and 35 takes with 19 cameras. We wanted to give the audience a blast right at the start, a taste of what I think we cherish about those early films before we pull the rug out from under you, in a way. We wanted to feel like you dropped into one of the older pictures. That was it.”
The filmmaker also emphasized the multiple advantages they had with this experiment: Ford’s acting, his comparatively similar build to 40 years ago and the past films’ showcase of Ford at the younger age “Dial of Destiny” was aiming to capture.
You can watch a clip from the SiriusXM interview in the video above.
“Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” hits theaters June 30.
