When we last saw him, nearly 19 years ago, everybody’s favorite archaeologist was literally riding off into the sunset after having found the Holy Grail. This seemed as though it had to be the end of the adventure series that had gotten its start with Raiders of the Lost Ark, the big summertime blockbuster of 1981. But then, on the morning of June 18, 2007, Steven Spielberg, the director of the Indiana Jones movies, and George Lucas, who came up with the idea for the franchise, found themselves facing cast and crew on an empty piece of land in Deming, New Mexico. “How time flies,” Spielberg said, raising a flute of champagne, in a moment captured on video, which ended up on YouTube. “No one’s changed, we all look the same. I just want to say: Break a leg, have a good shoot, do your best work, and here’s looking at you, kids.”
Before the day was out, the temperature had reached 97 degrees. Probably no one felt the heat more than the star, Harrison Ford, who, at age 65, was back in his distinctive costume. “It’s a very bizarre costume, when you think about it,” Ford says. “It’s this guy sporting a whip, who’s off usually for someplace really hot in his leather jacket.” He says he got right back into the role once he suited up. “There’s something about the character that I guess is a good fit for me, because the minute I put the costume on, I recognize the tone that we need, and I feel confident and clear about the character.”
After 79 first-unit filming days, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a wrap. Like the earlier movies, it is a Lucasfilm Ltd. production distributed by Paramount Pictures. Aside from the New Mexico location, the film was shot in New Haven, Connecticut; Fresno, California; and Hawaii, with significant work taking place on lots built at Downey Studios, in southeast Los Angeles.
On May 22, the movie will hit approximately 4,000 U.S. theaters. The story is set in 1957, and this time Dr. Jones goes up against cold-blooded, Cold War Russkies—led by Cate Blanchett in dominatrix mode—instead of the Nazis he squashed like bugs in previous installments. Making a return alongside Ford is Karen Allen, as Marion Ravenwood, Indy’s pugnacious true love, last seen in the first film (since retitled, rather inelegantly, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark). Rising star Shia LaBeouf joins the cast in a role that no one connected with the film will confirm is the love child of Indy and Marion.
Once the final cut is locked, it will be dubbed into some 25 languages for an ambitious international release. The masses—lately thrilling to the lethally blank Jason Bourne, the totally out-to-lunch Jack Sparrow, and that earnest wand waver Harry Potter—will be asked once more to embrace a fedora-wearing hero of the 1980s with roots in the jungle serials of the 1930s.
It’s not a bad bet. Lucas, 63, and Spielberg, 61, have made 13 of the all-time 100 highest-grossing movies, in terms of worldwide box office, either separately or as a producer-director duo. They are big-time spellbinders in a league with P. T. Barnum, Walt Disney, and the Wizard of Oz. The Indiana Jones series alone has grossed more than $1.18 billion worldwide—and that’s before you add in the comic books, young-adult novels, and figurines.
But once upon a time, in the faraway 1960s, Lucas and Spielberg were upstarts banging at the palace doors. Hollywood was run by men who were the age they are now, tough guys who weren’t going to give way without a fight. At age 18, Spielberg sneaked away from the tram route of the Universal Pictures tour and stepped onto a soundstage. He was a movie-crazed kid who had already made a full-length feature, Firelight, an 8-mm. sci-fi extravaganza starring his sisters, and he wanted in.
The next day he showed up on the lot wearing a suit, his dad’s briefcase in hand. It was a disguise good enough to get him past the guards. He settled into an empty office and “worked” at Universal all through that summer of 1965, making himself known to the cinematographers and directors, creating for himself an unofficial, on-the-fly internship. While attending California State University, Long Beach, Spielberg continued to visit the lot. On weekends he shot a 23-minute 35-mm. movie about two young hitchhikers, called Amblin’. He won a real job on the strength of it, as a director in Universal’s television wing. So there he was, a boy wonder among grizzled veterans, turning out episodes of Night Gallery, Columbo, and Marcus Welby, M.D., honing the craft he would put to use in a career spanning everything from The Sugarland Express (1974) to Munich (2005).
Lucas was more of an accidental filmmaker. As a skinny diabetic kid growing up in the dusty Northern California town of Modesto, he wanted to be a racecar driver—in those days driving fast and fixing cars were his chief talents—but his dream died soon before his high-school graduation, when he flipped over in his own Fiat Bianchina. The wreck almost killed him. After two years of community college, he applied to the University of Southern California’s film school. He moved downstate against the wishes of his strict father (who considered the film industry vile), and soon made a name for himself with a series of prizewinning experimental shorts. His U.S.C. films earned him a paid Warner Bros. internship that led him to the set of Finian’s Rainbow, a musical being shot by just about the only young director back then, 28-year-old Francis Ford Coppola, who pushed Lucas to learn how to write scripts and create accessible movies. Lucas went on to do just that on a grand scale, and he pulled it off largely outside the system. With his considerable winnings he built Lucasfilm, his very own, leaner version of Hollywood, now based in San Francisco’s Presidio and on a large property in rural Marin County.
In 1967, Spielberg had seen a Lucas short, Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, at a student film festival held at U.C.L.A.’s Royce Hall. “I met George backstage,” Spielberg recalls. “I was blown away by his short film, and Francis Coppola introduced us.” They met again in the early 1970s, when Lucas was in L.A. to cast his second feature, American Graffiti. A gang of young cinéastes was gathering at a Benedict Canyon hovel that had been Lucas’s home in his U.S.C. days, and where he was staying again while in town. Among the group was Spielberg, who was working on his script for The Sugarland Express. “I’d come in at night after casting all day,” Lucas says, “and that’s when we became friends.” As the decade rolled along, blockbusters by Spielberg (Jaws) and Lucas (Star Wars—now called Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope) changed the industry.
Lucas left Los Angeles the day Star Wars opened in 1977 to hide out at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea resort, on the Big Island. Spielberg soon joined him, and they talked over their plans. “I told him that I wanted to, for the second time, approach [film producer] Cubby Broccoli, who had turned me down the first time, to see if he would change his mind and hire me to do a James Bond movie,” Spielberg says. “And George said, ‘I’ve got something better than that. It’s called Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ He pitched me the story, and I committed on the beach.”
Lucas had first conjured the bullwhip-happy archaeologist in the early 1970s, when he was living on almost nothing in Mill Valley, north of San Francisco. It was right around the time he dreamed up Star Wars and was honing the American Graffiti idea. “I have a tendency, when I’m working on one thing, to doodle around and work on other things, to avoid what I’m doing,” he says. Just prior to that, he had been working, with brawny writer-director John Milius, on a script for Apocalypse Now (which Lucas was going to direct, before the project wound up in Coppola’s hands). “We started to prepare it,” Lucas recalls, “and there was no studio that would go near it. The army wouldn’t cooperate at all. It was kind of a hopeless exercise.”
That’s when he had a vision of Indiana Smith (as he originally named him). Here was a film hero who might be able to bring back the cheesy excitement of the 1930s-vintage Republic Pictures serials Lucas had seen on TV as a kid. “Saturday matinee serial—that was the initial thought,” he says. With a little more care, better production values, and a dash of irony, this type of thing could be transformed into something of interest for a 1980s audience.
Loaded with comedy and hairsbreadth escapes, Raiders of the Lost Ark was the highest-grossing film of 1981. Ford, who had played the cocksure, cynical Han Solo in Star Wars, made a perfect professor of archaeology who’s not so mild-mannered when he goes off campus. The movie spawned two sequels: the dark, over-the-top Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), made while Lucas was going through a painful divorce, and the more tender and slapstick father-son picture, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), in which Indy wins the respect of his dad, a withholding grump played by Sean Connery.
But it wasn’t quite the last crusade. From 1992 to 1996, Lucas supervised The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a TV series which ran first on ABC, then on the USA Network, and won 10 Emmys. While filming a 1993 episode in which Ford made a cameo appearance, Lucas happened on something that gave him the idea for a fourth movie installment. He mentioned it to the actor, who wasn’t too impressed. Lucas later told Spielberg about his new concept, only to find that the director wasn’t so hot on the idea, either, although generally warm to the notion of a fourth film.
But Lucas was adamant. It was this idea or nothing.
Tucked into a corner of the Universal Studios lot is a cluster of two-story, Southwestern-style buildings. This is the Amblin Entertainment production house, the place where Spielberg works when he’s not shooting a movie. The little campus is populated with union carpenters, development girls in funky hats, and nervous Hollywood courtiers who wait their turns in a clay-tiled foyer. When Spielberg meets you in his homey conference room, he looks you in the eye and asks interested questions. He’s affable, cheerful, engaged—“present,” in L.A. parlance. It’s easy to picture him running a sane, happy movie set. At the time of our interview, he’s between sessions of editing the new Indy.
“I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it,” he says. “I usually do about five cuts as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.”
My glance strays to a side table, where headshots of actors under consideration for his likely next directing project, Chicago 7—about the conspiracy trial that grew out of protests at the 1968 Democratic convention—lie on the surface. Among them I spy Will Smith, Taye Diggs, Adam Arkin, and Kevin Spacey; Sacha Baron Cohen (as Abbie Hoffman) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (as William Kunstler) are also linked to the project, which has a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. (It should be noted here that Chicago 7 will be partly based on Chicago 10, a new documentary produced by Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair’s editor, and Brett Morgen, the film’s director.) After Chicago 7, Spielberg will probably go on to direct Lincoln, with Liam Neeson in the title role.
A lot has changed since the last Indiana Jones movie. For one thing, Spielberg, known in the 70s and early 80s as a director of hugely popular but lightweight pictures, brought his famously fluid camerawork to the darker Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). With Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005), he made science fiction that hit harder than E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). At the same time, action movies went through a major evolution. A bald monk flew. So did Keanu. Jackie Chan chopped necks while moving like Astaire. Travolta wiped blood off a windshield. Spidey killed baddies between bouts of emo-boy angst. Batman got the Christian Bale treatment (thin, dark, intense), and a computer-generated Yoda battled Palpatine. Jason Bourne crunched the bones of his pursuers in films that came out great despite looking as if they had been edited in a Cuisinart. In this atmosphere, can Indy compete?
Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”
Spielberg promises no tricky editing for the new one, saying, “I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy’s on and the bad guy’s on, but which side of the screen they’re in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that’s been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on The Bourne Ultimatum, and there’s just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.”
The script, Spielberg says, can provide the blockbuster pace. “Part of the speed is the story,” he says. “If you build a fast engine, you don’t need fast cutting, because the story’s being told fluidly, and the pages are just turning very quickly. You first of all need a script that’s written in the express lane, and if it’s not, there’s nothing you can do in the editing room to make it move faster. You need room for character, you need room for relationships, for personal conflict, you need room for comedy, but that all has to happen on a moving sidewalk.”
When it came to the actual shoot, Spielberg reports, he and his star were able to get their Indy legs back a day or two into filming. “I mean, we’re both older,” he says, “and we both look a bit older, I think, certainly, but at the same time Harrison needed to recapture the caustic, laconic spirit of Dr. Jones, and certainly he was going to have to manage the action, and he did both of those things amazingly well, certainly far beyond what I expected.”
In a separate interview, Ford says he was just glad to come through filming unscathed. “In the first one, I tore the A.C.L. in my left leg,” he says, “and then, in the second one, I ended up with a bad back injury and had to have surgery in the middle of filming. But in this one, I was pretty much uninjured.” That’s not an easy feat, especially since Ford was doing many of his own stunts, and part of Indy’s appeal is his tendency to get the crap beaten out of him. “I always wanted to make sure the audience understood the pain,” Ford says, “so that they could participate and enjoy the triumph. That was always a very big part of my ambition for the character, to allow the audience to see his fear, allow the audience to have a chance to see him work his way through the problem, not to be one of those characters that you know is going to succeed. I guess you know that Indiana Jones is finally going to succeed, but I think you don’t know how many bumps he’s going to take before it happens.”
While Spielberg feels at home in Hollywood, Lucas is more of a loner. Because of his distaste for L.A., his suspicion of its guilds and executives, he works 400 miles to the north, on his 4,000-acre Skywalker Ranch, where olive trees grow in neat lines atop a ridge and grapevines cover hillsides. The main house, an idealized version of an American family home circa 1930, stands off by itself. Lucas occupies an upstairs corner office, which has the feeling of a master bedroom but with a large desk taking the place of a bed.
At nine a.m. he is holding a can of Diet Coke. He looks like an undersize bear. When he starts talking about Indiana Jones, a character he acknowledges is not dissimilar to Han Solo, his enthusiasm rises, breaking through his natural reserve. “It’s a classic movie archetype,” he says. “Clark Gable played that role forever, the same role, which is the freelance cynic who eventually comes around, whether he’s a newspaper reporter or a pirate. Humphrey Bogart would play it with a little bit more of an edge. Harrison plays that part really well and can play it with a certain amount of humor, which makes it really charming. And the idea originally for both Han Solo and Indiana Jones is he’s in over his head all the time and kind of treading water. In Solo, he’s got a lot more bravado and he’s actually better at what he does. He can actually handle it. Indiana Jones gets in over his head and he can’t handle it. It’s only by sheer, last-second skill, or luck, or whatever, that he actually gets himself out of it. You can’t create a character like that without knowing that someone like Harrison can have the right, befuddled, oh-my-God-I’m-gonna-die look. And you’re right there with him. He’s Everyman. He’s us. ‘That’s exactly what I would look like if I were in that situation.’ And it’s an honest look. It’s not contrived. A lot of those guys now try to copy that, the better-looking movie-star types who try to do it. In the end, Harrison is a movie star because he’s a character actor. He is like Clark Gable, who was also a character actor, and Humphrey Bogart, who was a character actor. Those people were not Adonis, superhero guys. But that’s why they’re so endearing. That’s why everybody loves them. That’s why they’re so much fun to watch on-screen, because they’re vulnerable.”
The Bourne movies, the last two of which were directed by United 93 virtuoso Paul Greengrass, have made an impression on Lucas also. The series seems to have become the new action-movie gold standard, or at least a widely admired point of reference in filmmaking circles. Lucas says he appreciates the Bourne movies for their relative believability. “The thing about Bourne,” Lucas says, “I would put that on the credible side, because he’s trained in martial arts and all that kind of stuff, and we know that people in martial arts, even little old ladies, can break somebody’s leg. So you kind of say, O.K., that’s possible. But when you get to the next level, whether it’s Tomb Raider or the Die Hard series, where you’ve got one guy with one pistol going up against 50 guys with machine guns, or he jumps in a jet and starts chasing a car down a freeway, you say, I’m not sure I can really buy this. Mission: Impossible’s like that. They do things where you could not survive in the real world. In Indiana Jones, we stay just this side of it.”
The first building block of any Indiana Jones movie, according to Lucas, is something called the MacGuffin. The term, popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, refers to an object or goal that kicks the story into action and drives it to the third act. Hitchcock held that the less specific the MacGuffin the better. In his 1959 suspense classic, North by Northwest, the men chasing Cary Grant are after microfilm containing “government secrets”—that’s all the audience learns about why the film’s villains cause the hero so much trouble—and Hitchcock considered that to be a perfect MacGuffin, because it was so wonderfully vague. While Lucas agrees with his predecessor on the importance of the MacGuffin, his conception of the device differs significantly from Hitchcock’s. Rather than seeing it as a gimmick with the function of getting things rolling, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and that the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen.
He feels he had an excellent one in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The much-sought-after Ark of the Covenant not only held the Ten Commandments but also functioned as “a radio to God” and possessed enough Old Testament power to smite those who looked on its treasures. If the Nazis were to gain control of it, instead of good old Indy, well, you can imagine the consequences. But a first-rate MacGuffin is hard to find, and Lucas says he was not completely satisfied with those he had for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (the sacred Shankara Stones, which, for reasons no audience can keep straight, must be retrieved in order to save kidnapped village children from an Indian death cult) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the life-giving Holy Grail, which comes in handy when Indy’s dad is dying).
“I’m the one that has to come up with the story, and the MacGuffin, the supernatural object that everyone’s going after … ” Lucas’s voice trails off. He is seated in a favorite chair, its cushions lumpy and dented. “The Ark of the Covenant was perfect. The Shankara Stones were way too esoteric. The Holy Grail was sort of feeble—but, at the same time, we put the father in there to cover for it. I mean, the whole reason it became a dad movie was because I was scared to hell that there wasn’t enough power behind the Holy Grail to carry a movie. So we kept pushing to have it function on some level—and to make it function for a father and a son. To make it that kind of a movie was the big risk and the big challenge, but also the thing that pulled it out of the fire. So, at the end of it, I was like, No more of these, baby. We’re done. I can’t think of anything else. We barely got by on the last one!
“At that point I had kind of retired,” he continues. “I was raising my kids, I was running my companies. The last thing I wanted to do was go off and do another one of these things. And it stayed there for quite a while, until I was doing Young Indiana Jones, and I was actually with Harrison, shooting a little piece for it, and I was up in Wyoming, where he lives, and I came up with this MacGuffin, which was sitting there right in front of me, and I said, ‘Well, why didn’t I ever see this before?’ ”
When Ford and Spielberg both rejected the idea, Lucas dug in. He hired screenwriter after screenwriter to make his MacGuffin the linchpin of a new Indy story. “So this went on for 15 years,” he says. “And finally we got to a point where everybody said, ‘Look, we’re not doing that movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, look, I can’t think of another MacGuffin. This is it. This works. I know this works.’ And then we stopped. I just said, ‘O.K.,’ and that’s about the time I started Star Wars again. But then Harrison was kind of interested. And I said, ‘I won’t do it unless we can have that MacGuffin. Without the MacGuffin, I will not go near this thing.’ ”
Ford can laugh about Lucas’s obstinacy now. “He’s a stubborn sucker,” the actor says, “and he had an idea that he kept pushing into script form, and then they’d run it by me, and I’d usually rebel, and, finally, you know, one script came along that really struck me as being smart, not working too hard to give reference to the other films, but that carried on the stories we had told so far in a logical way. The character was allowed to age, and we found ourselves in a different period of time, and what I read was a great script, so I said, ‘Let’s go, let’s make this one.’ ”
The eventual shooting script bore the name David Koepp, a writer-director whose screenplay credits include War of the Worlds, Spider-Man, and the first two Jurassic Park movies, which were directed by Spielberg and leaned heavily on Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic special-effects shop. An earlier pass, which Spielberg loved and Lucas didn’t, was written by Frank Darabont, the writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and The Mist. I ask Lucas if each version had made use of the prize MacGuffin. “Mmm-hmmm,” he says. “They’re all the same.”And then (spoiler warning) Lucas gets a little more (spoiler alert) specific: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will apparently nudge our hero away from his usual milieu of spooky archaeology and into the realm of (spoiler Code Red) science fiction. “What it is that made it perfect was the fact that the MacGuffin I wanted to use and the idea that Harrison would be 20 years older would fit,” Lucas says. “So that put it in the mid-50s, and the MacGuffin I was looking at was perfect for the mid-50s. I looked around and I said, ‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t do a 30s serial, because now we’re in the 50s. What is the same kind of cheesy-entertainment action movie, what was the secret B movie, of the 50s?’ So instead of doing a 30s Republic serial, we’re doing a B science-fiction movie from the 50s. The ones I’m talking about are, like, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Blob, The Thing. So by putting it in that context, it gave me a way of approaching the whole thing.”
As New Age devotees already know, fossilized skulls made of quartz crystal actually do exist. But are they truly, as those who believe in their powers claim, pre-Columbian objects of Mayan or Aztecan origin? And do they really harbor supernatural properties, like the “skull of doom,” supposedly dug up by early-20th-century archaeologist F. A. Mitchell-Hedges? This is a matter of some dispute, right up there with the existence of Big Foot or Atlantis. In the world of Indiana Jones, however, as with the Holy Grail and the Ark, one goes with the legend.
Crystal skulls have already appeared in four Indiana Jones young-adult novels and as part of an Indiana Jones ride at Tokyo’s DisneySea theme park. In an episode of the TV series Stargate SG-1, they had alien origin. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it would seem, based on the above hints, that here, too, the crystal skulls are somehow tied into things, or beings, not of this world. What Lucas says—and he won’t say more—seems to support earlier Internet speculation that the scenes filmed in New Mexico may be set at Area 51, the Nevada military base which, according to conspiracy buffs and the creators of The X-Files, has been the site of U.F.O. and alien research.
No one outside of the filmmakers will know for sure until May 22, but it would be pretty cool if it turns out that Emperor Palpatine had dropped a crystal skull on Earth. Or maybe one was left behind by the skinny dudes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Or maybe it’s, like, E.T.’s cell phone. :)
Whatever, Lucas is convinced he won’t please everyone. “I know the critics are going to hate it,” he says. “They already hate it. So there’s nothing we can do about that. They hate the idea that we’re making another one. They’ve already made up their minds.” At least the legions of Indy geeks will be pleased, right? “The fans are all upset,” Lucas says. “They’re always going to be upset. ‘Why did he do it like this? And why didn’t he do it like this?’ They write their own movie, and then, if you don’t do their movie, they get upset about it. So you just have to stand by for the bricks and the custard pies, because they’re going to come flying your way.”
Spielberg and Lucas both have Norman Rockwell originals hanging in their workplaces, among them The Peach Crop (Lucas) and a sketch of Triple Self-Portrait (Spielberg). That affinity makes sense. Rockwell, the popular American artist, was loved in his own time by millions of Saturday Evening Post readers and dismissed by serious critics. But in 1999, 21 years after the artist’s death, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl was quoted thus in ArtNews: “Rockwell is terrific. It’s become too tedious to pretend he isn’t.” Collectors too are taking notice: a Rockwell canvas, Breaking Home Ties, sold for $15.4 million at a 2006 Sotheby’s auction.
Spielberg and Lucas, similarly, have been slammed. Like Rockwell, they take everyday moments and blow them up into the stuff of myth. Also, as with Rockwell, it looks like their reputations will only rise. If you check out the American Film Institute’s 2007 list of the all-time 100 greatest American movies, you’ll see Spielberg represented with Schindler’s List (No. 8), E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (No. 24), Jaws (No. 56), and Saving Private Ryan (No. 71), and Lucas making the grade with Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope (No. 13) and American Graffiti (No. 62). The first movie to combine their sensibilities, Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, checks in at No. 66. Movie-lovers can argue, but there it is: a reasonable take on the American films that will make posterity’s cut.
Although Lucas is sometimes accused of forcing actors to mouth wooden dialogue between the fantastic bouts of action that fill his movie’s frames, he certainly has a penchant for populating his huge stories with domineering fathers, virtuous mothers who die, the most villainous villains imaginable, and naïve heroes who are not quite equipped to win the day. Neither he nor Spielberg is sly or subtle, and neither one shies away from the big moment—a necessary quality in making blockbusters.
Ford, who has a closer working relationship with both men than probably any other actor, has special insight into how they do it: “First of all, they both have incredible chops as directors,” he says. “They both are wonderfully capable film directors, and I think they have an ambition to communicate their ideas. Strange as it seems, that’s not always the case with directors. I think it derives from a kind of empathy and an understanding of how the world works and how people behave. And I think they also understand the culture so well that they are able to satisfy their own ambitions for a film and at the same time include the audience in the process. Neither of them is ashamed of making audience films.”
The Indy series has succeeded, Lucas believes, largely because of its reliance on well-made stories. “There’s a difference between throwing a puppy on a freeway and watching what happens and constructing a story,” he says. “You don’t just put your main character in jeopardy and then that becomes entertainment. That’s why so many people have failed at this. Even though they may make some money, it doesn’t get to the level that the Indiana Jones films do. They’re a lot more complex than that. They’re like little watches that have a lot of pieces in them.” And if you don’t like the key piece at the center of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull—the MacGuffin—you’ll know who to blame.
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