It’s almost upon us, with a premiere at Cannes a few days before a
simultaneous worldwide release on May 22, but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull is a mystery. There is a television trailer for the
film, and now a cinema one, but just a handful of stills have been released,
and there have been no clues whatsoever about the plot. The action is set in
1957, the baddies are Russian, the object of the traditional quest, this
time, is a powerful crystal skull. That’s about the sum of what Steven
Spielberg, the director, and George Lucas, the producer, want fans to know.
Spielberg and Lucas are taking huge gambles on this fourth Indiana Jones
movie. Big-budget sequels are seldom released more than a couple of years
apart these days, but it’s been a full 19 years since Harrison Ford last put
on his fedora and cracked his bullwhip, in Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade. Most of the youthful audience at which Hollywood aims its movies
today weren’t even born then. And whoever heard of having a 65-year-old
actor - which is how old Harrison Ford is now - as the star of a
bone-crunching action movie?
The film-makers have taken other gambles. Spielberg decided early on that he
wanted the film to have a distinctly old-fashioned feel. He and his
cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, watched the three previous films so they
could match their style, itself based on the cliffhanger Saturday-matinée
serials of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. (Douglas Slocombe shot the first
three Indy films.)
“Both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride,” Spielberg says. “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.”
To achieve this look, Spielberg deliberately used few computer-generated shots
and employed much less fast cutting than most modern action movies feature.
Spielberg says he wanted to keep much longer shots than modern audiences
have become used to in films such as the Bourne series, which he says he
admires, because, “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel
there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on”. Partly that’s
because, for all the action, the Indy films are also comedies, and Spielberg
wanted “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything
happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut. To get the comedy
I want, you have to be old-fashioned”.
Spielberg and Lucas also took a decidedly old-fashioned approach to the
marketing of the film. While whole new divisions of studio marketing
departments have grown up to exploit the attention movies now get on the
internet, Spielberg and Lucas have done everything they can to try to make
sure people will know as little as possible about the film when they file
into the cinema. Extraordinary measures have been taken to keep the script a
secret. Shia LaBeouf had to read the script in Spielberg’s office, while the
director flew over John Hurt’s to the UK when Hurt insisted on reading it
before signing on to do the film - and flew it back to LA on the next plane.
Despite their best efforts, which included everyone connected with the film
signing cast-iron agreements not to divulge anything, aspects of the story
have seeped out. One extra playing a Russian soldier leaked key plot
elements to a newspaper in Oklahoma. “Apparently, the Soviet army was
searching for a skull in the jungles of South America, and Indiana Jones was
searching as well,” said the extra, whom Spielberg is said to have had
digitally removed from the film as punishment. “We took Indiana Jones
hostage and managed to find the skull.”
It has taken a long time to get a story that everyone - specifically Lucas
(whose original idea Indy was), Spielberg and Ford - could agree on. The
first script was written in the early 1990s and was called Indiana Jones and
the Saucer Men from Mars. Lucas’s idea was that, as the first three films
had replicated the movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s, with their emphasis
on Nazis as villains, the fourth should take its ideas from the serials of
the 1950s, when there was much more emphasis on space and aliens. But Ford
didn’t like it.
Over the years, five other writers wrote treatments or scripts, the closest to
getting made being one by Frank Darabont (who wrote The Shawshank
Redemption). It was Darabont who brought back Marion Ravenwood, among other
story elements that have remained in the movie. Spielberg loved the script,
but Lucas, who has power of veto over such things, didn’t like the story,
much to Darabont’s fury. He called Lucas “insane” for rejecting it and
provoked much internet ire against Lucas, who is almost universally derided
for the incredibly clunky scripts he wrote for the recent Star Wars movies.
In the end, the writer to get the script credit on the film was David Koepp,
who had co-written Spielberg’s 2005 film War of the Worlds. Koepp put the
emphasis on what Lucas was interested in, the mythology of “crystal skulls”,
which Ford calls “the mysto-crypto stuff that’s part of every Indiana Jones
movie”. Ford’s voiceover in the latest trailer makes it clear that
possession of the crystal skull is the MacGuffin – the narrative device –
that drives the movie. “Whoever returns the skull to the city temple will be
given control over its power,” Ford intones.
The leaks apparently quite depressed Spielberg, according to Lucas, who has
said he told his friend audiences would not be “coming to see the plot.
They’re coming to see Steve Spielberg interpret a story. You can’t get that
any other way than by seeing the movie”. Which, of course, millions of us
will.
