Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Director Details How the Hero Has Changed Over the Years

With the first three Indiana Jones films being released within a span of a decade, and with the middle entry taking place prior to the debut installment, audiences might have loved seeing Harrison Ford as the archaeologist, but they didn’t entirely see the character go through much of a personal evolution, which is set to change with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Director James Mangold recently recalled how, not only has the character evolved over the years, but his journeys have taken him to a point where he’s more reluctant to embark on the kinds of exploits he might have been more willing to throw himself into when he was a younger man. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is expected to hit theaters on June 30th.

“We can’t hide from where we are in our lives — none of us can — and neither can Indiana Jones,” Mangold shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “I wanted to follow Harrison’s own lead and simply deal with it straight on. It’s not just a movie about a hero in his twilight years who is called back into action. It’s more than just that his bones might ache, it’s that his soul might ache, or that some of his optimism or sense fitting into the world might have evaporated. The mistake you can make in movies — and we’ve all seen movies like this — is where someone is of a ripe age, but the entire movie is continuing this charade along with them that they’re not that old.”

With how much time has passed within the franchise itself, this presented Ford and Mangold with both challenges and opportunities when it came to uncovering unexplored elements of the character.

“The first three Indiana Jones movies took place in roughly the same period,” the filmmaker expressed. “They all easily fit with the serialized, theatrical, almost screwball-action style of the movies that were being released in the period they’re set in. The challenge for [director Steven Spielberg] on [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull], and for me on this one, is: How do you move forward into new decades where the world is no longer seen in such clear demarcations of black and white and good and evil? Where the whole concept of raiding tombs and fighting over relics is looked at in a different way? It’s not about changing the story but allowing the character to experience how the world has changed around him.”

He continued, “And our perception of politics is more gray … Who’s a villain? Who are we working with? Who are we fighting against? Proxy wars, all of that. It’s not as simple as the era around World War II. What happens to a hero built for a black-and-white world, when he finds himself in one that is gray? It’s a problem that produces humor, produces contradictions, produces adjustments that this character’s going have to make.”

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is expected to hit theaters on June 30th.

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