Lucas wanted Indy 4 to be more “wacky”

Two years ago, before anyone had heard of crystal skulls, George Lucas hinted at the reluctance with which Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford had come to accept the concept behind what would turn out to be the newest Indiana Jones movie:

“I discovered a McGuffin,” continues Lucas, still reluctant to name said McGuffin. “I told the guys about it and they were a little dubious about it, but it’s the best one we’ve ever found… Unfortunately, it was a little too ‘connected’ for the others. They were afraid of what the critics would think. They said, “Can’t we do it with a different McGuffin? Can’t we do this?” and I said “No”. So we pottered around with that for a couple of years. And then Harrison really wanted to do it and Steve said, “Okay”. I said, “We’ll have to go back to that original MacGuffin and take out the offending parts of it and we’ll still use that area of the supernatural do deal with it”.

What, exactly, was so “connected” about this MacGuffin, and what, exactly, the “offending parts” of it were, we may never know. But Lucas recently made much the same point in an interview with the Associated Press:

“The MacGuffin of it slowed down a little bit from what my original enthusiastic version was. Again, that’s the way it works with Steven and Harrison and I,” Lucas said. “We’re not going to do anything anyone’s uncomfortable with. We want to do something everybody likes, we in the group, the three of us.

“They wanted to go off on some other tangent. I said, `I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stick with this no matter what, so we either do this or we don’t. That’s it.’ Finally, we got something that we could all compromise on and all be happy with. It wasn’t quite as wacky as I wanted it to be, but it still is subtle and nice and works really well and has the same idea behind it.”

To this, Harrison Ford adds:

Resurrecting Indy took more than a decade of debate, disagreement and compromise among the film’s three principals, Spielberg and Ford disliking a way-out-there initial idea Lucas had.

“It was the three of us, Steven, George and I, coming to agreement on the central notion of it all,” Ford said. “I think the original idea is still a large piece of it in the movie, but it’s been developed and worked on in ways that made it a lot more palatable to Steven and I.”

Arrrgh. Steven and me. Steven and me. Being a millionaire superstar does not excuse bad grammar. (And come to think of it, Lucas made a similar error above. They’re reinforcing each other’s bad habits.) But I digress.

What, in a nutshell, does all this compromising of Lucas’s original, enthusiastic, wacky idea mean? New York magazine’s ‘Vulture’ column sums it up in a headline: “Relax: The New Indiana Jones Movie Won’t Have That Many Aliens“.

In related news, the New York Times has an interview with Spielberg that includes this interesting quote on the movie’s style:

In fact, Mr. Spielberg said, he tries to cut as little as possible in these movies’ action sequences, because “every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there’s something wrong, that there’s some cheating going on.” So his goal is “to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut.”

Warming to the subject, he went on: “The idea is, there’s no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That’s not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in ‘The Bourne Ultimatum,’ is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I’ve studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you’ve got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It’s like every shot is a circus act.”

The “comedy” of it. I like that, truly.

Finally, the movie’s official website has a bunch of brand-new TV spots, some of which have footage that has never been seen before, and given this franchise’s interest in religious matters, I cannot help but note the presence of a nun in one of the spots — even if it looks like she’s simply running an asylum or something. Here are screen captures taken from the relevant shots: