Entertanment Weekly recently did a joint interview with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, in anticipation of next month’s release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and along the way Lucas offered this interesting description of one of the franchise’s basic operating principles:
LUCAS: The supernatural part has to be real. [He taps the table] Which is why they’re very hard, and you run out [of options] very fast. You have to have a supernatural object that people actually believe in. People believe that there was an Ark of the Covenant, and it has these powers. Same thing with the Sankara stones, same thing with the Holy Grail. We may have exaggerated some of its powers, but basically there are people who believe there is a Holy Grail, brought back by the Knights Templar. . . .
LUCAS: You do a whole lot of research around the subject matter to try to get it as plausible as possible. We don’t deal with time machines. We don’t deal with phony notebooks that don’t exist. We don’t deal with pyramids in 10,000 B.C., because there weren’t any.
I must say that, when I first saw Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as an 11-year-old Bible-history geek, I was thrilled to hear the characters in this major Hollywood movie talk about obscure historical facts like Pharaoh Shishaq‘s invasion of Judah during the reign of Rehoboam. So I appreciate Lucas’s point as far as that is concerned. But I was less impressed by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), which introduced hokey stuff like the Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword — which, as far as I know, was invented just for the movie and doesn’t have the background or history that the Knights Templar obviously do. It just made the third film seem that much more bogus.
In any case, the interview also includes this interesting tidbit on Lucas and Spielberg’s differing reactions to blogs like this one, which obsess over spoiler-ish details months before the release date:
STEVEN SPIELBERG: It really is important to be able to point out that the Internet is still filled with more speculation than facts. The Internet isn’t really about facts. It’s about people’s wishful thinking, based on a scintilla of evidence that allows their imaginations to springboard. And that’s fine.
GEORGE LUCAS: Y’know, Steven will say, ”Oh, everything’s out on the Internet [in terms of Crystal Skull details] — what this is and what that is.” And to that I say, ”Steven, it doesn’t make any difference!” Look — Jaws was a novel before it was a movie, and anybody could see how it ended. Didn’t matter.
SPIELBERG: But there’s lots and lots of people who don’t want to find out what happens. They want that to happen on the 22nd of May. They want to find out in a dark theater. They don’t wanna find out by reading a blog…. A movie is experiential. A movie happens in a way that has always been cathartic, the personal, human catharsis of an audience in holy communion with an experience up on the screen. That’s why I’m in the middle of this magic, and I always will be.Do you think the sanctuary of the dark theater is being eroded?
LUCAS: No! Look, it’s like sports —
SPIELBERG: Yes. I think it is being eroded, by too much information and too much misinformation, especially.
LUCAS: But look, it’s like sports. This isn’t new. When March Madness gets started with the NCAA [basketball tournament], there are thousands of blogs out there. Rampant speculation. If you follow it enough, you go crazy. [With Crystal Skull], you don’t know what’s actually gonna happen till you walk into that theater. I don’t care if you know the whole story, I don’t care if you’ve seen clips. I don’t care how much you’ve seen or heard or read. The experience itself is very different, once you walk in that theater.
SPIELBERG: Well, here’s my debate on that. I’ve always been stingy about the scenes I show in a teaser or a trailer. Because my experience has been — and my kids’ experience has been, ’cause they talk out loud in theaters, like everybody else does today — that if a scene they remember from the trailer hasn’t come on the screen yet, and they’re three quarters of the way through the movie, they start talking. ”Oh — I know what’s gonna happen! Because there was that one little scene they haven’t shown yet in the movie I’m experiencing, and it’s coming up!” And it ruins everything.
I’m with Spielberg on the trailers, definitely. But seeing a specific shot in a trailer is not the same as hearing about a possible plot element that surfaced in an early draft of the screenplay, or seeing a photo of one of the movie’s props. We all know that stuff gets changed in rewrites, or ends up on the cutting-room floor, or gets relegated to the deleted-scenes section of the DVD, so I don’t think we are necessarily inclined to take stuff like that as seriously as we take the footage in the actual trailers. Then again, many trailers include shots that don’t appear in the final films, too — see National Treasure: Book of Secrets for a particularly extreme example of that. So even trailers, we should take with a grain of salt.
I also love the way these guys throw around words like “sanctuary” and “holy communion” while discussing the act of moviegoing.
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