By 
It’s no secret that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull faced resistance from star Harrison Ford and director Steven Spielberg on the long road to its 2008 release, and that George Lucas’ insistence that aliens could be a viable plot device in the movie was a big part of that resistance.
Lucas had been pitching Indy vs aliens since the 1990s, and after various writers had worked on scripts for the belated fourquel, David Koepp’s screenplay about Indy reuniting with Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark and discovering he has a son while searching for an alien skull in Peru finally took Lucas’ idea from seed to fruit. But even Koepp admits he took the job with “some trepidation,” and a new oral history of Spielberg’s movies reveals more of the behind-the-scenes battle among the director, Lucas, and Ford.
Noting that Crystal Skull was a “tough production” for cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, Lucasfilm’s former president Kathleen Kennedy recently told Vulture that “Steven was struggling with that movie. Harrison was struggling with the movie. They didn’t want to do a Raiders movie that involved aliens, and they kind of got into a fight with George about it.”
Lucas noted that he had wanted Crystal Skull to be “kind of a War of the Worlds sort of thing,” but that Ford and Spielberg both said they weren’t going to do another sci-fi film, with Spielberg already having dabbled with alien shenanigans in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Ford having already done Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy and Blade Runner. Still, Lucas was convinced that a fourth film in the franchise would be the perfect opportunity for everyone’s favorite fedora-wearing archaeologist to do something different. “I said, ‘Steven, this is perfect because it’s the 1950s, when flying saucers were a whole thing,’ but he said ‘no.’”
Eventually, the pair compromised, with Lucas suggesting that the aliens might be from another dimension instead, though that aspect of the movie was somewhat lost in the execution. “Steven put that last shot in, where they get into a flying saucer and take off,” Lucas explained. “He was rationalizing it by saying, ‘Well, they’re going to another dimension. They have to get there somehow.’ I said, ‘It looks like a flying saucer.’”
It’s hard to argue with him there. Crystal Skull’s interdimensional beings both look like traditional grey-faced aliens and set off on their journey in a saucer-shaped ship through a portal. Lucas got his way in the end, which ultimately convinced Ford that a fifth movie in the franchise was necessary.
“They ended up all of them doing what George wanted to do, which was probably the right thing,” Kennedy added. “But Harrison and Steven were not 100 per cent on board. That’s why the movie, out of the four that Steven made, is the weakest. And that’s why Harrison was so deeply committed to [Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny]. He didn’t want [Crystal Skull] to be the end.”
The post Spielberg and Ford Fought George Lucas on the Worst Indiana Jones Sequel (and Lost) appeared first on Den of Geek.
