Harrison Ford Didn't Want to Do Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Without Steven Spielberg
Harrison Ford has been the face of Indiana Jones since the franchise’s inception. But he was once reluctant to do a fifth Indiana Jones film without Steven Spielberg to work with.
Steven Spielberg didn’t direct Harrison Ford’s ‘Indiana Jones 5’
Ford recently revisited his iconic Indiana Jones franchise with Dial of Destiny. But before its 2023 debut, there had been talk of a fifth movie for years. Spielberg commented on how interested he was developing the sequel, with the only holdout being George Lucas.
“It’s up to George,” Spielberg once told Games Radar. “We have already agreed on the genre of the fifth movie, we already have a concept in mind. I don’t know where George is with the story. There is no Indy 5 until George says there is.”
Ford expressed similar interest in returning to the franchise. Although he only felt comfortable if Spielberg was still attached to the feature.
“I’ve always thought there was an opportunity to do another. But I didn’t want to do it without Steven [Spielberg],” Ford said in an interview with BBC. “And I didn’t want to do it without a really good script. And happily we’re working on both. Steven is developing a script now that I think we’re going to be very happy with.”
But after so many years, Spielberg decided to hand the franchise off to director James Mangold. According to Variety, a source claimed Spielberg thought it was time for a new generation of filmmakers to inherit the franchise.
Steven Spielberg once shared why he’d never recast Harrison Ford in ‘Indiana Jones’
Despite Ford getting older, Indiana Jones was one character the actor didn’t see himself aging out of. He was insistent that the Indiana Jones character wouldn’t and shouldn’t live on without him.
“Don’t you get it? I’m Indiana Jones,” Ford once told IGN. “When I’m gone, he’s gone. It’s easy.”
It seemed Spielberg thought the same way Ford did. He once told Screen International that the adventurer couldn’t be passed down to other actors like other large-than-life characters.
“I don’t think anyone could replace Harrison as Indy, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen,” Spielberg said. “It’s certainly not my intention to ever have another actor step into his shoes in the way there have been many actors that have played Spider-Man or Batman. There is only going to be one actor playing Indiana Jones and that’s Harrison Ford.”
Although, in an interview with The Sun, Spielberg did briefly toy around with the idea of turning Indiana Jones into a woman.
“We’d have to change the name from Jones to Joan. And there would be nothing wrong with that,” he quipped.
Steven Spielberg regretted directing ‘Indiana Jones 3’ over ‘Rain Man’
Spielberg has always had a lot of pride and admiration for his Indiana Jones film. But if he could turn back time, he might not have directed Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. At the time, he was developing the classic movie Rain Man with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. But he ended up exiting the project in favor of Indiana Jones, a decision that sometimes haunted him.
“With Rain Man, I spent almost half a year developing it with Dustin and Tom Cruise and Ron Bass,” Spielberg once said on Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated (via The Playlist). “I kept trying to get the screenplay to be better and better while having a stop date of the 12th of January, at which time I would have to start shooting in Indy 3, or we couldn’t make our Memorial Day 1989 release date. When I saw that I was going to go past January 12th and that I would have to step down from Indy 3, the promise I made to George was more important than making Rain Man. So, with great regret because I really wanted to work with Dustin and Tom, I stepped down from the movie.”
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