'THIS is a recreational activity for me," is surely among the last things you'd expect to hear from the director of a huge, costly, dauntingly complex summer action movie as it nears completion, surrounded by feverish expectation. But that is what Steven Spielberg says, speaking from a dub stage where he is supervising the sound mixing of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, the first new instalment in 19 years of the crowd-pleasing adventure movie franchise that began in 1981 with Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
"In 1989," Spielberg says, referring to the year Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade came out, "I thought the curtain was lowering on the series, which is why I had all the characters literally ride off into the sunset at the end. But ever since then, the most common question I get asked, all over the world, is: 'When are you going to make another Indiana Jones?'"
It's a fair guess that cinema operators and executives at Paramount Pictures have asked that question at least as frequently as the rest of us: the three Indy pictures – Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom (1984) was the one in the middle – have raked in well over a billion dollars worldwide from their cinema releases alone. The anticipation, on the part of both fans and suits, falls somewhere between keen and breathless.
The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull will be screened in public for the first time next Sunday at the Cannes film festival. But what little that is known about the new film has had fans salivating over every morsel of information. Shia LaBeouf plays the whip-cracker's assistant with youth on his side, but there are also rumours that he may turn out to be the love child of Indy and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen, who returns as Indy's love interest from Raiders). The only other certainty is that it is set in 1957 and that Jones's enemies are Cold War Soviet forces, led by Cate Blanchett.
"I'm having a great time," Spielberg says. But audiences could be forgiven for thinking that getting back in the saddle might be difficult after the director has moved on to films such as Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, which were still epics, but of a far more considered and sombre subject matter and tone. So much has changed in film technology and special effects in the past two decades too, alongside the public's expectations of action cinema. But Spielberg has been very vocal about the smooth transition for all involved back into filming.
"For me, making the latest instalment of Indiana Jones was like getting back on the bicycle I hadn't ridden in 18 years. And I was able to keep my balance without training wheels. I was sort of amazed that all of us got our Indy legs back in the first couple of days of shooting, and that was the good news. It was a real reunion, with the sweetest memories we shared from 1980 through 1989. And to have Karen Allen back, and to get Harrison back in such great form."
Spielberg certainly sounds excited, and the secret of the Indiana Jones films' success has always been their free-spirited inventiveness, a what-the-hell quality that can't (or shouldn't) be faked, even on a gigantic budget.
Authenticity is very much on his mind when he makes one of these unabashedly preposterous movies, whose hero (still played by Harrison Ford, now 65) is a two-fisted, bullwhip-wielding academic archaeologist zipping around the globe in search of rare mystical artefacts and in the process running afoul of Nazis, creepy human-sacrifice cults and other exemplars of unambiguous, unadulterated evil.
Of course, the authenticity Spielberg is concerned with here is something other than the historical realism of, say, Schindler's List or Munich; what he wants to talk about is the physical integrity of the action, of which there is, in an Indiana Jones movie, plenty.
Spielberg has admitted that he and Ford both had concerns about whether they could recapture the excitement of the earlier films, saying: "We're both older – and we both look a bit older – but at the same time Harrison needed to recapture the caustic, laconic spirit of Dr Jones, and certainly he was going to have to manage the action, and he did both of those things amazingly well, far beyond what I expected. And he just did it so brilliantly and so effortlessly. He was just a little more out of breath after every stunt, just a little more – and so was I."
The tone and style of the Indy films derive from the movie serials of the 1930s and Forties, which Spielberg, growing up in the Fifties, used to see on Saturday mornings at a revival theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona. "They made a great impression on me, both because of how exciting they were and because of how cheesy they were," he says. "I'd kind of be involved in the stories and be ridiculing them at the same time. One week they'd give us a cliffhanger with the good guy going off the cliff, the car crashing on the rocks below and blowing up, and then the next week he's fine. They forgot to show us the cut of the guy jumping out of the car? That we weren't going to do in the Indiana Jones series."
In fact, Spielberg says, 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".
He adds: "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."
And in 1981, in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, that approach was so old-fashioned it looked new. (It's difficult to remember now just how stodgy and joyless the action genre had become, even the James Bond films.)
In the 27 years since, practically every action filmmaker has tried to drink from the grail of Indiana Jones, to tap into the movie's quasi-mystical kinetic (and commercial) power: the pace had to be blindingly fast; the stunts insanely elaborate; the villainy extra-villainous; the hero's attitude blithe, insouciant, almost sociopathically cool. Spielberg and George Lucas – who produces the movies and who dreamed up the basic idea of the series – have a lot to answer for. Spielberg remains tightlipped about the content of The Crystal Skull, but has admitted that he "had to go back to a box that I had helped invent in the 1980s to accomplish this task of bringing Indiana Jones back to life in the 21st century".
When asked what kind of films he enjoyed most as a boy, Spielberg replies simply: "Anything with a lot of movement." This kind of randomness is risky – not to be tried at home, or by any filmmaker less prodigiously gifted than Spielberg. You need a rigorous imagination for visual comedy to make films as exhilaratingly ridiculous as these.
"John Williams (the film composer who provided Spielberg, and Lucas on Star Wars, with iconic theme tunes] and I have a word we use when we have something we think the audience will love," Spielberg explains. "Maybe it'll be a little over the top, and we ask each other: 'Are we being too shameless?' In a way I think we've both grown kind of proud of being shameless."
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The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is released May 22 •
www.indianajones.comThe full article contains 1413 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
