Indiana Jones 5 uses VFX technology to de-age Harrison Ford back to original trilogy days
Indiana Jones 5's opening sequence uses de-aging software to flash back to Indy on an adventure in 1944
Aux News Indiana Jones
Even Harrison Ford couldn’t escape the clutches of Disney’s obsession with de-aging technology. The Indiana Jones 5 actor is now the third and final member of the Star Wars original trilogy trio to roll back the years with VFX software. Empire has revealed that a younger Indy will make an appearance in the upcoming film.
Thankfully, the uncanny tech won’t steal us from seeing Ford as the adventurer in his golden years. The de-aged software only comes into place in the movie’s opening sequence, where Indiana has to face off against a castle filled with Nazis all the way back in 1944, a few decades prior to him continuing to fight Nazis (but this time in NASA) in the fifth film’s setting of 1969.
“And then we fall out, and you find yourself in 1969,” director James Mangold told the publication. “So that the audience doesn’t experience the change between the ‘40s and ‘60s as an intellectual conceit, but literally experiences the buccaneering spirit of those early days… and then the beginning of now.”
With new software from VFX powerhouse Industrial Light & Magic, the film recreated a 1980s Ford by combing through archived footage of the actor, eventually blending it together with the newly shot scenes. The dedication in bringing back Raiders-era Indiana didn’t stop there, as the costume department even re-created his iconic brown leather jacket stitch-by-stitch.
“My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago,’” said producer Kathleen Kennedy. “We’re dropping you into an adventure, something Indy is looking for, and instantly you have that feeling, ‘I’m in an Indiana Jones movie.’”
Of course, Ford reacted to seeing his younger self on-screen as pretty much expected—by calling it “spooky” and acting like a dad that was perfectly fine with his flip phone, but will begrudgingly take your gift of that fancy iPhone 14. “This is the first time I’ve seen it where I believe it,” said the 80-year-old actor. ”It’s a little spooky. I don’t think I even want to know how it works, but it works.”
We’ll have to wait and see if Ford’s de-aged Indiana looks passable or veers too far into Luke Skywalker deepfake territory when Indiana Jones 5 swings into theaters June 30, 2023.
60 Comments
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I saw a billboard yesterday of a de-aged Harrison Ford saying “I could smile 12 weeks from conception!” It was so realistic!
Maybe this movie’ll just be a vision Indy had when he got dosed at Woodstock.
He went to Altamont instead
Well, Hells Angels sometimes wore Nazi gear, maybe he could beat them up and get like a half-dozen of them to stand in a line so he can shoot them all with one shot.
Why bother? They’re never going to fool the audience completely. And for that reason, I think they should just have a younger actor wear an Indiana Jones mask made by Ben Cooper from the 80s.
well considering everything i’ve heard about this movie so far, my money is on the old indiana jones teaming up with a young indiana jones, much to the delight of not me.
Why don’t they just have River Pho-Oh. Right.
oh no
Are you Matthew Perry?
Could he BE any more insensitive?
I don’t know what river pho is, but if you’re implying these decisions would have been better made over a nice warm bowl of pho, I can’t disagree.
Yet Keanu Reeves walks among us.
They’ve got the young Mark Hamill deepfake and the young Harrison Ford deepfake. We are one disgruntled Disney employee away from seeing Luke/Han slash fanfic played out in front of us on Youtube. God bless technology.
An Indy movie without Spielberg in the directors chair is a crap proposition from the get go.
Spielberg directed two not-great Indy movies. He’s not exactly four for four.
Agreed, but even a not-great Spielberg is still a Spielberg. Temple of Doom has moments of magic amidst all the child labor and heart gouging. And Crystal Skull… actually, fine, no I can’t go there.
I don’t know how to respond to someone who isn’t putting the heart-gouging from Temple of Doom in the plus column for that movie.
Unless they’ve deepfaked his face onto a younger stuntman and run his voice through a processor, he’s going to move and sound like an 80 year old Harrison Ford. It’s the same problem that The Irishman had with its software de-aging – there’s no way yet to make an old person move like a young person.
It seems like there’s some hope here. They did a good job de-aging James Earl Jones’s voice in Obi-Wan Kenobi, so it’s at least doable. And the thing with The Irishman is there were no stunts. They weren’t gonna hire a body double to have DeNiro walk around a gas station or whatever. With Indy, stunts are guaranteed and having Ford do them would be grotesquely foolish. Constructing a sequence with relative close-ups of Ford, stunt doubles, and some CG under proper light to touch things up doesn’t seem impossible.
They did a good job de-aging James Earl Jones’s voice in Obi-Wan Kenobi
And yet didn’t do a good job de-aging Hayden Christensen.
It’s true. It seems like they didn’t do much in general. Maybe figuring better to distract with some natural aging than distract with the uncanny valley?
I don’t know what they were thinking about Hayden/Anakin. AFAIK it was supposed to be a scene of Anakin and Obi-Wan practice dueling before Episode II, so he was supposed to be a teenager at that point.
He sure didn’t look like a teenager, and the few shots we saw his face could have easily had the lines around the mouth and eyes removed. It looked like they took Attack of the Clones era Anakin and did a bad aging makeup job on him to make him look older for no reason. That was distracting.
Exactly. DeNiro had little flailing t-Rex arms while he ‘roughed-up’ that guy.
There’s a whole bunch of exciting emerging technologies way beyond what they did in The Irishman, and it’s developing really quickly and exponentially. ILM definitely have been developing some proprietary systems based on this tech – heck, all the big VFX houses have, that’s the arms race at the moment.That said, the claim “there’s no way yet to make an old person move like a young person” presupposes that the extent of the approach they’re taking is head replacement. There will almost certainly be some shots where they do that. But you can do all kinds of wacky stuff like AI-based performance capture, and there’s loads of deep learning happening around movement. I’d be almost certain that ILM have invested a lot in R&D for this stuff.The Irishman by comparison takes the more traditional route of creating de-aged elements in 3D space and compositing them in. There was some interesting live-capture technology developed for that picture, but it’s honestly apples and oranges. There’s ways and means and they’re growing. Deep learning’s role in VFX goes way beyond just the standard Face-App stuff.
Interesting! Unsettling in its implications, but interesting!
Unsettling in its implications
Genie’s already out of the bottle.
Fortunately humans can evidently live with/turn a blind eye to any potentially catastrophic technology.
Ah yes, like that classic scene in Last Crusade where they digitally de-aged Harrison Ford.
Dude, that was Sean Connery!
“Indiana has to face off against a castle filled with Nazis all the way back in 1944, a few decades prior to him continuing to fight Nazis (but this time in NASA) in the fifth film’s setting of 1969.”Raiders of the Lost Ark debuted 41 years ago. If I’m understanding this correctly, in the new movie Professor Jones will age 41 years between 1944 and 1969. Am I missing something?
He had the wrong Grail all this time?
What they should have done, if I’ve done my math correctly, is have this movie take place in 1977. Then they could have had a scene where Indy is driving/riding down a street and passes a theater marquis with “Star Wars” on it. He could growl out something about “who would want to go see that crap?” It might have been enough to make me watch this when it hits streaming, anyway.
Raiders was set in 1936, so he will age 41 years between 1936 and 1969 instead of 33. Not quite as bad?
Not really bad at all. To have an 80 year old play a guy in his early 70s doesn’t seem bad. Especially since Indy probably didn’t follow much of a skin care routine.
Plus all that exposure to sun, wind and salt water. Not to mention the fact that back then everyone smoked, even if he didn’t. A 70 year old Indiana Jones would probably count himself lucky to look like 80 year old Harrison Ford.
And that there was no 80 year-old on the planet in 1969 who looked like Harrison Ford.
It’s not the years, it’s the mileage.
Ah, that’s a detail I hadn’t thought of. It’s been a very long time since I watched any of these movies, I assumed it had been set in the 40’s after reading this article. Not nearly as bad.
It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.
Just release the godamn trailer already.
In the entire history of CGI, this has been done effectively, precisely once, for Sean Young in Blade Runner 2049. I do not trust Spielberg/Mangold to get it right, and I wish they wouldn’t even try.
I thought Sam Jackson in Captain Marvel worked fairly well. It wasn’t a picture perfect recreation of what Jackson looked like at that age, but it evoked a young Jackson without falling into the uncanny valley or feeling like a fully cgi character.
I immediately thought of this, too; but then I remembered that a LOT of the shots of Jackson are in shadows or the dark, so it is easier to hide cg mistakes or oopsies that way.
Jackson limping around like a man of his actual age took me out of the reality of the film constantly in Captain Marvel, though. Hopefully they don’t have Indy’s de-aged body played by Harrison Ford at any point.
It helped that we hadn’t seen young Nick Fury before so it didn’t matter that he didn’t look like Sam Jackson actually did in the 90’s Nick Fury movie that never happened. We know what a younger Indy should look like, this flashback is set between Last Crusade and Crystal Skull.
Yeah, that one was good. I think Donald Pleasance in Halloween Kills was also really convincing, though they did mask it a little bit with film grain. Also I think it was primarily practical effects.
That wasn’t CGI.
Chris Nelson, the film’s make-up visual effects artist took to Instagram to show followers how it was don’t. Nelson says, “He was not CGI, but our own construction foreman Tom Jones Jr. in an 11 piece prosthetic makeup with hair pieces.”
Yeah, it was funny to see the horror crowd explode over typical “Boo, CGI” shit and then get “Actually”’d hard
Wow, that makes it even more impressive, I figured it must be touched-up digitally with how good it looked. I wish people would do THAT instead of the CGI stuff. Especially considering physicality of someone at 70 or 80 is not going to be anywhere close to at 40 (see also: Sam Jackson in Captain Marvel, he looks good except when he has to move). Guess it’s hard to get a real performance out of that if they’re trying to do a lot of acting closeups, but I think it would have been no problem for something like, I dunno, the ghoulish CGI in recent Star Wars movies/shows.
Why don’t we get more of that?
DeNiro looked so bizarre in The Irishman with this done. Looked younger but still moved like a geezer.
Honestly I thought his blue-ass eyes were the most distracting thing
Enjoying the more important reveal that the signature Indy opening action setpiece will be his entry and escape from a Nazi-held castle. It’s different enough from the others’ but of a piece with the first one: escaping from another fortress (but likely less booby-traps and more Nazis). I’m already wondering if Mangold’s gonna do a fade from a Disney Castle to the Nazi one a la all the older Paramount logo match-fade-cuts to other mountains & hills – or if that’s way too sinister, or if they just drop it. I can’t imagine there’s an artful match cut for the “Lucasfilm” presentation title.
I was wondering about the logo thing too. It won’t feel like the beginning of an Indy movie without it. Hopefully they’ve figured out something.
Man, you’re probably right, and it’s probably going to have something to do with ghosts. I think that’s the only major set-piece left from Indy planning sessions that hasn’t been touched yet.
won’t steal us from seeing Ford —> Jesus H. Christde-aged software —> de-aging softwarecomes into place —> comes into play (??)re-created —> recreatedstitch-by-stitch —> stitch by stitch
Was Alden Ehrenreich busy?
God they are going to do an Irishman. You would think Hollywood would learn its lesson from that.
Anthony Ingruber could have played the younger version, instead of Lucasfilm paying millions to ILM for a deepfake that will be roasted by online trolls.