When Disney bought Lucasfilm from George Lucas, everyone kept a friendly door open for him to offer his input, but he politely declined and let others take the reins on “Star Wars.” But still sitting in the franchise stable is Indiana Jones, who will return to the big screen in 2019 in a new film directed by Steven Spielberg, with Harrison Ford cracking the whip, presumably for the last time. And if you were wondering if Lucas was going to offer his input on where the story goes next, screenwriter David Koepp is setting the matter straight.
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“He’s not, to my knowledge. I’ve had no contact with him,” he told Collider.
So presumably that means the sequel story idea that “Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull” co-star Shia LaBeouf said was being tossed around way back in 2010 is off the table. But for now, Koepp is keeping his lips sealed on the script, but does at least offer the Macguffin this time around is going to be stronger.
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“I think that what [Indy] looks for and when he looks for it dictates what the movie’s gonna be. So the selection of the MacGuffin is everything. I think ‘Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,’ being set in 1957 there was a conscious desire to say, ‘Much like two of the other ones were World War II movies set in the 30s and early 40s, this is ’57 so a lot of our influences are gonna be science-fiction movies.’ You got that with the original [script], Jeb Stuart took the first shot at it with ‘Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars.’ That was a really conscious decision that dictated a lot about what the story would be and what the movie would be like, and I think that was followed through on really nicely. I thought Steve did a really good job with that. I don’t know that the idea was most suited to an Indiana Jones movie, but that was what we did,” Koepp elaborates. “So we tried to be very careful with the selection of the MacGuffin and the eras to give ourselves as much latitude to make the best kind of Indiana Jones movie that we most want to see. Learning how that’s the importance of the choice of the MacGuffin is a big deal.”
“It’s hard because you can learn like if something maybe didn’t work as well as you think it would well we certainly wouldn’t do that again, but you wouldn’t have done that again anyway, you already did it, so it’s hard to say. For me it was the MacGuffin dictates everything, and so we tried to make the best possible choice we could. Not that nobody didn’t try to make the best choice that they could in the past, but we tried to give us the one that gave us the Indiana Jones movie we most wanted to see,” he added.
So, presuming the next chapter is set in the ’60s or even ’70s, what could Indy be after? The Watergate tapes? Share your thoughts below. “Indiana Jones: Title To Be Determined” opens on July 19, 2019.
