Indiana Jones 5 Burning Questions: How Long Did It Take To De-Age Harrison Ford?
The fountain of youth exists — in digital format.
The first time Harrison Ford appears in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny as the iconic fedora-wearing, whip-cracking archaeologist, the then 79-year-old actor looks like he just walked off the set of 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark into a first act set in 1944.
Throughout the 25-minute long prologue (the most action-packed sequence in a movie that's better appreciated for its introspective moments), it’s hard not to do a double take on how the hands of times are turned back for Ford via digital de-ageing.
We’ve seen how the AI face-lifts were used before in The Irishman and Gemini Man but how much has the technology evolved since then? Clearly a lot, but there’s still room for improvement.
While some shots of young Indy are remarkably uncanny, for the most part — the close-ups, especially — where he feels less human and more like a CG character in the cutscenes of a video game. It ends up being something surreal and distracting that takes the viewer out of the story.
So much so that it has us thinking about a few questions. Starting with...
No.1: Did they really de-age Harrison Ford? Or did they use a digital double?
Oh, it’s Harrison Ford alright.
Per Total Film, director James Mangold said because Ford was “incredibly gifted and agile” for his age, it was a cinch for him “to pretend that he was 35” when filming the scenes. To make him look 35, however, Mangold turned to SPFX titan Industrial Light & Magic, which employed a cutting-edge face replacement software called ILM FaceSwap.
“We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day,” said Mangold. “I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced.”
Ford himself was stunned by this state-of-the-art deepfake application.
“They have this artificial intelligence program that can go through every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns,” he told Stephen Colbert in February. “Because I did a bunch of movies for them, they have all this footage, including film that wasn’t printed. So they can mine it from where the light is coming from, from the expression. I don’t know how they do it. But that’s my actual face. Then I put little dots [tracking markers] on my face and I say the words and they make [it]. It’s fantastic.”
Can you tell them apart? Harrison Ford, de-aged in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and in a publicity still for Raiders of the Lost Ark from 1981.
No. 2: So it was really Harrison Ford 2021 with a younger digital face throughout the 1944 prologue?
Yes — and no. For some of the more, ahem, challenging sequences (both in the prologue as well in the later 1969-set story), stunt performers stood in Ford. And to make life easier for the artisans doing the digital grafts, the stunt players wore realistic masks of young Ford.
IJ Adventure Outpost, an unofficial blog on Twitter dedicated to all-things Indiana Jones, shared (unauthorised?) photos of the prosthetic veil and, boy, are they downright creepy, not unlike the one Michael Myers used in the Halloween movies. “This is my sleep paralysis demon,” one netizen reacted. Another wrote: “That’s horrifying.”
That said, we now know what to dress up as come October 31…
No. 3: By the way, how old is Indiana Jones supposed to be in Dial of Destiny?
The movie is set in 1969 and that makes him 70. According to The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV series, Jones was born on July 1, 1899.
No. 4: How long did Ford’s de-ageing process take?
Three years, according to Mangold, and “a couple hundred” artists by ILM visual effects supervisor Robert Weaver’s account. “A couple hundred”? In another interview, Weaver said “a team of over 100”. The process was so complicated that Weaver lost count. Maybe when the movie arrives on streaming, we can do a head count by examining the end-credits crawl. (As a reference, about 500 artists spent two years working on The Irishman.)
No. 5: In theory, the de-ageing technology makes it possible for Ford, even though he’d made it abundantly clear that Dial of Destiny is his last ride, to reprise a younger version of himself, should he change his mind, right?
Ford was asked about this at Dial of Destiny’s press conference at the Cannes Film Festival and Kathleen Kennedy, producer and Lucasfilm president, jumped in and said, “No.” Ford then added, “You got the answer from the right person.” Watch the press conference here:
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now in cinemas. The first four Indiana Jones movies are available on Disney+.
Photos: Disney, TPG News/Click Photos, Twitter/IJ Adventure Outpost
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