With Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny about to hit theaters in the US after opening yesterday in the UK and other territories around the world, James Mangold talks with Lucasfilm.com about the film and his long-standing love of Doctor Jones which stretches back to a 17-year-old Mangold seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981.
In Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Indy is up against time itself, both in hunting the titular Archimedes’ dial, which is said to have mystical properties, his own mortality, and the consequences of his decisions thus far. In fact, the fifth film in the franchise finds Indy as we’ve never seen him before: older, but perhaps not yet wiser, and at loose ends with his professional and personal life — including a meeting with his estranged goddaughter, Helena Shaw, played by Indy newcomer Phoebe Waller-Bridge — amid the backdrop of an ever-changing world.
“There are several different storylines stranding through the movie,” Mangold says. “One is obviously the adventure story involving the relic, but also one is about…time and its regrets. About choices we’ve made in the past, choices we wish we might have made differently. People we’ve hurt — maybe inadvertently, maybe intentionally. Times our eyes were closed to something that we wish we had seen. We understand from the moment we meet Indy in 1969 that he is haunted by something, but we don’t know what it is.”
