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Steven Spielberg could have expected to field any number of questions this afternoon after unveiling the much-hyped Indiana Jones movie to the world: Why now? What exactly is a crystal skull? Did he ever witness Harrison Ford, after a difficult stunt, clutch his back and scream, “Ow! My lumbago!” Spielberg probably didn't anticipate being asked if the Communists made him do it.
Yet that was the first question at the press conference following the premiere screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was a suitably surreal capper on a day that would already have given Fellini enough material for a couple of movies. The journalist posing the question – who said he was from a “free China” website – seemed to be suggesting that Communist governments, and not the richest men in Hollywood, had been the driving force behind Indiana Jones IV. The expression on Spielberg's face was priceless and he finally said, “Do you want me to actually answer that question?”
The answer, not surprisingly, was no, Indiana Jones IV is not a Red plot. The reason that the film's villains are Communist (Russians, in this case) is simple, Spielberg said: The first Indiana Jones movie for 19 years is set in 1957, at the height of the Cold War.
Visual riffs on the era are everywhere, from the Atomic Café in the opening scene to the dummy village in the American desert that exists only to be levelled by a nuclear test. That scene – which sees Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones silhouetted against a mushroom cloud – brought a puzzled question from a Japanese journalist, who wondered what the filmmakers were doing playing with such a painful issue.
Harrison Ford, director Steven Spielberg and producer George Lucas pose during a photocall for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull' at the 61st Cannes International Film Festival on Sunday in Cannes, southern France. (GUY KINZIGER/AFP/Getty Images)
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“It's a sensitive topic to all of us as well,” Spielberg said, remembering a childhood of listening to air-raid sirens and learning to duck and cover. “My formative years were spent under the threat of thermonuclear annihilation.”
Ford noted that “there's no more graphic image of evil than the power of the atomic bomb,” while the other members of the panel – including producer George Lucas and co-stars Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone and John Hurt – looked on soberly.
It was a strangely grave way to begin a discussion about a movie that is, essentially, a ripping yarn about tombs, scorpions, ESP and duels fought between moving vehicles. Soon enough, talked turned to what had finally convinced the Hollywood power trio to come together again. It seems Ford had brought up the idea in 1994 after presenting Spielberg with his Oscar for Schindler's List. Spielberg admitted that he'd been the most reluctant of the three to come on board, though the popular vote was on Indy's side: Whenever people approached him in the street, the director said, they only ever asked when he would make a sequel to ET or another Indiana Jones picture. “Nobody ever comes up to me and says, ‘When are you going to make a new AI or 1941 or Hook.'”
The trick was creating a script and for Lucas to come up with a believable MacGuffin – Hitchcock's term for the central object everyone in the film's searching for. Lucas, a history buff, insists that the MacGuffins in all the movies have to be trophies that real-life archeologists have sought (you're just going to have to see the movie to find out the significance of the crystal skull.) The world's first glimpse of Indiana Jones in two decades caused a bit of chaos in Cannes, with fans and reporters failing to heed the plaintive words of one person caught in the crush: “It's just a movie, folks!”
Making the world a peaceful place seemed to be the theme of the press conference, but the unseemly shoving and screaming among journalists from different countries to get into the screening hardly provided a successful model of geopolitical co-operation. Early reports on the film were mixed. Every critic's got a pen (or iBook) at the ready, but Ford says he's not fazed, and is more concerned about the report he gets back from his clients – that is, the people who buy the popcorn. “I'm not afraid at all [of critics],” he said. “I expect to have the whip turned on me. It's not unusual for something that's popular to be disdained by some people. I work for the people who pay to get in – they're my customers. … We need this movie to reacquaint people with the pure joy of sitting in a dark room with a bunch of other people, seeing something you haven't seen before that will kick your butt.”
In the latest butt-kicking adventure, Indy is a tenured but embattled professor; it's the age of McCarthy and FBI paranoia. That's the grounding in reality; the fantasy is provided by Cate Blanchett's Russian army villainess, a cross between Mr. Spock and Rosa Klebb. Indy's got trouble with his old girlfriend Marion (Karen Allen) and breathing down his neck is a greaser with attitude named Mutt (Shia LaBeouf). LaBeouf was given a stack of period films like Blackboard Jungle and Red River to study (Lucas also said he was given a stack of early Playboys, although it was unclear if this was a joke or just wishful thinking on everyone's part.) It seems clear that LaBeouf's character is being groomed to pick up the whip at some point in the future, although Spielberg played coy about whether there would be a new instalment in this serial: “Only if you want more of them.”
