Everyone who has a pair of eyes and saw the ‘Star Wars’ prequels knows George Lucas has shit for taste. Hell, even Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford are completely aware of it and have alluded to it many times. It’s been noted ad nauseum that resurrecting the ‘Indiana Jones’ franchise took a decade because all three principals, Spielberg, Ford and Lucas had veto power and the two reasonable members of the trio couldn’t agree with Lucas’ original idea, one that the AP is calling an “way-out-there initial idea.”
In the same interview Ford alludes to the alien theme that is likely running (about to ruin?) “Indiana Jones & The Crystal Skulls” and again basically mentions that Lucas is an idiot.
“It was the three of us, Steven, George and I, coming to agreement on the central notion of it all,” Ford said. “I think the original idea is still a large piece of it in the movie, but it’s been developed and worked on in ways that made it a lot more palatable to Steven and I.”
Translation: Lucas is a stubborn fuck and insisted that there be some Roswell-like aliens from outer space central theme in ‘Indy 4’ and we finally relented, but it’s done in a tasteful way that hopefully shouldn’t turn off everyone who’s childhood’s were ruined by the shitty ‘Star Wars’ prequels.
You’ll remember earlier in an Entertainment Weekly article:
At one point George Lucas thought that since the film was going to be set in the 1950s (to jive with Ford’s now advancing age) the genre should match that era: aliens invading Earth in spaceships (or some shit like that) with the military in hot pursuit (a popular genre trope of the ’50s obviously). Hilariously, Harrison Ford wasn’t with it. “No way am I being in a Steve Spielberg movie like that,” he told Entertainment Weekly,” with seemingly near disgust at Lucas’ original concept.
The AP writes:
Though the filmmakers have been tightlipped on the plot, the era – 1957 instead of the 1930s – and the trailer’s image of a crate marked ”Roswell, New Mexico, 1947,” imply aliens are involved. Roswell is where UFO buffs claim an alien spaceship crashed in 1947. Just as the first three Indy flicks were inspired by the supernatural B-movies of the 1930s, Lucas conceded he took his cue for the new film from the equivalent of the 1950s, when B-movies centered on extraterrestrial menace.
And they further bring home the point that Ford and Spielberg hate Lucas’ ideas. Hell the “filmmaker”/CGI-enthusiast knows it himself and it sounds like there’s not enough ridiculousness for his taste, in other words, he had to compromise (gasp!).
“The MacGuffin of it slowed down a little bit from what my original enthusiastic version was. Again, that’s the way it works with Steven and Harrison and I,” Lucas told the AP. ”We’re not going to do anything anyone’s uncomfortable with. We want to do something everybody likes, we in the group, the three of us. They wanted to go off on some other tangent. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stick with this no matter what, so we either do this or we don’t. That’s it.’ Finally, we got something that we could all compromise on and all be happy with. It wasn’t quite as wacky as I wanted it to be, but it still is subtle and nice and works really well and has the same idea behind it.”
Hilarious. There you have it. Aliens involvement in ‘Indy 4’ basically confirmed.