Indiana Jones 5: they went all out to rejuvenate Harrison Ford

The ILM teams worked for three years on the special effects for this fifth part.

Updated January 1, 2024: While Canal + rebroadcasts The Dial of Destinywe are sharing an article on its behind the scenes, interspersed with links to its review and our Cannes interview with its main actor, Harrison Ford. Good reading !

Harrison Ford: “I’ve had times when there were a lot of crappy movies” (interview)

News of July 10, 2023: Who needs a fountain of youth when face swap exists? Harrison Ford will celebrate his 81st birthday in three days, and yet, in Indiana Jones 5, he appears twenty years younger in the flashback scenes. This jump in time is due to the Industrial Light & Magic studio, which spent three years working on the film’s special effects.

More than 100 artists set about developing and improving their already existing artificial intelligence program to create an impeccable Face Swap technique. This technique consists of pasting the features of one face onto another in an ultra-realistic way: here, the young Ford on the 80-year-old Ford.

“We knew we were going to have to use all the tools we had, and develop new ones”explained Andrew Whitehurst, head of special effects.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny represented a real challenge for the teams, who worked from elements shot on location, but also from archive images recovered from all the old films in the saga. Once all the necessary content was gathered, all the images had to be retyped one by one.

“As I have made several films for this studio, they can take back rushes, even those which did not end up in the final cuts. Then they can reuse them depending on the angle of the light or my expression. I don’t know exactly how they do it, but it’s definitely my face” had notably explained Harrison Ford on the set of Late Show by Stephen Colbert last February.

And it does not stop there. The machine they developed gave them a 2D rendering, which then had to be transformed into 3D. For this, Harrison Ford had to shoot all the shots centered on his face, in order to mix them with the initial rendering.

“If we managed to finish the project within the allotted time, it was largely because we were able to rely on Harrison’s performance. He was a driving force”added Andrew Whitehurst.

These rejuvenation techniques have already been used on several films before, like Ant-Man, And The Irishman in which Robert de Niro and Al Pacino become younger for a whole half of the film.

Our review of Indiana Jones 5, the very surprising final episode of the franchise