Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Photo: CBS via Getty Images, CBS Photo Archive. All rights reserved.
In the forthcoming, fifth “Indiana Jones” film (theatrical release: June 30), Harrison Ford appears as a young man in the approximately 25-minute prologue: Thanks to de-aging technology, the 80-year-old appears in his mid-forties, which in part according to previous reviews, not only caused enthusiasm. Harrison Ford defended this depiction, and the technology behind it, at the Cannes Film Festival.
Some fans are wondering why a younger actor wasn’t put in Ford’s place – it still looks more convincing than Ford’s computer-smoothed face. In the process, Ford says, something much better would have happened — the producers would have used unused Ford footage from decades past. “I know that’s my face,” Ford told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s not Photoshop magic – this is what I looked like 35 years ago. Because Lucasfilm has all the images from all the films that we’ve made together over the years.”
“This process, the scholarly evaluation of this collection, has been put to good use… It would only be a ruse if it weren’t backed by a story. But it is emotional and looks real. And so I think the technology has been used very cleverly.”