Just last year George Lucas put his foot in his mouth calling Disney “white slavers” after an interview with Charlie Rose, when speaking about selling the Star Wars rights to them. He would later apologize, but hard to really take back such a horrible statement.
I guess Steven Spielberg hasn’t got the memo that everyone is opposed to Lucas making these films anymore after how horrible Kingdom of The Crystal Skull turned out, as he revealed to the press via Comic Book Resources that he’ll be executive producing Indiana Jones.
“George is going to be an executive producer on it with me,” the filmmaking icon told reporters on Monday during a press roundtable for his upcoming film “The BFG,” when it was suggested that — following the 2012 sale of the Lucasfilm properties to The Walt Disney Company and Lucas’ reported retirement from producing films — that Spielberg would make the recently announced fifth Indiana Jones film without his longtime friend and collaborator.
“Of course — I would never make an ‘Indiana Jones’ film without George Lucas,” Spielberg said. “That would be insane.”
Steven and George uniting might make some people excited, for me this could breed even more bad ideas. They each bounced-off bad ideas for Kingdom of Crystal Skull, and Lucas had killed Frank Darabont’s (Walking Dead, The Mist, The Green Mile, Shawshank Redemption) Indiana Jones and The City of Gods script, that likely would have been more faithful to the original Indy films. Frank had been closely involved with the TV series The Young Adventures of Indiana Jones, so it’s not like he didn’t have strong connections to the franchise.
Talking to Empire, Spielberg was quite aware that people weren’t happy with the last installment and threw Lucas under the bus a little bit for the MacGuffin. While taking the blame for the super-dumb scene with Indy hiding in a fridge during a nuclear blast.
“I sympathize with people who didn’t like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin,” Spielberg told Empire in an interview that will be featured in their next issue. “George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn’t want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in – even if I don’t believe in it – I’m going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I’ll add my own touches, I’ll bring my own cast in, I’ll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that.”
“Don’t blame George,” he said of the sequence. “That was my silly idea. People stopped saying ‘jump the shark’. They now say, ‘nuked the fridge’. I’m proud of that. I’m glad I was able to bring that into popular culture.”
I really hope it’s more of an advisory role, and Lucas doesn’t hijack the script or story again.
Indiana Jones 5 has the slatted release date of July 19th, 2019.
SOURCE: CBR