You’ll have a hard time finding two men in the film world that have more respect for each other than Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. However, just because you like and respect each other, doesn’t mean you’re always going to see eye to eye on everything. It appears such is the case with how the two giants view Indiana Jones and where they should go next.
The people at The Sunday Times have these quotes from Lucas when talking about the possibility of an Indiana Jones 5:
“Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.”
“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”
Now here’s the thing that no one will agree with anymore, but I still hold to it… I think George Lucas is still the best story concept guy in the movie business. He’s a piss poor director, but on the basic foundations his stories rule. Hell, even the Star Wars prequels… if you look at them each as 3-4 page outlines, the stories are BRILLIANT… but he ruined the movies by directing them himself… which he just has no knack for anymore.
So if you ask me (which no one is), everyone should take their hands off Indiana Jones EXCEPT Lucas, and then once he has his story, he should take his hands totally off it and hand it over to Spielberg to direct and make it. Two guys butting heads isn’t the way to make great cinema… Indy 4 proves that point. Just my two cents worth.
