INTERVIEW: We talked nostalgia and cynicism in modern cinema in a roundtable chat with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny director James Mangold.
If you grew up in the 80s and loved the movies, Indiana Jones would have been a pivotal figure in your imaginary worlds. That was true for James Mangold, the first director to take on an Indiana Jones film outside of icon Steven Spielberg.
Talking at a press junket roundtable before the release of the fifth - and final for now - instalment, the acclaimed director recalled seeing the first one in the cinema in 1981 when he was a teenager, already bursting with dreams of becoming a filmmaker.
"Before I made this movie, Indiana Jones was first and foremost a kind of a primal memory of being 17 years old and seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark in my local cinema and being so inspired, knowing I was watching not just an inventive film or an entertaining film or a well-crafted film, but a great film. It provided me with a kind of inspiration."
He continues in almost a fervent rapture about the film's score, staging, acting, cinematography and set design - he admits that he could easily teach an eight-week class on that movie alone. Now that he has made an Indiana Jones film himself, the franchise has become incredibly personal to him, a dream come true he could never have comprehended at 17.
"That, to me, is kind of personally moving because these are my heroes. We make movies about heroes, but in my own world, these people were my heroes who lived in a faraway universe from my upstate New York town, and somehow my life carried me to them.
"When you make a movie together, you also become friends, you get to know each other, and so that opportunity to get to know my heroes, to get to work with them, to see them, and they see me in all kinds of light and all kinds of stresses is one of the profound honours of my lifetime."
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