Harrison Ford Had All the Old Age Jokes Cut Out of ‘Indiana Jones’ 5
People have been calling Harrison Ford a “grumpy old man” for decades, and the typically untalkative film legend finally spoke out on the moniker when he saw the screenplay of the upcoming Indiana Jones sequel – “Don’t call me old,” ordered the octogenarian whip-cracker.
When Ford first read the script for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, he found that the screenwriting team of James Mangold and Jez & John-Henry Butterworth had done something that Indiana Jones fans have been doing since Crystal Skull – they made jokes about how absurd it is for an elderly explorer to engage in the same ass-kicking adventures that he’d been doing since his 30s.
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“There were a lot of old jokes in the script. We took them all out," Ford told The Hollywood Reporter presumably before he bumped a jukebox and slipped on a pair of aviators.
Ford described one of the cut “Indy too old” jokes from the movie, saying, “There is a moment (in Dial of Destiny) where he observes himself in this situation and says, ‘What the fuck am I doing in here?’” Ford clarified that his issue with the line wasn’t with the implication that an 80-year-old man ducking under bullet fire and leading high-speed car chases through the jungle is absurdly not age appropriate – he just thinks it’s lazy storytelling.
“I hate what I call ‘talking about the story.’ I want to see circumstances in which the audience gets a chance to experience the story, not to be led through the nose with highlights pointed out to them,” Ford explained, “I’d rather create behavior that is the joke of age rather than talk about it.” Ford’s complaints about age jokes don’t seem to be born from any kind of elderly insecurity, but from an apprehension towards the unsubtle MCU-esque quips and zingers that litter the script of every action film nowadays.
Ultimately, the joke Ford should have been most worried about removing from the Indiana Jones series was the entirety of Crystal Skull.
