Harrison Ford was ‘agile’ enough in ‘Indiana Jones 5’ to play half his age for de-aged opening scene: director

foxnews.com:

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" director James Mangold said this week that the fifth installment of the franchise opens with a 25-minute action sequence in which Harrison Ford, 80, plays a 35-year-old version of himself.  "I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35," Mangold told Total Film magazine of Ford who he called "incredibly gifted and agile." He added, "But the technology involved is a whole other thing."  Mangold explained that dots were placed on Ford’s face during the scene that takes place in 1944 and using VFX technology and old Lucasfilm footage of the actor as a younger man, he was de-aged.

The new film is set in the space race-era of 1969.  "We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day," he told the magazine. "I could shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced." The director called the technology "incredible," saying he did not think about it while shooting the sequence. "I just focused on shooting what’s [approximately] a 25-minute opening extravaganza that was my chance to just let it rip," he said. "The goal was to give the audience a full-bodied taste of what they missed so much.

Because then when the movie lands in 1969, they’re going to have to make an adjustment to what it is now, which is different from what it was." In February, Ford told The Hollywood Reporter that he had to be convinced that de-aging was the way to go. "I never loved the idea until I saw how it was accomplished in this case — which is very different than the way it’s been done in other films I’ve seen," he said.