New Indiana Jones Movie Will Feature an AI 35-Year-Old Harrison Ford

Indiana Jones 5 will feature a de-aged Harrison Ford for the first 25 minutes of the movie thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will employ an AI system known as FRAN (face re-aging network). It is a proprietary technology of Disney.

The researchers behind FRAN highlight that for the technology to work on real people there must be images available of the person in similar poses and lighting when they were younger.

This means that footage of Ford playing Indiana Jones was taken from the Lucasfilm archives to accomplish the de-aging process. However, Ford still had to act out the scenes with dots across his face to aid the system.

The only problem was getting a 79-year-old to move like a 35-year-old, but according to director James Mangold, Harrison was able to deliver.

“I just shot him, and he just pretended that he was 35,” Mangold tells Total Film. He lauded his “incredibly gifted and agile” leading man.

“But the technology involved is a whole other thing,” Mangold adds. “We had hundreds of hours of footage of him in close-ups, in mediums, in wides, in every kind of lighting, night and day. 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 fifth and final movie in the Indiana Jones franchise opens with a scene from 1944 — roughly eight years after Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark took. The rest of the film is set in 1969.

“My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago’,” Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and a producer, tells Empire.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny will be released in theaters on June 30. The trailer for the film is above.