By Iain Blair

Directed by James Mangold, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is the long-awaited final chapter in the beloved saga, which stars Harrison Ford reprising his role as the whip-smart archaeologist one last time.

Featuring huge set pieces showcasing spectacular VFX – including the opening train sequence, the tuktuk chase sequence, the horseback chase through the New York ticker tape parade, an underwater dive in Greece and the grand finale — the globe-trotting adventure was filmed on location in Morocco, Sicily, Scotland and England in addition to stages at Pinewood Studios.

I spoke with the film’s overall VFX supervisor, Oscar winner Andrew Whitehurst, and ILM VFX super Robert Weaver about the challenges of creating the VFX and working with Mangold (Ford v Ferrari, Walk the Line).

What were the big challenges of creating the VFX for this?
Andrew Whitehurst: The biggest challenge of any film like this, which is a journey and full of locations, is that almost every single scene is a challenge in itself. We’re either in a different place or era or time of day, or we’re following different characters, so it’s not a movie set in one place where you can refine and tweak the look of that place. We have a whole swathe of very different kinds of work and environments that we had to create. So it was the huge scope and scale across the film that was the most challenging aspect of doing all the VFX.

How many VFX shots are there, and who did what? Break it down for us.
Whitehurst: We did roughly 2,350 VFX shots. It’s a lot, but then there’s a lot going on. We had a lot of vendors, and they all did little bits here and there, but in terms of the major work, ILM did the opening act with the whole Nazi train sequence as well as the third act.

Rising Sun did all the New York work, including the streets, the airport, the rooftops and the subway sequences. Soho did the tuk tuk chase sequence set in Morocco, and ILP (Important Looking Pirates) did the wreck dive set in Greece, along with a lot of sea plate extensions and the creepie-crawlies in the tomb. We also had an in-house team that did a lot of window extension work… putting stuff outside apartment windows, that sort of thing.

Similarly, a lot of our other vendors, including The Yard, MidasVFX, Capital T and Firestorm, also did that kind of work — changing backgrounds out the windows.

Of all the huge set pieces, what was the toughest to deal with and why?
Whitehurst: They were all equally challenging and all vast in scope and complexity. For instance, we couldn’t shoot the 1969 astronaut parade sequence in Manhattan, and so much has changed with the buildings, so we shot in Glasgow, which does a reasonable impersonation of 1969 New York. The art department did an amazing job. We had over 1,000 extras, cars and the horse, and we extended the streets up higher and out longer and added all the confetti with VFX.

The challenge on the dive sequence was that we shot some underwater stuff in the Mediterranean and the rest in a tank at Pinewood. We also shot some of it dry for wet because we needed that control for performance issues.

Did you 3D-scan all the locations and sets?
Whitehurst: Yes, we scanned and photographed absolutely everything, including places we didn’t actually film at but thought would be useful for generating material for backgrounds. That was crucial. Clear Angle did it all.

DP Phedon Papamichael, ACE, told me that integrating all the VFX with your team was crucial, and he had you on-set in the DIT tent?
Whitehurst: Yes, I was basically on-set every day and in the tent with his DIT, Ben Appleton, for the whole shoot. And Robert was with us for some of the more specific stuff that ILM was doing.

Robert Weaver: I was there for the whole opening sequence with the train, for all the stage work. I was there for about a month in the DIT tent while also working with the various grips and The Blues Brothers trying to get bluescreen coverage where we needed it, dealing with changing camera angles and so on.

Robert, tell us about the complex process involved in de-aging Harrison Ford from his late 70s to his late 30s. Was delivering a convincingly youthful Indiana Jones the most challenging job for the team at ILM?
Weaver: I think it was because it’s the whole opening part of the film and if it didn’t work, you’d probably lose the audience. We use a whole bunch of components that go into doing a face swap, basically replacing one face with another. We have our proprietary face replacement technology, ILM FaceSwap, which used every nuance and detail of Harrison’s performance on-set. It all boils down to having a good repository of imagery to work from, either from reference or for helping to process through machine learning.

But more importantly, it’s down to the artistic skills and abilities of individuals pulling key components to help create the final overall image we needed. It also involved building a complete CG asset of Harrison and then a younger version of that as well. So it’s a multi-faceted process that combines the latest technology with archival imagery, and it took a lot of R&D. We had to figure out new ways of exactly how to do it because it’s an ever-evolving process. In terms of the de-aging result, I think we’ve achieved the best that’s been done anywhere to date.

Whitehurst: One of the key things to understand is that FaceSwap is an umbrella term for a lot of different technologies, whether it’s using reference photography, machine learning or multi-camera shooting on the day and then being able to extract 3D geometry and then remapping that onto a different face.

So there’s a lot of different approaches and techniques that we can use, and we did use every single one of them. Each shot would end up using more of one technique than another; there was no one process or method that worked for everything. It was shot by shot, and it all comes down to performance, and Harrison’s driving it.

Weaver: And Harrison is so fit that he was able to do pretty much everything he was asked to do, which was invaluable for us. It’s pretty amazing for a guy who is now in his 80s.

You’ve both worked on a lot of huge projects. Where does this rate in terms of complexity and challenges?
Whitehurst: It’s the biggest movie I’ve ever done. It’s certainly the longest I’ve ever been on one project. I’ve been working on it for three years, from early prep all the way to the end.

I get to look back on the earliest conversations we had about what we might try and do with all the VFX, and then doing all the early previz for the opening sequence and how it might work. To see all that go through the shoot and then post, and layering in all the VFX and to see how it all evolved in the edit and how we tweaked stuff… it was very creatively satisfying.

Weaver: It’s the same for me. I’d say it’s top of the list of all the films I’ve ever worked on. It was incredibly challenging but so rewarding to work through it and see the results.

---

Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.