Following the success of The Sixth Sense, director M. Night Shyamalan once attended a meeting with Steven Spielberg to discuss writing the fourth Indiana Jones movie – years before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was developed.
Now, in an interview with Collider to promote his latest feature film Old, Shyamalan revealed what happened in the meeting with Spielberg, why he didn’t move forward with writing the fourth instalment and confirmed that he did have an idea for a MacGuffin but he “hadn’t pitched it to them.”
“Oh, my God. I mean, it was fantastic. Obviously, Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time, and so this was a dream, to be asked as a kid to go see a movie in a movie theater and then later to be asked by that person to write one of those in the future. I could faint at that moment. It was amazing. I do have my notebooks; I still have those with all my ideas for that movie,” Shyamalan said.
He continued: “I did have a take. I talked to everybody involved and it was so nascent at that time, that movie. Everyone hadn’t gotten into a room yet. They were bouncing ideas off of me. So everyone had different ideas of what to do. When you say that, I have in my head, it’s a green notebook, and I had this idea. It was a darker idea.”
Indiana Jones 5 is being directed by James Mangold and sees Harrison Ford returning as the archaeologist and adventurer for a final outing alongside Antonio Banderas (Pain and Glory), Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), Thomas Kretschmann (Avengers: Age of Ultron), Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal), and Toby Jones (Captain America: The Winter Soldier).
The as-yet-untitled Indiana Jones 5 is currently set for release on July 29th 2022.