Lucas, Speilberg & Ford Talk Indiana Jones 4

Empire Online had an exclusive chat with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford about the highly anticipated Indiana Jones 4. The film is scheduled to start filming mid-2007 for a 2008 release. "We're basically going to do The Phantom Menace," says Lucas (stay with him here, he's making a point). "People's expectations are way higher than you can deliver. You could just get killed for the whole thing…We would do it for fun and just take the hit with the critics and the fans...But nobody wants to get into it unless they are really happy with it."

The 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation has freed up an idea for a plot that was originally deemed too incendiary.

"I discovered a McGuffin," continues Lucas, still reluctant to name said McGuffin. "I told the guys about it and they were a little dubious about it, but it's the best one we've ever found... Unfortunately, it was a little too 'connected' for the others. They were afraid of what the critics would think. They said, "Can't we do it with a different McGuffin? Can't we do this?" and I said "No". So we pottered around with that for a couple of years. And then Harrison really wanted to do it and Steve said, "Okay".

I said, "We'll have to go back to that original MacGuffin and take out the offending parts of it and we'll still use that area of the supernatural do deal with it". "Hopefully it will be different in all the right ways and the same in all the familiar ways," adds Spielberg. As for timing, Lucas says that filming is scheduled for mid-2007, for a 2008 release but getting the gang back together is a tricky proposition. "Before I was just working with Steven and Harrison. Now everybody's a superstar, so it's a little bit more difficult than it was then. But there's a good chance it will happen," assures Ford. "There are things left for this character to do."