On whether cinema relies too much on special effects:

George Lucas: Obviously, when you get new technology, like you get sound or you get color, or digital effects, y’know, they get misused. That’s human nature, and that will slow down in time. All special effects are is another tool to use to tell the story. Just like a camera’s a tool, a sound recorder is a tool. It’s just how you tell the story. And it makes it a lot easier to do certain things that you couldn’t do before. Many of the movies that are being made today could not have been made before the advancement of special effects. So we get change-up kind of movies that are made in terms of you get more historical films, more epic film. You’re not just doing films on the street.

Steven Spielberg: The idea here always is—y’know, there’s not inspiration when a cast and a director walk onto a blue screen stage where everything’s blue. Very, very difficult to understand what’s going on and we wanted to do as little of that as possible on this picture because we’re spoiled. We’ve had great art directors, from Norman Reynolds to Eliot Scott to Guy Dyas on this picture, that build tremendous sets for us that are practical and almost in scale with what you see on the screen. And I wanted to walk onto a soundstage and I wanted to be in a temple and be in all these sort of booby-trapped sets and I wanted to get my ideas for good shots based on how the set inspired me and I think also inspired all the actors. So even though it cost a little more money, we were real advocates—I was certainly an advocate and so was George about making as much of this movie practical magic, not digital magic.

On why it took so long between films:

Steven Spielberg: Y’know, it took a long time cause I was sort of the hold out. I was the person saying, “Well, I don’t known. Gee, I’m in my dark period now. I’m making all these depressing historical dramas. I’m making movies with meaning that really, y’know, I want my kids to see when I get older. And gee whiz, I’m not ready to go out and entertain a lot of people at once.” Then of course I made “Jurassic Park” and said, “Gee, that felt good. Wow! I forgot that feeling. That felt really good!” And then I went back and made some historical, y’know, dramas. But, y’know, it took a long time to find the right story. George always had the idea of the crystal skull. That was something George brought to the table at the outset. There were a couple of other powerful Maguffins, but that was the one that stuck. But getting the focus of the story and who the villains were going to be, that took a lot of time. George was making “Star Wars”. I was directing a whole number of movies and I was starting a new movie company. This really didn’t congeal properly until Jeff Nathanson and David Koepp came on board, and all of a sudden the plot accelerated, the pages were fantastic, and I went, ‘Oh my God! I’m really going to be making ‘Indy 4’! It looks like it’s really gonna happen!’

Harrison Ford on the physical stunts:

Well, I gotta say what I’ve said for twenty years: I don’t do stunts. Stunt guys do stunts. I do physical acting, and I think it’s very important that the audience be able to see expression. There’s storytelling going on during these physical events, otherwise it just becomes kinetic. It needs to be an emotional event like every moment on screen needs to be invested with real emotion, or pretend emotion, but in any case you need to establish an emotional continuity with the audience, even through those events. Otherwise it becomes watching kinetics. And that’s why it’s so gratifying that we all were happy to do the stunt sequences, or the action sequences, old school, human scale. It couldn’t be done--if I couldn’t do it, or if the stuntman couldn’t help arrange it so that I could do it. And I think that that goes a long ways towards making people in the audience feel that they’re acquainted with the physics of this event and they’re not coming from another world.

George Lucas on whether he believes there is magic behind an object like the crystal skull:

Well, we always find an artifact that is real, that people believe in, that archeologists have looked for or already found, and that has a supernatural aspect to it. All of the artifacts we look for have never been proven to exist or they’ve been proven to actually have the powers that’s been ascribed to them, but there are a lot of people that believe in it, that the crystal skulls have power, that the Ark of the Covenant is real, that the Shankara Stones are real, or the Holy Grail. So I’ don’t have to personally believe in whether these things are real, all I have to do is believe that a lot of other people believe it is real.

On the changes in today’s adventure films:

Steven Spielberg: In adventure films that we see today? Well, y’know, I like a lot of the adventure films, I think of the adventure films have become streamlined and sophisticated and daring and out of the box, like the “The Bourne Identity” series of films, which I love. The last “Casino Royale”, the best James Bond film I’ve seen since “From Russia With Love”, in my humble opinion. So films have gone a long way to show action in a new way and give a lot of entertainment. I’m an advocate for going back to the Indiana Jones series that the audience gets a chance to at least see what’s on the screen before the director cuts away to something else. Just when you’re getting used to that, in a lot of today’s films they cut away to something else and you get a visceral impact of a lot of montage, but you don’t really understand where you are geographically in any of the action scenes in some, not all, but some of the films that are being made today. So I’m really happy to go back to the old school of action-adventure filmmaking where you become collaborators in the process. We really, I think, respect the audience and want them to know exactly where they’re at at every moment along this journey.

On the importance of reunifying the nuclear family in so many of his films:

Steven Spielberg: Y’know, I, like so many children from divorce, y’know, it impacted me. It created “E.T.”. The divorce of my mom and dad actually gave me the idea to make “E.T.”. That was all about divorce, first, and a visitor from the stars second. Father/son reconciliation I’ve been very public about. I have a great relationship with my 91-year-old father, but it took awhile for us to come back together. And that was why I came up with the idea of bringing Sean Connery into ‘The Last Crusade,’ to work out, y’know, unresolved issues between father and son. And now we have—now that you’ve seen the movie I can say for the first time we have another father/son story. So it has been very gratifying to me and it is satisfying that I haven’t been busted too hard by the media for dwelling on this very personal subject. It does keep popping up through my movies. Thank you for asking.