Vanity Fair has a pretty extensive article on the upcoming Indiana Jones the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, along with some pretty cool pictures and video from a photo shoot. In the article, Steven Spielberg talks about how far along they are in the editing process.

“I’m in my second cut, which means I’ve put the movie together and I’ve seen it,” he said. “I usually do about five cuts as a director. The best news is that, when I saw the movie myself the first time, there was nothing I wanted to go back and shoot, nothing I wanted to reshoot, and nothing I wanted to add.”

Spielberg then goes on to say that as tough as it is in this day and age to do so, they’re (thankfully) keeping it old-fashioned, although it went against a lot of his instincts as a modern-day filmmaker and especially seeing so many action movies nowadays effectively using the quick-cut method (The Bourne franchise, which he seems to love, is used by him as an example of what action movies all strive to live up to nowadays). It’s tough to emulate the style of the past Indy’s, since cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies with Spielberg, has been retired since The Last Crusade, and they have Janusz Kaminski on board, Spielberg’s go-to guy for his past ten movies, a man with a completely different style than Slocombe’s. But Spielberg thinks they captured the essence of the past films effectively.

You can read the whole article, full of quotes from Spielberg, Lucas and Harrison Ford – it’s pretty interesting – and also check out separate interviews with Spielberg here and George Lucas right here.

Then check out the rest of the photos below.

The villainous Agent Spalko. “Commies. I hate these guys.”

Just hanging out on set.

Hmm……….. does the background look a bit familiar? Why, yes… yes it does.