Although the majority of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is set in 1969, the 2023 movie release began in 1944, when Harrison Ford’s Henry Jones Jr. met Mads Mikkelsen’s Jürgen Voller for the first time. Indy managed to successfully steal one half of the Archimedes Dial from Voller atop a moving train, and adding insult to injury, the Nazi was knocked off said train shortly thereafter. Frankly, the fall looked like it could have killed him, but members of the Indiana Jones 5 team have explained how Mikkelsen’s character managed to survive.
Production VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst and ILM VFX supervisor Robert Weaver spoke with THR about their work on Dial of Destiny, including how the train sequence came together. On the subject of how Voller made it through that nasty fall still breathing, Whitehurst opened up about what it was that knocked the character off the train in the first place:
This was a long conversation, with a lot of iterations. The thing that he gets hit by is a very lightweight hose that they use for putting water into steam trains, which itself can rotate. So he’s being hit by as soft a thing as you can be hit by that’s going to be hanging by a railway line in 1944. But, yes, it should be a little bit of a surprise when he shows up again later.
Ok, so knowing that was a lightweight hose that struck Jürgen Voller rather than something like a solid metal bar explains why he wasn’t permanently deformed, although at high speed the train was traveling, I find it hard to believe that wouldn’t hurt at least a little bit. However, that was still one hell of a drop from the train to the river below, and in real life, you can be sure would lead to someone’s demise. In the Indiana Jones universe though, these characters are built of sturdier stuff, and that’s what Weaver attributed to Voller’s survival in the World War II flashback. In his words:
It boils down to him being a very tough bugger. (Chuckles.)
As for how this sequence was actually shot, needless to say that Mads Mikkelsen wasn’t actually tossed off a moving train, but Andrew Whitehurst did share that the Hannibal alum certainly put in the physical effort for that memorable moment in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. He explained:
The one thing I will say is that when Mads does get knocked off the train, he did that. We put some crash mats there, and Mads Mikkelsen knows how to take a punch and how to look like he’s been hit by something heavy. We had to make him travel back further because the train was moving at speed, and obviously we weren’t doing that on the stage. But in terms of the physicality of the performance, he did that.
It’s possible that Jürgen Voller was injured badly enough from that fall that it took several years for him to recover, but by the time he and Indy crossed paths again in 1969, he was in good health and now working for the United States’ moon landing program as “Dr. Schmidt.” But the passage of two and a half decades didn’t curb Voller’s more sinister tendencies, as he was determined to fully assemble the Archimedes Dial so that he could “correct” mistakes of the past. Ultimately he failed to accomplish this, but you can read our Dial of Destiny ending breakdown for more information about that.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is still playing in theaters, and stay tuned to CinemaBlend for details about its home video release and when it will be available for Disney+ subscribers to stream. You can also see where Jürgen Voller was placed in our ranking of the major Indiana Jones villains.
