First, here’s Annie Leibovitz’s photo of Cate Blanchett, playing the eeeeevil Commie who’ll be facing off against Indiana Jones this summer.

Second:

A lot has changed since the last Indiana Jones movie. For one thing, Spielberg, known in the 70s and early 80s as a director of hugely popular but lightweight pictures, brought his famously fluid camerawork to the darker Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). With Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), Minority Report (2002), and War of the Worlds (2005), he made science fiction that hit harder than E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) or Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). At the same time, action movies went through a major evolution. A bald monk flew. So did Keanu. Jackie Chan chopped necks while moving like Astaire. Travolta wiped blood off a windshield. Spidey killed baddies between bouts of emo-boy angst. Batman got the Christian Bale treatment (thin, dark, intense), and a computer-generated Yoda battled Palpatine. Jason Bourne crunched the bones of his pursuers in films that came out great despite looking as if they had been edited in a Cuisinart. In this atmosphere, can Indy compete?

Rather than update the franchise to match current styles, Lucas and Spielberg decided to stay true to the prior films’ look, tone, and pace. During pre-production, Spielberg watched the first three Indiana Jones movies at an Amblin screening room with Janusz Kaminski, who has shot the director’s last 10 films. He replaces Douglas Slocombe, who shot the first three Indy movies (and is now retired at age 94), as the man mainly responsible for the film’s look. “I needed to show them to Janusz,” Spielberg says, “because I didn’t want Janusz to modernize and bring us into the 21st century. I still wanted the film to have a lighting style not dissimilar to the work Doug Slocombe had achieved, which meant that both Janusz and I had to swallow our pride. Janusz had to approximate another cinematographer’s look, and I had to approximate this younger director’s look that I thought I had moved away from after almost two decades.”

All this stuff’s from Vanity Fair’s new cover story, a pretty great article (written by Jim Windolf, photgraphed by Leibovitz) about the making of the new Indiana Jones, which boasts some solid, insightful interviews with both Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. (There are also online Q & As with Spielberg and Lucas.)

I am, shall we say, a little bit excited about this one.