We all know the road to almost every movie is littered with alternate versions and other possibilities. In another universe, Will Smith was the lead in The Matrix, Tom Cruise was Iron Man, Joaquin Phoenix was Doctor Strange, and Stanley Kubrick made his Napoleon movie. As someone that grew up loving the Marvel comic What If....?, it’s always fun to think about what might have happened.

Which brings us to Indiana Jones and M. Night Shyamalan.

If you’re not aware, many years ago, after the massive success of The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan met with Steven Spielberg and the other key players about writing the fourth Indiana Jones movie. This was obviously many years before George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and Spielberg decided to make Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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Image via Lucasfilm

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As a student of Hollywood and what might have been, I’ve always been curious about what happened and if Shyamalan ever took pen to paper. So when I recently sat down with Shyamalan for an extended interview for his new movie, Old, I decided to ask him about Indiana Jones and what really happened.

COLLIDER: I believe, many years ago, you met with Spielberg about writing a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Did you ever come up with your MacGuffin and the idea, or was it more just a basic meeting?

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN: Oh, my God. I mean, it was fantastic. Obviously, Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite movie of all time, and so this was a dream, to be asked as a kid to go see a movie in a movie theater and then later to be asked by that person to write one of those in the future. I could faint at that moment. It was amazing. I do have my notebooks; I still have those with all my ideas for that movie. I did have a take. I talked to everybody involved and it was so nascent at that time, that movie. Everyone hadn't gotten into a room yet. They were bouncing ideas off of me. So everyone had different ideas of what to do. When you say that, I have in my head, it's a green notebook, and I had this idea. It was a darker idea.

Every Indiana Jones movie has the MacGuffin, so had you thought about what that was yet?

SHYAMALAN: I did, I did, yeah. I had an idea. I hadn't pitched it to them or anything like that, but I had an idea.

While I know it is a longshot that we’ll ever get to see his green notebook filled with his ideas, hopefully one day he’ll post them on his Instagram and we can all imagine the possibilities.

Look for a lot more from my extended interview with Shyamalan later this week.

m-night-shamaylan old movie image
Image via Universal