Director Steven Spielberg is in full promotional mode this week, as The Adventures of Tintin opens across Europe today. He recently spoke with Empire Magazine about two of his most popular franchises as they continue on into the future: Jurassic Park IV and Indiana Jones 5.

If the reviews are to be believed about The Adventures of Tintin, it offers everything we wanted, but didn't get, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. So Indiana Jones 5, which is working with a sixty-nine year old human instead of a timeless construct of limitless pixels, might prove to be a letdown more than anything. And it seems that Steven Spielberg may be taking on the project just to appease his longtime friend, George Lucas.

Here is what Steven Spielberg had to say about the current progress on Indiana Jones 5.

"You have to ask George Lucas. George is in charge of breaking the stories. He's done it on all four movies. Whether I like the stories or not, George has broken all the stories. He is working on Indiana Jones 5. We haven't gone to screenplay yet, but he's working on the story. I'll leave it to George to come up with a good story.

The legendary director then addressed some of the criticisms aimed at the last installment, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

"I'm very happy with the movie. I always have been... I sympathize with people who didn't like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin. George and I had big arguments about the MacGuffin. I didn't want these things to be either aliens or inter-dimensional beings. But I am loyal to my best friend. When he writes a story he believes in - even if I don't believe in it - I'm going to shoot the movie the way George envisaged it. I'll add my own touches, I'll bring my own cast in, I'll shoot the way I want to shoot it, but I will always defer to George as the storyteller of the Indy series. I will never fight him on that...The gopher was good. I have the stand-in one at home. What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast. Blame me. Don't blame George. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying "jump the shark". They now say, "nuked the fridge". I'm proud of that. I'm glad I was able to bring that into popular culture."

Steven Spielberg then went onto address the progress of Jurassic Park IV, which he claims is ready to go story wise.

"The screenplay is being written right now by Mark Protosevich. I'm hoping that will come out in the next couple of years. We have a good story. We have a better story for four than we had for three..."

US audiences will have to wait until Christmas for the director's next two films, The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse.