If you’ve seen the latest trailer The Adventures of Tintin, you may have noticed a certain touch of Steven Spielberg‘s legendary sense of adventure and whimsy. That Spielbergian charm seemed to be somewhat absent from the later installments of the Jurassic Park films, in addition to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

In a recent interview with Empire, Spielberg addressed the forthcoming installments of both of those popular franchises.

“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.”

On Jurassic Park IV, Spielberg had this to say:

“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…”

The director also addressed issues people had with that last Indiana Jones film:

“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.”

No release dates have been officially announced for Jurassic Park IV or Indiana Jones 5.