Raiders of the Lost Ark Updates Ark begins with a giant action scene of Indy trying to escape a temple that housed the Golden Idol. Indiana Jones almost gets crushed by rocks, trapped in the temple, has to outrun a giant boulder, and then runs for his life from the angry locals. Indy runs to a seaplane and they fly off, but things only got worse from there in real-l
Actually, due to different filming angles and such, he had to outrun the boulder ten times! Spielberg later admitted, “He won ten times and beat the odds. He was lucky, and I was an idiot for letting him t
Lauded as one of the greatest movies ever made, Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced the movie-going world to one of its most timeless icons: Indiana Jones . Even though the dream team of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who had each directed a record-breaker for the highest grossing movie ever made at this point, were behind the production, they struggled to garner any interest from the major Hollywood stud
As world-renowned as the Indiana Jones series has become, it’s a bit shocking to find out that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg originally had trouble pitching the idea to movie studios. George Lucas once revealed to Empire that pretty much every studio turned down Raiders of the Lost A
Legend has it that Steven Spielberg was considering directing a James Bond movie before George Lucas convinced him to take on an original hero instead. And Indiana Jones was certainly set apart from other big-screen heroes. He was smarter than the average good guy, and while he got beat-up often, he could handle himself in a fi
The script for Raiders of the Lost Ark went through various different drafts, in which a number of scenes and concepts came and went. A lot of those ideas would later be reused in the second movie (which was technically a prequel ), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom . These include Indy traveling the Shanghai and avoiding machine gun fire by hiding behind a gong and a high-speed chase on mine carts. Originally, in Raiders , the trip to Shanghai was to recover a piece of the Staff of Ra and the mine cart pursuit followed the opening of the
From the minds of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and brought to life on the big screen by Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones is undoubtedly one of the best cinematic heroes of all time. Though he is a professor of archaeology in his day job, Jones spends his spare time traveling the globe and facing danger while recovering long lost artifa
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas auditioned a ton of different actors for the roles of Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood. For Indy, they considered David Hasselhoff, Tom Selleck, Michael Biehn (who would go on to play Kyle Reese in The Terminator ), Mark Harmon, Christopher Guest (who starred in This is Spinal Tap ), and A Star is Born ’s Sam Elli
(Lucas resisted casting Harrison Ford for a while, because he didn’t want him to become the Robert De Niro to his Martin Scorsese , but eventually, he couldn’t deny that Ford was perfect .) For Marion, they considered Michelle Pfeiffer, Debra Winger, Mary Steenburgen, Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Seymour, and Barbara Hers
In a frenzied handheld shot that just points at whatever’s going on in front of it, more like a documentary than a docudrama, we see soldiers gearing up, assembling rifles, watching helicopters fly overhead – it’s hec
Steven Spielberg doles out new information with every shot in the opening scene of Jurassic Park , slowly building up the suspense. It opens close on some trees, obscuring something. That something is tearing the trees out of the way, thundering towards us, bellowing booming noises. A couple of closeups then introduce terrified men wearing hard hats bearing the Jurassic Park logo. Some of them are ar
Then, a wider shot reveals the thing that was ripping through the trees: a large truck, carrying a heavy-duty cage. It slowly becomes apparent that there’s a dinosaur in the cage, and these guys aren’t equipped to handle
That being said, when they first tried to film the scene, none of the spiders moved when they were put on Molina’s back. This was because all of the spiders were male. After they added a female to the mix, however, the spiders got very animated and the shot was achie
Raiders of the Lost Ark is the best example of Indy as a cinematic hero. From the very first scene, as he goes through the temple filled with boobytraps to his iconic “fight” with the swordsman, he is a hero that explodes off the scr
The Indy movies are renowned for their over-the-top sound effects, and there’s one legendary sound designer that we have to thank for that: Ben Burtt. Burtt is also responsible for all the sound effects in Star Wars and the voice of WALL-E. The sound of the snakes slithering in the Well of Souls was created by Burtt sliding his fingers into a cheese casserole. The sound of the Ark of the Covenant’s lid being removed was created by Burtt sliding the lid off the back of his toilet. The sound of the boulder rolling after Indy was actually the sound of a Honda Civic driving over gravel. And famously exaggerated punching sounds were created by Burtt beating a pile of leather jackets with a baseball