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 Ark Guide artifa
Raiders of the Lost Ark and the rest of Indy’s adventures were inspired by the pulp serial that Spielberg and Lucas enjoyed as kids, which explains the movies’ many anachronistic elements such as unintentional rac
While the cast and crew were out in Tunisia, shooting the Cairo-set scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark , they all got really sick from food poisoning. John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in the movie , apparently got so sick that he soiled himself during a scene that required him to bend over. The only person involved in the production who didn’t get food poisoning was Steven Spielberg, because he had brought his own food from home – which reportedly consisted of dozens and dozens of cans of Spaghetti-O’s – and didn’t eat any of the local food that everyone else was hav
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
(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
Although a lot of his contemporaries, like Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius, tackled the Vietnam War on the big screen while it was still raging, Spielberg avoided explicitly commenting on the conflict in his films until 2017. The Post is really the story of the Washington Post’s battle with the Nixon administration and the power of the free press, but it opens on a U.S. Army base in Vietnam’s Hau Nghia Province in 1
The script featured an elaborate scene involving the goon chasing Jones through the streets of Cairo, but since almost all of the crew members had gotten food poisoning, Ford suggested he just shoot the guy instead. The actor playing the swordsman had apparently practiced for months for the scene, but unfortunately for him, he was killed off in a matter of seco
When Raiders of the Lost Ark was first sent to the censors to be rated, it was hit with an R rating, because the MPAA felt that the melting face at the end was too graphic. The producers really wanted a PG-13 rating to allow it to become the box office hit that it would eventually become , so a layer of fire was added on top of the shot of the melting face to make it less horrifying and it was given a PG-13 rating. Steven Spielberg didn’t want to cut the melting face scene altogether, because he felt that it was the most impressive special effect he’d ever seen up to that po
Raiders of the Lost 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
Cartoonishly evil Nazis are practically a tradition of heightened World War II fiction, with Raiders of the Lost Ark featuring its famously occult-obsessed members of the Third Reich. As delightfully villainous as Major Toht and company may be, their characterizations still ignored the inhuman ideals that real-world Nazis belie
To the filmmakers’ credit, Sallah is a fun and well-written supporting character who was expertly brought to life by Davis. Still, this doesn’t excuse the casting of a Welshman for a character clearly written as an Egyptian. The fact that Davis actually spent majority of his youth in Tanzania because his father was a colonial officer doesn’t help matt
Steven Spielberg’s original choice for the role of Sallah, Indy’s international contact who functions as the movie’s comic relief, was Danny DeVito. DeVito was interested in playing the role, but ultimately, the production conflicted with his shooting schedule for Taxi . John Rhys-Davies played Sallah in the end and, although DeVito would’ve done a fine job with the character – especially since he’s Raiders ’ comic relief and DeVito is hilarious – Rhys-Davies’ take on the character was great. Years later, when Raiders had inspired a long slew of copycats, DeVito played a similar comic relief character in a similar action-adventure movie, Romancing the Stone , alongside Michael Doug