Most people couldn’t imagine anybody playing Indiana Jones except for Harrison Ford . Ford has even said he never wants to be replaced as Indiana Jones and nobody else wants that either. That being said, Tom Selleck was super close to playing the famous archeologist. Actors such as Tim Matheson, Peter Coyote, John Shea auditioned for the role, but Selleck was offered the posit
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
Schindler’s List , Steven Spielberg’s harrowing cinematic portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust, opens with a completely black frame. Then, a match is struck, dimly illuminating the fingers holding it as it lights a can
Since Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the pulpy adventure serials of the 1930s , the early conceptual designs for the characters were a lot pulpier. The pulpiest of the bunch was the initial design for the Nazi villain, Arnold Toht. Whereas he’s just a sinister man in black in the final film, he was originally supposed to wear a cartoonishly kitted-out Nazi unif
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
Both of these films seemed to recognize that Nazis make for fantastic villains in the Indiana Jones franchise. However, Raiders of the Lost Ark just succeeds a little more in making their villains truly despica
Spielberg’s biopic of notorious con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. opens with real footage from his appearance on the game show To Tell the Truth . Leonardo DiCaprio is inserted into the footage, but everyone else featured is from the actual show from 1977. Opening a movie in 4:3 aspect ratio with footage from a ‘70s game show was an unexpected and inspired move by Spielb
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
“Snakes…why did it have to be snakes?” Indiana Jones’ fear of snakes is one of his defining characteristics, and it’s put to excellent use in the narrative of Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy enters the Well of Souls and finds that it’s filled with hundreds of hissing cobras and pythons. However, as it turns out, neither Harrison Ford not Steven Spielberg are afraid of snakes, so it’s unclear where exactly this character quirk came from. It was a good thing for Ford and Spielberg, because it meant that they could focus on their work during the snake-infested sce
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
Lucas talked about how he had written a story about a character named Indiana Smith back in 1973 and the two began to brainstorm ideas for what would eventually become Indiana Jones. The name Indiana was also the name of Lucas’ Alaskan Malamute, the same dog that inspired Chewbacca from Star W
Karen Allen brings so much humor, heart, and fun to the character. From her first scene where we find her in the midst of a drinking contest, she makes for an unforgettable character who is a welcome addition to this advent
Raiders of the Lost Ark was the first cinematic Indiana Jones adventure and did a fantastic job presenting a hero that would go down in cinema history. As soon as Ford steps out of the shadows in that first scene, we were hooked to this guy. The movie showed him to be a smart, charming rogue who could kick butt but was never taken overly seriou
The Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies opens with Rudolf Abel, technically the film’s antagonist, looking at himself in the mirror in his cramped New York apartment. As the camera pans out, we realize he’s trying to capture all of his own features in a self-portrait he’s painting. In a matter of seconds, Spielberg establishes that this is a mild-mannered man with a solitary existe
While the cast and crew were out in Tunisia, shooting the Cairo-set scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark leveling guide 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