INTRODUCTION
In May 1977, George Lucas and his friend Steven Spielberg were discussing movies they would enjoy directing. Spielberg named serials and James Bond adventures, and Lucas responded by telling his story of Indiana Jones, an archaeologist- adventurer whose search for a sacred treasure leads him around the world.
Three years later, on June 23rd 1980, Spielberg began directing that film at La Rochelle, France. Over the next 14 weeks, the adventure story took Spielberg, the actors and crew to four countries for location and studio filming - and, in the elaborate and painstakingly accurate sets for the film, through several other exotic locations as well.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark Collector's Album follows the order in which the movie was put together, from its inception in Hawaii through pre-production, then covers the production set by set, from the first day of filming to the last. Quotes from the director, producer, cast and crew are illustrated with exclusive behind-the-scenes photographs, Spielberg's original sketches of his conceptions for scenes, letters, telexes, storyboards, production paintings, and the final movie stills. - Ed.
SYNOPSIS
It's the mid-30's and Adolph Hitler is searching frantically for an ancient and sacred
artifact, said to give invincible power to its possessor.
The American government must locate the legendary relic and recover it before Hitler's agents
seize it.
Dr. IndianaJones (HARRISON FORD), a professor of archaeology at a small New England
college, is better known to Army Intelligence as a cunning and steel-nerved adventurer.
IndyJones is the only man with the ability—and recklessness
—to undertake the task demanded by his country on the eve of World War II.
Jones has just returned from a recent expedition in the dense jungles of South America,
which ended with the unwelcome intrusion of Rene Belloq, a ruthless French
treasurehunter.
Indy leaves for Patan, Nepal to find one of his old professors who has information vital to his
search. He finds the professor's beautiful and bold daughter Marion (KAREN ALLEN) instead.
Marion's father has died, leaving her to survive alone and penniless in the unfriendly foreign city,
and making her the only one who can give Indy the help he needs.
Reluctantly, she agrees to cooperate with the persuasive charmer, putting aside bitter memories
of their past love affair for the right price (which is a chance to start a new life).
However, their reunion is cut short only days later in a crowded bazaar in Cairo, when Marion
becomes the innocent victim of an attempt by German agents to dispose of Jones.
Relentlessly pursued by Nazi henchmen, Indy soon learns that his old rival, Belloq, has
been hired by the German archaeological team. Indy's only chance now of keeping the object out
of Nazi hands is to infiltrate their operation deep in the vast Egyptian desert before the
Frenchman leads them to the site of the buried relic.
The ancient ruins are teeming with life as Arabs work feverishly in the brutal sun, under the
impatient supervision of Nazi officers.
Once inside the encampment, Indy makes a more amazing discovery—Marion is still alive
and being held prisoner.
Time is quickly running out as the Nazis press forward at a frantic pace, growing ever closer
to their final goal. Indy must risk going into the excavated ruins himself, aided by a small band of
loyal Arabs and protected only by the darkness of the desert night. Finally, just as day begins to
dawn, they find the awe-inspiring relic. But even Indiana Jones, a man of few fears, is not
prepared for the terror that accompanies his brief triumph.
Seizing the treasure for their Fuehrer in Berlin, the Nazis leave the foolhardy American and
his girlfriend to face a torturous death, while they hastily abandon the desecrated ruins.
The defeated pair manage a harrowing escape in time for Indy to pursue the retreated
convoy along a treacherous and winding road to Cairo and, in a heroically daring ambush,
rescue the cargo from the enraged Germans.
Attempting to get the relic safely out of Cairo on a tramp steamer, Indy and Marion again find
themselves trapped when their vessel reaches open sea.
Triumphantly, the menacing Germans remove the relic to an awaiting submarine and, at
Belloq's sinister prompting, abduct Marion as well.
Challenging his ingenuity and endurance to the limit, Indy follows them to their secret supply
base, hidden deep within a remote tropical island. Here, in a tense climax, Indy confronts Belloq
and the Nazis to a lightening-paced dramatic conclusion.
Steven Spielberg (Director): George told me the story in Hawaii in May 1977, a week before Star
Wars opened. He'd gone to Hawaii to get away from what he thought would be a monumental
disaster, and he and Marcia were there with their heads in the sand when I showed up. At dinner
one night, George got the news that the film was a hit the first week and he was suddenly
laughing again, he told me the story of this movie.
Frank Marshall (Producer): It was over at Universal Studios. I came in and met George, and
Steven came in about a half an hour later and then Larry Kasdan came in none of us had ever
met Larry, except for Steven and we all shook hands right there. Larry was going to write
Raiders, I was going to produce it and Steven was going to direct it. It all happened so fast.
Lawrence Kasdan: George and Steven and I sat for a week of meetings about the story, really
outlined the thing into a tape recorder. It was a constant process of an idea coming out and
another person saying, yah, that's pretty good but it doesn't quite fit. Let's try this. And the
third person saying, how about this for a capper? We wound up with about a hundred-
page transcript of the story outline. I left those meetings feeling I was in pretty good shape and
then realized, Uh-oh, this is gonna be hard.
Steven Spielberg (Director): Larry didn't stick with our story outline a hundred per cent. A lot of
this movie is on Larry's own original ideas, his own characters. George provided the initial vision,
the story and the structure of the movie. Then George and I together provided key scenes
throughout the film. And Larry essentially did all the characters and tied the story together, made
the story work from just a bare outline, and gave it color and some direction.
Lawrence Kasdan: I made up all the names except Indiana, he's named after George's
dog. The names I used are significant in that they're romantic in certain ways, or evocative of
certain kinds of characters. Marion I thought that was a pretty name, it was my wife's
grandmother's name. Ravenwood I was talking about the movie with my wife as we drove up
Beverly Glen and there's a street there called Ravenwood Court. I wanted the names to be
romantic and old-timey.
The reason, I think, that George and Steven and
I worked well together is that we share a lot of likes about movies, a certain love for the
kinds of things that can only happen in movies. And Raiders is very much about things that can
only happen in movies.
Steven Spielberg: The movie works only if the script works. You can do anything to a movie
you can change dialogue, you can change the feelings the characters have about
each other but if the story and the basics of the script don't work, the movie doesn'twork.
If you have a very very good movie, then most of the reason is that the script was
excellent.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark script went through five revisions before the final story emerged in April 1980. And there were still more changes made as the actual filming of the movie demanded practical revisions of the story
CASTING
Steven Spielberg (Director): It's the hardest cement wall for a director to break through: finding
out in 15 minutes who an actor is or even a sneak preview of his personality.
So we decided to have all the casting sessions in the kitchen at Lucasfilm. It disarmed
everyone: actors who were normally shy came out of themselves.
All the actors who came in from nine to one helped cook; and all the actors who came in from
two to seven helped eat. Everything was baked from scratch, from Charlotte au chocolat to
homemade pumpkin bread. The word spread Army Archerd and a few of the other columnists
were carrying the story in the papers, so the actors were calling their agents saying, "I only want
to come after two" Everybody wanted to eat; nobody wanted to work.
We were looking for a leading man for over six months. We wanted an unknown originally a total
unknown. Conceitedly, George and I wanted to make a star of Johnny the construction worker
from Malibu. We couldn't find a construction worker in Malibu, so we began looking at more
substantial people in the film industry.
We were stuck; we had three weeks left to cast the part of Indiana Jones, and there was
nobody close. Then I saw The Empire Strikes Back and I said Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. I
called George Lucas and said, "He's right under our noses" George said,"I know who you're
going to say." I said, "Who?" and he said "Harrison Ford" "Right" "Let's get him,' he said. And we
did.
Karen was the most professional actress to come into our readings. She was
polished, and she came prepared. After that, we just kept saying, "Not as good as Karen"
Harrison Ford was the only person George and I saw playing Indiana Jones. He is a remarkable
combination of Errol Flynn from The Adventures of Don Juan and Humphrey
Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of Sierra Madre. He can be villainous and romantic all
at once.
ART AND DESIGN
Artists and designers are essential to the making of any film. They translate the ideas and imagination of the filmmaker to the film crew and ultimately to the audience. In Raiders of the Lost Ark director Steven Spielberg did a rough sketch of each shot. Artists took these drawings and, using their own imaginations, turned the drawings into storyboards - polished illustrations that visually present the action of the script. Other artists worked on production paintings and costume sketches that helped guide the search for locations, direct the building of sets, and determine what props and other elements were needed to make the movie.
Steven Spielberg (Director): I did all the rough sketches myself. I just began at the beginning of
the script and worked my way to the end. I had three artists working with me. I had Ed Verreaux,
Dave Negron, and Roy Carnon, and I had Michael Lloyd who did 20-inch oil paintings for us. I
would always sketch the composition and the action with my stick figures. And then I'd turn that
over to the artists and we'd talk about.it. I'd say, "Now, this is a man" And he would often say, "I
thought that was the wall" I'd say, "No, that's a man, and that's a car" And he would say, "I
thought that was a dog" And I would say, "No, it's not an animal. It's a car" I would interpret my
own crude renderings, and they would carry them a step further and complete
the continuity. Usually the continuity was completed in black and white. Ed Verreaux
occasionally did it in color pencil, so we had a little more depth in the different sketches. And
then I'd put those together in a shooting continuity; and that became the arrangement of
scenes. The order was dictated by the location and by the shooting schedule.
I never did my homework for arithmetic or biology in school. But
I love doing the homework for movies. I really love to stay up late at night with the little desk light
hot and the rest of the lights in the room off, drawing sketches, and planning this and that, and
thinking about how the characters should say the dialogue they have to say. I imagine the movie
over and over again and then take those scenes to the set and try to get the actors to imagine
them as I did. That's the trick; and that takes being very well prepared.
And, of course, there are days I'm not prepared at all. And sometimes I've done the best scene in
the movie when I just made it up as I went along. Sometimes the spontaneity is better than
pacing in my office at midnight, trying to make plans.
LOCATION HUNT
Robert Watts (Associate Producer): Norman Reynolds (Production Designer), Bill Welsh
(Construction Manager) and I left London for New York on a Saturday with tickets to take us
either to Puerto Rico or to Honolulu. Frank Marshall was to ring me at my hotel from Puerto Rico
at a prearranged time to say "Tomorrow morning come to Puerto Rico" or "Go to Honolulu" so at
6 p.m. Frank called, and instead of saying, "Come to Puerto Rico, ' or "Go to Honolulu, ' he said,
"We're going to Mexico"
Early Sunday morning at Kennedy Airport we met Frank, who came in from Puerto Rico, and we
all jumped on a flight to Mexico City. In Mexico City we got ourselves on the first flight that we
could get to a place called Villa Hermosa, down toward the Guatemala border, where we spent
the night.
At the crack of dawn the next morning we set off in two rented cars for a place called Palenque,
to look at an existing jungle temple for the South America sequence. My car had a faulty gas
gauge, so I ran out of gas. Frank managed to find some. When we got to Palenque, we had two
breakfasts because we were so hungry, and then went up to the ruins. In one hour we realized it
was not for us, because it was far too manicured and we would have had enormous work to put it
back to a state that looked like nobody had found it before.
By the way, we hadn't been able to call the States and tell them where we were, because the
phones didn't work down in Villa Hermosa, so we were desperately trying to phone. We got back
to Mexico City where we would get the next flight out to L.A. We had left London early Saturday,
it was now Monday. We got to L.A. at 5 a.m. Tuesday and had two hours sleep, then took a flight
to Honolulu and then on to Lihue, Kauai, where we arrived just after lunch. On Wednesday Doug
Slocombe (Director of Photography) arrived, and we checked locations on Kauai. Thursday
morning we flew from Lihue to Honolulu, spent most of the day there doing business about the
construction that was required. We then took a night flight out from Honolulu, which got us into
L.A. again at about 5 o'clock
in the morning. This was Friday now. We had a meeting with Steven on Friday afternoon and
we then booked a flight back to London Friday evening. So we were back in London Saturday
morning; that was a week after we left. We'd spent three nights on airplanes.
When I heard that this picture was set in Egypt, I asked three questions: do we see the Sphinx,
do we see the Pyramids, do we see the Nile? And when the answer was no, I said, "Well, then,
we don't have to go to Egypt."
We used one of the Tunisian locations we had used on Star Wars the canyon
—but basically we were looking for quite different locations. We required Arab streets; we
required an archaeological dig site, as well as mountain roads for a mountain road chase which
we then changed to an oasis chase.
Robert Watts (Associate Producer): They had constructed a submarine in Bavaria
Studios and then shipped it and assembled it in La Rochelle, France. So we had to go to La
Rochelle to shoot the submarine because it couldn't be moved anywhere else. We
decided to shoot the interior of a World War II submarine in La Rochelle. That required some
construction because we had to make it look like a cave entrance.
Ultimately the La Rochelle location was set up in about four or five days because we
never had any more time. OnJune 23rd, the unit assembled in La Rochelle and we
started to shoot. We shot there for a week. We were very, very lucky to finish because we
were shooting out at sea with a submarine and also an old freighter that had been converted in
England to look like a 1930s tramp steamer.
Frank Marshall (Producer): When Steven arrived in La Rochelle in France, he got up to the
passport man in customs, kind of a chubby Frenchman. And the guy looked at Steven's
passport, got real excited and started jumping up and down. He shouted, "Steven
Spielberg. Steven Spielberg. Jaws of the third kind!"
You've got to show people things that they don't have an opportunity to see.
That's what makes a movie exciting. People don't ordinarily see a big German submarine
out there on the ocean. It may be extremely difficult to do that sort of thing, but you have
to try because real things always look better. You get away with models only when
you have to. If it works out that you can't have the real thing, then you try to fake it.
Almost every movie I've ever worked on, the local people say, "We've never had weather like
this never before" They said it in La Rochelle. They said it in Tunisia. Actually,
they said it in England, although it didn't make any difference there.
Kathy Kennedy(Associate to Steven Spielberg): It was the worst summer in
England in three hundred years, so they said. But then this happened to George
Lucas, too. He ran into the same thing in Norway for Empire where it was the worst
blizzard in fifty years, or something. When he did American Graffiti it was the worst weather
in two hundred and fifty years in the town he filmed in.
So George considers it to be good luck if somebody immediately says to him, "This is
the worst weather we've had"
Frank Marshall (Producer): Which they said the first week. It was clear the weekend before we
started filming and boom, Monday morning it was like a hurricane. And we couldn't get any
weather forecasts because the forecasters were on strike. So Robert and I went out
to the jetty every morning at 4:30 and looked at the ocean to decide whether we
could go out or not.
The weather was cold and windy, and the sea was breaking over the breakwater, which
meant eleven-, twelve-foot waves. We had a sixty-foot boat, and the guy didn't want
to leave the breakwater. He said we were in real danger. So we went out anyway. It was like
going in a trough and looking up and seeing this mountain of water. We needed three days of
filming on the ocean, and finally that's all we had left there. And, like a miracle, on the third
day it was calm.
Robert Watts (Associate Producer): The first two days the weather was very rough
and we had limitations on the height of waves we could take the submarine out in. So
we shot the interiors. We shot everything at sea Wednesday and Thursday. Thursday
got very rough. We managed to stay out even though a lot of people got seasick.
Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones): There was always a double for me and there are some scenes
that were doubled, but there were also a lot of stunts that I did myself. There were some things
that I didn't do because of time, and some I didn't do because they were too dangerous.
Most of the things that I did were like swimming to the submarine; that didn't
involve danger, it only involved discomfort.
Kathy Kennedy (Associate to Steven Spielberg): La Rochelle was scheduled for five days.
Starting a film on location, with a new crew and all, you usually have to work all the bugs out. I
think most everyone assumed that we'd get off to a rocky start and that we would probably go a
little bit over and could make it up once we got to the stages. Instead we came in right on
schedule.
If you start out like that, the crew is pretty hyped up, and you come back to the studio ready to go
right into shooting again. The momentum kept up. We had scheduled two days to do the first set,
Iman's house, and we completed it in one day. That got things off to a nice start.
THE TEMPLE
Frank Marshall (Producer): It's funny how everyone thinks tarantulas are so dangerous, when
in fact they're very fragile creatures. If they fall or you drop them they die. you have to be very
careful with them. We did lose one of them one day when two got in a fight a battle to the
death.
Steven Spielberg (Director): A director, essentially, is a collaborator: taking the best people
around and trying to get them all to help make the movie the best that can be made. I troll for the
best are ideas; I'm an audition man. I sit there and say, "Okay, who has the best idea? Let's see
a show of hands"
Frank Marshall (Producer): Often with mechanical effects you just don't know what's
going to happen. Most of them are tested, but until you have somebody run through it, you don't
really know what it's going to look like, or if it's going to work.
Kathy Kennedy (Associate to Steven Spielberg): As Indy runs through the hall outside the
sanctuary, after he's picked up the idol, he triggers arrows that come flying out of the walls. The
first time we did this, the arrows went so fast that Steven was worried we wouldn't see them on
film. But to our surprise, in dailies it looked great.
Frank Marshall (Producer): Sometimes things just look much better on the screen than they do to
the naked eye. Somehow the camera changes things. Remember, when you're seeing a movie,
you're really seeing only half of what happens: the shutter's closed the same amount of time that
it's open. Maybe that has something to do with it.
A huge boulder comes crashing down through a chute and chases
after Indy. We had to make it look like it rolled free, but we also had to be able to control it. The
boulder was on this contraption like an arm; it was free-spinning and the arm was hidden. The
boulder tumbled down the chute, then it had to be taken back if we wanted to do another take.
But we couldn't do it again very quickly because we had to put in the stalactites that got broken
off as it rolled out.
THE MAP ROOM
Frank Marshall (Producer): Norman Reynolds (Production Designer) has to jump around and
have the sets ready when we get there. And if we get ahead at all, then he doesn't have time to
finish things. And we were a little ahead. The Well of the Souls wasn't finished yet, but the map
room set was. So we went to the map room.
End of Part 1
Edited by Ann Holler
Assistant Editor, Kristine H. Johnson
Designers, Melanie Paykos and Rio Phior
Originally published in 1981.