In Film Criticism this week! RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
1. RAIDERS was mostly filmed inTunisia, which stood in for Egypt.2. The movie was also filmed at Elstree Studios in England for scenes involving the Well of Souls, opening interiors and Marion's tavern.
3. The opening exteriors were filmed in Kauai, Hawaii, and exteriors set in Washington D.C. were filmed outside of San Francisco's City Hall.
4. The University of the Pacific stands in for (the unnamed) Marshall College where Jones works, and his home exteriors were filmed in the city of San Rafael, California.
5. Spielberg managed to shoot the film in only 73 days, wrapping under schedule.
6. The scene where Indiana Jones shoots the sword-wielding assassin in the market was improvised on the set. Harrison Ford had been suffering from dysentery and exhaustion due to the extreme heat of Tunisia during filming. As originally planned, the scene was elaborately choreographed, with Jones facing the expert swordsman and trying to defeat him with just his whip. Some footage of the planned fight was shot (and was seen in at least one of the movie's trailers) but the filming was proving to be very tedious, both for Ford and the crew, and at some point Ford had had enough. Reportedly, he said something to Spielberg along the lines of, "Why don't we just shoot the sucker?" Spielberg liked the idea, scrapped the rest of the fight scene, and filmed the brief sequence of the shooting that appears in the movie.
7. The scene in which Jones threatens Belloq with a rocket-propelled grenade was shot in the same Tunisian canyon where George Lucas shot a scene involving Tusken Raiders attacking Luke Skywalker in his film, STAR WARS (1977).
8. The U-boat scenes were shot at La Rochelle, both outside the harbour and inside the U-boat bunkers there, built by the Germans in 1942. Filming was done here due to the need to obtain a U-boat to film with — the film "borrowed" the U-boat that was being prepared for filming DAS BOOT.
9. During the Well of Souls scene, when Indiana stares down the cobra, the snake's reflection is visible in the glass which was placed to prevent the cobra from actually harming any of the actors (the reflection was digitally removed for the 2003 DVD release).
10. Famously when 6000 snakes were bought on set, Spielberg still felt there were not enough, so crew members cut up plastic tubes and placed them carefully between live snakes. During Elstree filming, Harrison Ford also had to outrun the boulder 10 times, and Alfred Molina had to endure 100 spiders. Whilst all the snakes were fine, one spider fell and died - as a result the movie does not have a 'No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of this Production' notification.
11. There were three stunt doubles for Harrison Ford, the primary one being British born stunt man Vic Armstrong, who reportedly resembled Ford to the degree that people off camera often mistook him for the real Ford. But Ford fought to do many of the fights and stunts himself, arguing there would not be much else for him to do if he was not in the thick of it.
12. The Washington D.C. exterior was a pick-up (added in after main filming), as the film was originally written to end without any resolution of Indy's relationship to Marion. The brief footage showing the activity on a D.C. street (with the Washington Monument prominently in the background) was actually "borrowed" from the 1975 disaster film THE HINDENBURG.
posted by CW at 9:21 PM
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