LOCAL WILDLIFE
FRANK MARSHALL
"The elephants were interesting because they posed problems we don't normally have to deal
with on location. Like getting from A to B. Only the baby elephant could go on the truck. The
others would have to walk to the shoot and it could take several hours for them to reach there.
Unfortunately, we only had one set of elephants and so logistical problems cropped up when we
had to shoot in two different locations. They would have to go home some nights and other times
they would just sleep by the roadside with their mahouts. There aren't a whole lot of Elephant
Hotels, even in Sri Lanka."
ROBERT WATTS
"Elephants have a sort of inbuilt Union Organizer in their heads. You are governed by the speed
that they can walk from place to place. And they don't work after certain hours of the day. They
are working animals and they know when it's time to knock off. They just stop working and that's
it. After working hours they go to the river to bathe and relax and they become a little cross if
they're deprived of their recreation time. And a cross elephant could prove both expensive and
dangerous on a movie set. "
PATRICIA CARR
"One night, in the hotel, the following day's location was changed at short notice. Because of the
problems with moving elephants about, we went in search of their mahouts to give them plenty of
warning of the change. There were three elephants we were using, a baby one, a medium sized
one and a big tusker. The big ones we located fairly easily but when we reached the truck
where the baby elephant was housed we found his mahout blind drunk under the truck being
fiercely defended by his animal. Well, we did finally manage to get all the elephants where they
were meant to be the next day, but it's terrifying when you know a whole day's shooting may rest
on a drunk mahout and a baby elephant."
HARRISON FORD
"Riding an elephant is very uncomfortable, so I developed a little antipathy toward elephant
riding. "
"You ride with your legs in a hyperextended position to accommodate the girth of the animal right
over its shoulders. First one leg then the other is pulled forward, which tends to spread you apart
- like being stretched on a medieval rack, I imagine. I'm not surprised the mahouts generally walk
next to their animals."
PATRICIA CARR
"The Sri Lankans aren't very partial to snakes, funnily enough. So we booked the pythons Mike
Culling, our animal handler, had brought over from England into their own hotel room adjacent to
his under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow . . . "
MIKE CULLING
"I took three snakes out to Sri Lanka from Britain; three fifteen foot pythons. This was for a scene
in which a snake slithers out of a tree, into a pool where Kate Capshaw is bathing and wraps
itself around her. Problem was, the rains were late and the pools and rivers were stagnant; plus
Kate Capshaw wasn't too keen on having a large snake chasing her around in the water. So we
didn't use the pythons that trip.
"But the journey was productive in other ways. I had the opportunity while in Sri Lanka to get
into the jungle and collect insects. I knew we were going to need literally thousands of them for
scenes to be shot at Elstree, back in England. I spent two or three weeks just collecting,
which is work that I love."
FRANK MARSHALL
"The bats were strange, ugly creatures; giant fruit bats who lived in the trees in Kandy. They
would sleep all day, folded up in the trees, looking like some weird foliage. We couldn't get too
close to them because of the danger of rabies - although they are fruit bats, they're big and
they'll bite anything in self defense. To get a good shot of a swarm of them we'd let off a
firecracker. The trees would be barren as they came swooping around, real unhappy at being
disturbed!"
ROBERT WATTS
"We had a small part in the script for a child who has escaped from the mines of Kali and gotten
back to the village. It's the arrival of this child that persuades Indiana Jones to visit the Palace of
Pankot. We wanted to cast this part with a local child, so eventually we brought up three kids
from Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, who'd had some experience in acting. While we were
testing them on the set, we noticed a boy sitting on the wall, watching, taking everything in and
looking very keen. We asked him down to try out too. He turned out to be the best of all.
He was the son of a local woman who picked tea on the plantation. A kid who lived in a mud hut.
But he was absolutely amazing; he hit his mark every time and even had a couple of lines."
Executive Producer
Producer
Production Manager
Production Manager
Animal Handier
Executive Producer
Producer
ELSTREE STUDIOS, ENGLAND
PATRICIA CARR
"It's an exercise in pure logistics. The Production Designer, Art Directors, Set Dressers and
Construction Manager have to coordinate their management of carpenters, plasterers,
painters, riggers and stage hands. There is a whole separate set of decisions to be made as to
what gets done first. The riggers will start putting tube up, the carpenters clad it in wood, the
plasterers come in and transform it into some wonderful cave or temple interior, the painters
come in and age it down again. . . you'll see a prime example of that in the Temple of Doom
itself, which is a wonderful set. Meanwhile, the modellers will have been working in
polystyrene and plaster making, say, various gargoyles or Kali sculptures which are erected at
some point late in that building schedule. Finally, the Set Dresser goes in to dress it, to
finish it, after which that area would be roped off, ready for shooting the following day. If any one
of these processes falls out of sync, it can hold up the whole operation and ruin the allocation of
work forces on the various sets under construction."
ELLIOT SCOTT
"At Elstree we constructed a whole series of sets. The interior of the palace, reception halls with
various rooms and corridors, an entire underground scenic railway with working cars for the
Thuggee mine scenes, a vast water complex meant to drive crushers and belts to carry
the ore around, exterior palace shots in a courtyard on the outside lot, and, of course, the
Temple of Doom set itself It's a vast business to create this many sets. At one point I think
we had sixty plasterers alone at work."
FRANK MARSHALL
"The bugs were much harder to work with than the snakes we used on Raiders of the Lost Ark.
You can 'arrange' a pile of snakes - add one here or there. That's impossible with insects.
Believe me, we had a couple of terrible days at Elstree due to bugs; days when we'd grind film all
day and get nothing useable. They hate bright light, so the minute you dump them in front of the
camera, they run. If you don't get everyone's hands out of the way the minute you put them in the
shot is ruined. "Mike Culling, the animal handler, would come on the set and I'd say,
'We need more bugs! Not enough bugs!' He'd groan, 'I just put two thousand down there!'
"I found, too, that people were much more scared by the insects than they were by snakes.
Every once in a while I'd hear this shriek because one of the bugs had crawled through
from the bug tunnel to the tap dance rehearsal stage next door. Of course, this was a bad place
for any bug to be -32 girls tapdancing away - so both the insects and the girls would
run like hell. Mutual fear!"
GEORGE GIBBS
"Steven Spielberg wanted the full size mine car circuit at Elstree to be just like a scenic railway.
We hired in and bought some real mine cars and then had to decide how to power them.
I settled for an electric motor and batteries controlled by a hidden motorcycle-type twist grip. We
also installed disc brakes on each car, plus the electric motors had their own built-in braking
system.
"We had a lot of teething problems, which one would expect. No one had ever built electrically
l powered mine cars before. But eventually we riggred us four cars which could carry four people
each. And they could really travel, especially coming down inclines eighteen or twenty feet
high into a zigzag! Of course, I had to visit a lot of specialist companies for help designing and
building an asymmetrical track plus installing steel flanges behind the wheels to keep the cars on
the track around the curves . . . "
ROBERT WATTS
"The best animal we used in this movie was Oscar the Owl. Oscar had belonged to his handler
since it was an egg, so he tended to identify with humans rather than with other owls.
We did about six takes with Oscar. He always flew in and landed exactly on cue. The best
animal I ever worked with . . . better than a lot of humans ! "
Production Manager
Production Designer
Executive Producer
Mechanical Effects Supervisor
Producer
SPECIAL EFFECTS
MAKE-UP
TOM SMITH
"One shouldn't really notice make-up at all. If you're sitting in a seat in the movies and you notice it, you have a failure on your hands. It should be something one might think about in retrospect, but not something one should be conscious of in the movie theatre.
"There were half a dozen rotting corpses to create and a few dummies - one sitting on a spiked gate and another hanging from a beam, virtually eaten away.
"The headdress for Mola Ram, the Thuggee High Priest, was an interesting challenge. I was shown drawings of it by the costume designer. They were scouring all over the place trying to locte real horns, which weigh a ton, and the whole design was becoming difficult to manage. Especially as the actor would arrive at 7 o'clock in the moring and had to be ready on the set by 8:30 every day.
"I set about simplifying thew hole thing and did four clay mock-ups of the shrunken head that's fastened to it. The headdress was like the skull of an animal, based on a steer's head, and I used bony formation, rather than horns, which also acted as an anchor for the hair of the shrunken head. We actually plugged the hair in with a needle, directly into the latex, to create the effect of correct density in such a small area."
Make-up Artist
THE BANQUET
FRANK MARSHALL
"Also in the banquet sequence was a boa constrictor filled with eels! Our young Maharaja had a lot of trouble with the eels. He didn't want to stay at the table too long, even though this was supposed to be his favorite meal!"
Executive Producer
"We had a lot of fun with the banquet scene, everything from eyeball soup to chilled monkey brains. The soup was a tomato soup with eyeballs that were stuck to the bottom of the dish with putty. It looked like regular tomato soup, but when Willie stirred it the eyeballs came floating to the surface. The eyeballs were fake, of course. So were the monkey heads which were modeled and cast and the brains made of whipped cream with vegetable coloring.
PIGEON FLAMBE
GEORGE GIBBS
"In the nightclub, Indy picks up a sort of spit with flaming pigeons on it and hurls the whole kebab into the chest of one of the gunmen. Steven Spielberg was keen that the spit actually concertina into the gunman's chest and that the pigeons crushed up with it. So we made the birds out of foam, which solved the crushing problem, and constructed the spit out of a car aerial that was about two feet long.
"The scene was shot in several cuts. The gunman has a balsa wood pad concealed under his shirt with a wire going from the pad towards Harrison Ford. Harrison throws the flaming spit, which travels down the wire, sticks in the pad and flames shoot up in front of the victim's chest. Then we rush in with the fire extinguishers."
Mechanical Effects Supervisor
BOILING LAVA
DENNIS MUREN
"The boiling lava pit proved very, very difficult to get right. I don't think there's ever been a movie with actual boiling, bursting lava attempted before. Usually, it's crusted over lava - just red with black bits on the top. But we wanted to see it alive, molten, percolating. You can't possibly do it with the real thing because it would melt anything you had nearby, so we used a number of different techniques and liquids with clever lighting.
"The set we built for the lava pit was almost half scale, and even then it was over 30 feet high, with giant pumps to circulate the liquid. We chose glycerine, which is clear, but we colored it and it appears to be almost glowing in the right lighting. In the script, they actually lower somebody into the lava, and we tried that. But it didn't work; it showed up as glycerine. So we tried again using a blue screen element of the cage going in with a lot of rotoscoping work and steam all over the place. It's an extremely ambitious effect, one of the most ambitious we've ever actually done.
"Probably the main problem was working out the right scale to operate on, and that was governed to some extent by the liquid. Water proved useless and so did much thicker liquids. Eventually, we settled on having to work at a huge scale with miniature puppets three feet high as the sacrificial victims. It took 25 people to shoot this scene, at slightly high speed rather than stop motion. and we took perhaps 30 or 40 cuts of it. That's what it took to make it all look real."
Visual Effects Supervisor
ROPE BRIDGE DUMMIES
GEORGE GIBBS
"Originally, the rope bridge dummies were going to be made in America but one day Frank Marshall asked me if we could do it. I said we could, although I didn't have a clue how we were going to go about it. We had less than six weeks to create sixteen dummies which had to move realistically when the bridge was cut.
"I didn't have time to take plaster casts of the actors, so I just used ordinary tailor's dummies from which we made molds filled with soft foam and tubular frame. I worked with Richard Conway, a long time associate of mine, to figure out the best way to create movement. Radio control was one possibility but we were after reliability and simplicity. And we decided the best way to do it was to use pneumatic air rams attached to small medical oxygen bottles.
"We had a tower built at the back of the studio, about 60 feet high and tested them by throwing them off the tower. They turned out so well it was unbelievable - their legs an arms waving about and heads wobbling.
"Next, was coming up with a reliable trigger mechanism. We didn't use any fancy ideas, because when that bridge was cut everything had to work. There would be no second chances. We installed wedges between spring loaded contact plates and attached the wedges to the handrail of the bridge. When I cut the bridge, I fired the handrails first. This pulled the wedges out from the contact plates.
"For a few split seconds, just before the main bridge gave way, the cameras caught these dummies actually standing on the bridge waving. And as they fell into the river below, their limbs jerking around like crazy, they actually started swimming...they could have been real people. It was an incredible effect, one I am quite proud of."
Mechanical Effects Supervisor
THE MOST EXPENSIVE TRAIN SET IN THE WORLD
DENNIS MUREN
"Much of the mine car chase sequence was shot in England on a full size set. But for the longer shots, where you need to see a lot of the set and where the mine cars are going around corners and down steep drops in dangerous situations, we used miniatures on a very small scale. The figure of Indiana Jones, for example, was perhaps ten inches tall and yet some of these miniature sets still ended up being well over fifty feet in length.
"We made two sets of mine cars in different scales. The small ones of course, and some larger for high speed shots where we actually had to shoot with real models flying through the air. The smaller ones we were shooting stop motion using animated puppets, but when they come off the rails we have to be able to shoot at high speed.
"In shooting the miniatures, we used Nikon still cameras. I wanted to keep the scale down as far as possible to reduce the length of the sets and it occured to me that we could use a Nikon. Mike McAlister, who shot all the miniature sequences, worked on ways to steady the Nikon and put a larger magazine on it. Everything was dictated by the smallest camera we could devise, and it worked great. We could have spent $100,000 on building a special new camera, but a slightly modified 35mm Nikon with 30 feet of Vistavision film shooting at one frame per second worked perfectly.
"We shot single frame stop motion so that Tom St. Amand could animate the puppets each shot, and eventually Bruce Nicholson, who did the optical work, put a little "shake" into each element. This matched in with the live action footage shot in England on the full size set, where everything was shot "shaking" on that sequence to give the impression of speed and danger, as if the cameraman was actually in jeopardy shooting it."
Visual Effects Supervisor
GLOWING STONES & WATER PRESSURE
GEORGE GIBBS
"Steven Spielberg likes as many special effects as possible to be capable of being filmed directly, without having to cut over and over again.
"There's a small scene when the sacred stones burn their way through Indy's shoulder bag. We contrived things so that the stones would actually glow and appear to burn their way through the bag. First we cut a panel out of the bag and replaced it with nitrated paper painted the same color. The stones are lit by very powerful quartz bulbs inside. They start glowing through the paper and then we fire a switch to light the paper and the glowing stones drop out. It's simple when you know how, isn't it?
"One of the most difficult gags we did on this movie was the water stunt. Millions of gallons of water (in the script) is racing through the mine tunnels chasing our heroes. They just reach the exit to the tunnel in time and stand on each side of the holes while jets of water sweep out carrying pit props and debris into the gorge. You've got to be careful and you've got to know what you're doing."
KATE CAPSHAW
"Someone says, 'Two logs are going to come through either side of your head with a lot of water.
' What they don't tell you is the velocity and the power behind those logs."
Mechanical Effects Supervisor