Asps, Very Dangerous
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"Snakes don't bother me much. It's just acting."
Harrison Ford |
Allen: The Well Of Souls was really something. They had some real snakes - maybe 500, 600 - that they were going to use for closer shots. For long shots they were going to use mechanical snakes. Steven could pretty much tell straight away that it wasn't going to happen that way. So he put out a call to snake-wranglers and suddenly, within a period of days, 6,000 snakes arrived.
Rhys-Davies: I remember meeting one of the wranglers who had caught a crew member with this quite large snake saying, "I just want to take it home for my kid, it'll only die anyway." The wrangler stuck it in the glove compartment of his car and forgot all about it. By the time he remembered, the snake had gone completely. Later, he's taking his wife and his mother-in-law for a drive. And, of course, the snake re-appeared.
Ford: Snakes don't bother me much. It's just acting.
Kennedy: Do you remember that rat reacting to the hum of the Ark in the hold of the ship? We found a rat that was behaving very erratically because it was deaf. It was turning in this very odd way, trying to hear out of one ear. When we actually featured it in the shot it worked very effectively.
Truck? What Truck?
Marshall: The truck chase is really something. It worked just like it should've worked. It's got all these great homages, like going under the truck with the whip like in the old Westerns. All those things were done for real, no CGI.
Spielberg: The whole Flying Wing fight was improvised. One idea gave access to the next, it was a real lesson in cinematic improvisation. I was getting really excited, as the possibilities were overwhelming. I had to stop myself before the sequence became an eight-minute-long one that George would cut down to three-and-a-half.
Marshall: In Tunisia it was literally 125° F but very dry. A lot of people had dysentery, and we had run out of stuntmen. Steven said, "Go and put that outfit on and you can be the pilot." I said, "How long is this going to be, Steven? I'm also the producer." He said, "Oh, just a morning." It was about 150°F in that cockpit, and then you have Karen Allen hitting me over the head with the chocks. That wasn't much of a stunt; it just hurt. It took three days, by the way.
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"It was about 150°F in that cockpit, and then you have Karen Allen hitting me over the head with the chocks. That wasn't much of a stunt; it just hurt."
Frank Marshall |
Vic Armstrong (Stunt Man): Harrison is Indiana Jones. He wanted to do all his stunts.
Ford: The stunts were the key part of the thing, getting as far into them as I could. Working with the brilliant Vic Armstrong, working out how much I could do. We would always devise how the character would work in these circumstances.
The Power Of God Or Something
Spielberg: When it came to the opening of the Ark, George said to me, "You've done a supernatural ending with Close Encounters. Make it thrilling, but make the audience come back and see it a second time."
Freeman: I had no idea what was going on. You would just be standing there in costume and they would say, "Okay, imagine this thing coming at you!" I would say, "What thing?" "I don't know but it's something coming at you - duck and scream!"
Lucas: We weren't focused on how gory the end of the movie was going to be. In the script, one head shrivels, one explodes, the other melts. Steven dictated the level at which it would happen. Those were the days when you could do things like that without anyone saying much.
Wolf Kahler (Dietrich): Paul Freeman thought my mask was better than his.
Spielberg: I showed the movie to George and he had no notes; he was ecstatic. We were all hugging. My editor, Mike Kahn, couldn't have been happier. I went back to LA and then I got the inevitable call from George the next morning saying, "You know, Steve, I've been thinking about the cut. The ending seems three times longer than it should be. I wonder if I could have a run at it." George and Mike took a pass at the ending and cut it in half, and I didn't want to make a single change.
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