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Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

• Directed by Steven Spielberg
  • Jaws
  • Schindler’s List
  • Jurassic Park
  • ET
• Starring Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, Denholm Elliot and John Rhys-Davies
• Budget of 18 million and Box Office of 389 million
• Nominated for 9 Oscars and won 4 including best Visual Effects
  • Only Indiana Jones film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
• Trivia
  • George Lucas conceived Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1973, shortly after finishing the comedy film American Graffiti (1973).
  • Inspired by Lucas’ love for Buck Rodgers, Zorro, and Spy Smasher.
  • In 1975, Lucas discussed his serial film idea with his friend Philip Kaufman. The pair worked on a story for two weeks. Lucas imagined his character as a college professor and archaeologist adventurer, based on his own appreciation for archaeology and famous archaeologists like Hiram Bingham III, Roy Chapman Andrews, and Leonard Woolley.
  • Traditionally when one of his films is about to open, George Lucas goes on vacation to get away from all the hoopla. As Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977) was just about to open, Lucas went to Hawaii where he was joined by Steven Spielberg. When the grosses for Lucas’s film came in and it was clear it was going to be a hit, Lucas relaxed and was able to discuss other topics with his friend. It was at this point that Spielberg confessed he always wanted to direct a James Bond film, to which Lucas replied he had a much better idea, an adventure movie called “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The conversation happened while the two were making a sand castle. After their trip, they got together and developed the script with Lawrence Kasdan.
  • They rejected it, in part because of the proposed $20 million budget, but also because of the deal Lucas offered. He wanted the studio to provide the budget, have no creative input and allow him to retain control of the licensing rights and any sequels. The studios considered this deal unacceptable. They were also hesitant because of Spielberg’s involvement due to his having delivered a succession of films over-scheduled and over-budget; his recent effort, 1941, was both over-budget and a critical failure. However, Lucas refused to do the project without Spielberg.
  • The famous scene in which Indy shoots a marauding and flamboyant swordsman was not in the original script. Harrison Ford was supposed to use his whip to get the sword out of his attacker’s hands, but the food poisoning he and the rest of the crew had gotten made him too sick to perform the stunt. After several unsuccessful tries, Ford suggested “shooting the sucker.” Steven Spielberg immediately took him up on the idea, and the scene was successfully filmed.
  • In 1999, Raiders of the Lost Ark was added to the National Film Registry by the United States Library of Congress. It is the only Indiana Jones film to have been inducted. Films are chosen for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
  • When Brody first goes to Indy’s house to discuss the mission, Jones is dressed the way he is because he is entertaining a young woman in his bedroom. The script originally planned to show her before moving to the next scene, to give Indy a more worldly persona (like James Bond). However, her appearance was cut, as Steven Spielberg thought that being a playboy did not fit Indy’s character. (This also helps explain why several of the co-eds fawn over Jones and why one girl wrote “love you” on her eyelids).
  • The out-of-control airplane actually ran over Harrison Ford’s knee, tearing a ligament in his left leg. Lucky for him, the heat had turned the rubber tire’s soft, so it did not crush the bone. Rather than submit to Tunisian health care, Ford had his knee wrapped in ice and carried on.
  • Alfred Molina’s first credited screen role. His first scene on his first day of filming involved being covered with tarantulas.
  • The opening sequence featured live tarantulas on Alfred Molina, but they did not move until a female tarantula was introduced.
  • The monkey raising his paw and saying (in his own language) “Heil Hitler” was thought up by George Lucas, and is one of Steven Spielberg’s two favorite scenes (in the video box set, he says his other favorite is the “where doesn’t it hurt” love scene on the ship). In Empire magazine, Frank Marshall said that they got the monkey to do the Nazi salute by putting a grape on a fishing pole, and getting the monkey to reach for the grape, which was dangling just out of camera range. This took about fifty takes before it actually looked like a Nazi salute. Voice-artist Frank Welker provided the chattering sounds for the monkey, including the “Sieg Heil”-like chirp that the monkey gives when it raises its paw in salute. (Welker later provided similar monkey chatter for Abu, the spider monkey in Disney’s Aladdin (1992).)
  • Steven Spielberg and George Lucas disagreed on the character of Indiana Jones. Although Lucas saw him as a 007-like playboy, Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan felt the character’s academic and adventurer elements made him complex enough. Spielberg had a darker vision of Jones, interpreting him as an alcoholic, similar to Humphrey Bogart’s character Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). This characterization fell away during the later drafts, though elements survive (especially Jones’s response Marion’s “death”).
  • Steven Spielberg was quoted as saying: “I made it as a B-movie. I didn’t see the film as anything more than a better made version of the Republic serials.”
  • Indy being dragged under and then out behind a moving truck is a tribute to Yakima Canutt’s famous stunt in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). In fact, it was a stunt that stuntman Terry Leonard had failed to pull off the year before in The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981). He was thrilled at the chance of having another shot at it, but only agreed to do it if his friend and colleague Glenn Randall, Jr., was driving. The truck was specially constructed to be farther off the ground than normal to allow clearance for Indiana Jones to pass underneath safely, and the center of the road was also dug out. In Great Movie Stunts: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), we see on the camera slate that the camera was set at twenty frames per second instead of the traditional twenty-four. In other words, the shots were done in “fast motion,” so the truck was not really moving as fast as depicted on-screen. Harrison Ford was actually dragged behind the truck for some of the shots, badly bruising his ribs. When asked if he was worried, Ford quipped: “No. If it really was dangerous, they would have filmed more of the movie first.” During the chase, Harrison Ford dispatches all three of his stunt doubles, all of whom are playing German soldiers. Terry Leonard plays the driver of the truck, who gets punched out of the cab by Ford. Vic Armstrong and Martin Grace play soldiers hanging onto the side of the truck before being knocked off.
  • The name of the sadistic Nazi interrogator is never mentioned in the film (although Marion calls him Herr Mach), but it is Toht, pronounced like Tod, the German word for Death. The role was offered to Klaus Kinski, who writes in his book “Kinski Uncut” that Steven Spielberg offered him a part in this movie, but he turned it down. “As much as I’d like to do a movie with Spielberg, the script is as moronically shitty, as so many other flicks of this ilk.” Kinski chose to appear in Venom (1981), because the salary was better. Michael Sheard also auditioned for the role. Ronald Lacey, who had given up acting to become an agent, was chosen because he reminded Steven Spielberg of Peter Lorre. Toht only speaks a total of fourteen lines in English. The rest of his dialogue is in German. If he looks vaguely familiar it is because of his role as Semelovsky, one of the three reluctant engineers in Firefox (1982), which was released one year after this film.
  • The Well of Souls sequence was filmed on the same sound stage that was previously used for the Overlook Hotel for The Shining (1980).
  • The scene where Jones fires at the truck was a botched stunt. The truck was supposed to flip over by means of a telegraph pole being fired by explosives through the floor. The explosive wasn’t powerful enough and it simply forced the truck to tip over at an angle as can be seen in the finished movie. Time did not permit any further attempts at getting it right.
  • Sam Neill was considered for the role of Indiana Jones. He would eventually play a character with an iconic hat in a Spielberg-directed movie: Alan Grant in Jurassic Park (1993).
  • Actors considered for the role of Indiana Jones included Sam Elliott, Jeff Bridges, Paul Le Mat, Christopher Guest, Bruce Boxleitner, Barry Bostwick, Sam Elliott, Mark Harmon, Nick Mancuso, Peter Coyote, John Calvin, Michael Biehn, Sam Shepard, David Hasselhoff and Tom Selleck. Harrison Ford was cast less than three weeks before principal photography began.
  • Shortly after the film’s release, Stanley Rader and Robert Kuhn filed a lawsuit against the filmmakers for $210 million. They alleged the film was based on a screenplay and unpublished novel, Ark, by Kuhn. The outcome of this lawsuit is unknown.

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (1984)

• Directed by Steven Spielberg
• Starring Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, and Amrish Puri
• Budget of 28 million and box office of 338 million
• Trivia
  • Spielberg later recalled that when Lucas first approached him for Raiders of the Lost Ark, “George said if I directed the first one then I would have to direct a trilogy. He had three stories in mind. It turned out George did not have three stories in mind and we had to make up subsequent stories.” Both men later attributed the film’s tone, which was darker than Raiders of the Lost Ark, to their personal moods following the breakups of their relationships. In addition, Lucas felt “it had to have been a dark film. The way Empire Strikes Back was the dark second act of the Star Wars trilogy.” Spielberg had said “The danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone. If you give people the same movie with different scenes, they say why weren’t you more original?” “But if you give them the same character in another fantastic adventure, but with a different tone, you risk disappointing the other half of the audience who just wanted a carbon copy of the first film with a different girl and a different bad guy. So you win and you lose both ways.
  • In the “making of” documentary for this movie, George Lucas said that although he originally intended for Temple of Doom to have a darker tone compared to Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (much like Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) was darker than Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977)), he admitted that he made it much darker than he intended, part of the reason being that both he and Steven Spielberg were going through a break-up at the time, and he was “not in a good mood”. Spielberg also admitted that although he agreed with Lucas’ idea for a darker-toned film, he felt uncomfortable with certain scenes while filming them, and would attempt to inject some humorous elements into those scenes trying to lighten them up. The scene where Indy is fighting the Thuggee chief guard with a hammer, and the guard takes the hammer away and tosses it aside, only to have it land on a bystander’s head, knocking him out with a comical thud, is a prime example of this scene “lightening up”.
  • The depiction of Indian culture caused controversy and brought it to the attention of India’s censors, who placed a temporary ban on it as it did not open in theaters. The film was later released when it came out on home video In India the depiction of Indian cuisine was heavily criticized, as dishes such as baby snakes, eyeball soup, beetles, and chilled monkey brains are not Indian foods. Shashi Tharoor and Yvette Rosser have criticized the film for its portrayal of India, with Rosser writing “it seems to have been taken as a valid portrayal of India by many teachers, since a large number of students surveyed complained that teachers referred to the eating of monkey brains.” Tharoor criticizes the film for promoting a negative impression of India as “a country where kings and courtiers feasted on stewed snakes and monkey brains, where Kali worshippers plucked the hearts out of their victims and embroiled them in flaming pits, and where evil, poverty and destitution reigned until the Great White Hero could intervene to restore justice and prosperity”. Other assessments of the movie, both those contemporaneous to the release of the film, and later reviews, have criticized the depiction of Indian religion and Chinese characters as racist and orientalist, and reflecting white savior tropes.
  • For the bug chamber sequence, Kate Capshaw was really covered with over two thousand insects. She took sedatives prior to the scene to get over her initial fear, and claimed “they definitely worked”.
  • R. Nanayakkara, cast as the Indian village Shaman, did not speak a word of English. He delivered his lines phonetically by mimicking Steven Spielberg who was prompting him off-camera. The pauses in his dialogue were therefore not for dramatic effect, but rather waiting for his next line.
  • Kate Capshaw was very critical of her own character, saying that Willie was “not much more than a dumb screaming blonde”.
  • Ke Huy Quan’s film debut. An open casting call was put out to all the elementary schools to find a young Asian actor to play Short Round. Quan arrived with his brother, not to audition, but merely to provide moral support. He caught the casting director’s attention because he spent the entire time of his brother’s audition telling him what to do and what not to do. Steven Spielberg liked his personality, so he and Harrison Ford improvised the scene where Short Round accuses Indy of cheating during a card game. Quan won the role over about 6,000 other auditions.
  • The nightclub in the opening scene is called Club Obi-Wan, a homage to the Star Wars character.
  • There was a scene involving Kate Capshaw and a rather large snake which had to be cut, as Capshaw was having panic attacks at the very prospect of it. Steven Spielberg jokingly says that the only reason Kate married him later was because he allowed the scene to be cut.
  • During production, the film was starting to go over budget, and Spielberg went to writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz and asked them to make changes to the script in order to save money. They removed one page from the script and saved $1 million. It was a planned air chase scene using vintage biplanes. The scene was removed from the film and was later incorporated into Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
  • Kate Capshaw’s dress in the Shanghai club was completely made of 1920’s and 1930’s original beads. This meant that there was only enough to make one dress. The opening dance number was actually the last scene to be shot, but the dress did feature in some earlier location shots in Sri Lanka, in particular, a nighttime one with Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw sitting by a campfire, with the dress drying on a nearby tree. Unfortunately, an elephant had started to eat the entire back of the dress, which was saved just in time. Consequently, some emergency repair work had to be done with what remained of the original beads, and it was costume designer Anthony Powell who had to fill out the insurance forms. As to the reason for damage, he had no option but to put “dress eaten by elephant”.
  • Steven Spielberg’s first sequel, though technically a prequel, as this film takes place in 1935, before Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) taking place in 1936, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) in 1938, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) in 1957.
  • The “chilled monkey brains” were made from custard and raspberry sauce.
  • Kate Capshaw had to be taught how to scream.
  • Sharon Stone was one of the top choices for the role of Willie Scott before Kate Capshaw auditioned. Stone later starred in King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and its sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold (1986), two films that attempted to duplicate the success of the “Indiana Jones” franchise. Also, Markie Post of Night Court (1984) fame was heavily considered for the role of Willie Scott.
  • According to some sources, Harrison Ford was not entirely comfortable with the film’s story and not entirely happy with how the film turned out. This is in direct contradiction to his interview on the home media sets where he states “I was fairly well pleased with the film”.
  • George Lucas wrote a film treatment that included a haunted castle in Scotland, but Steven Spielberg felt it was too similar to Poltergeist (1982).
  • Dan Aykroyd: as Weber, the British-accented man who escorts Indy, Short Round and Willie onto the cargo plane. Aykroyd had previously worked with Steven Spielberg on the film 1941 (1979)

Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989)

• Directed by Steven Spielberg
• Starring Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliot, Allison Doody and, River Phoenix.
• Budget of 48 million and Box Office of 474.2 million
• Trivia
  • George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had intended to make a trilogy of Indiana Jones films since Lucas had first pitched Raiders of the Lost Ark to Spielberg in 1977, though they signed for five films with Paramount Pictures by 1979. After the mixed critical and public reaction to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg decided to complete the trilogy to fulfill his promise to Lucas, with the intent to invoke the film with the spirit and tone of Raiders of the Lost Ark
  • As with the other Indiana Jones movies, Harrison Ford did many of his own stunts. According to stuntman Vic Armstrong, he had to pull Ford to one side and ask him to let him “do some work” because Ford was doing so much of the action himself. Armstrong later said, “If he wasn’t such a great actor, he would have made a really great stuntman.
  • Harrison Ford nominated River Phoenix to play him as a teenager, having worked with him before on his favorite of his many movies, The Mosquito Coast (1986). When describing how he prepared for playing the role, Phoenix explained that he didn’t really base his portrayal on the Indiana Jones character, but on Harrison Ford. So he observed Ford out of character before acting his part.
  • For the scene at the Nazi rally in Berlin, where Indiana (Harrison Ford) confronts Elsa (Alison Doody) and steals back the diary, Steven Spielberg had all of the extras who did the Nazi salute simultaneously put their other arms behind their backs and cross their fingers.
  • Steven Spielberg’s favorite of the “Indiana Jones” film franchise.
  • Steven Spielberg is on record as saying he made this movie for two reasons: 1) to fulfill a three-movie obligation he had made with George Lucas, and, 2) to atone for the criticism that he received for the previous installment, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984).
  • When Donovan’s wife comes into the study to tell him he’s neglecting his guests, the Imperial March (Darth Vader’s theme) from Star Wars can be heard playing on the piano in the background. Julian Glover (Donovan) played General Veers, the leader of the ground attack forces on Hoth, in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
  • Due to his commitment to this movie, Steven Spielberg had to drop out of directing Big (1988) and Rain Man (1988).
  • Sir Sean Connery was always Steven Spielberg’s first choice to play Indiana Jones’ father, as an inside joke to say that James Bond is the father of Indiana Jones. If that had failed, Gregory Peck and Jon Pertwee were back-up choices for the role. Spielberg had always wanted to do a Bond movie, but did Indiana Jones as a James Bond-type character. In keeping with the James Bond theme, the movie has many Bond movie co-stars: John Rhys-Davies, Alison Doody, Julian Glover, Stefan Kalipha, Pat Roach, Eugene Lipinski, Michael Byrne, and Vernon Dobtcheff
  • Denholm Elliott had been diagnosed with A.I.D.S. shortly before filming began, and was seriously ill on various production days.
  • Henry, Sr. and Jr. note that in Latin, Jehovah begins with an I, not a J. This is quite correct, especially given that the knight who recovered the Grail acquired it during the First Crusade. The First Crusade ended in 1099. In the time of the Roman Empire, J was merely a variant of an I, hence the resemblance between their lower case forms i and j. The original pronunciation was very much like an I or Y. Its use as a soft g sound dates to no earlier than the fifteenth century.
  • Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford included the opening scenes as a tribute to their own experiences as Boy Scouts.
  • The film recycles two rejected ideas from Raiders of the Lost Ark. George Lucas originally wanted Indy to travel with his old archaeology professor, who had himself been obsessed with the Ark. Spielberg wanted Indy to have a female love interest who was also a German spy.
  • Ben Burtt recorded chickens for the sounds of the rats, and digitally manipulated the noise made by a Styrofoam cup for the castle fire. He rode in a biplane to record the sounds for the dogfight sequence, and visited the demolition of a wind turbine for the plane crashes.
  • After having a great working relationship with Steven Spielberg on Gremlins (1984), Spielberg produced the next two movies Chris Columbus scripted, The Goonies (1985), based on an idea Spielberg had, and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985), which was Columbus’ idea, which, altogether, was two years working on three movies. Spielberg then wanted Columbus to script this movie, a big step for him as a writer. He accepted, and went to meet Spielberg and George Lucas, two men by whom he was very intimidated, even though he had worked with Spielberg three times, and they were two of his cinematic heroes. Columbus acted as Spielberg and Lucas’ secretary on this movie for five days, taking down all of their ideas. Lucas dictated the screenplay to Columbus, making him fearful of changing any of it, and it went against what Columbus had learned at film school. To him, the script seemed lifeless, and without energy, and there was nothing of Columbus in it. Columbus assumed Spielberg hired him for that last reason, and when Columbus turned in the script, he was fired from the movie for all of the above flaws in the screenplay. It was a defining moment in Columbus’ career, to never again ignore his base instincts on a movie, or to be intimidated by the people with whom he worked.
  • The shot of Donovan’s death was created over three months by morphing together three puppets of Donovan in separate stages of decay, a technique Industrial Light & Magic mastered on Willow (1988). A fourth puppet was used for the decaying clothes, because the puppet’s torso mechanics had been exposed. Complications arose because Alison Doody’s double had not been filmed for the scene’s latter two elements, so the background and hair from the first shot had to be used throughout, with the other faces mapped over it. Donovan’s skeleton was hung on wires like a marionette. It required several takes to film it crashing against the wall, because not all the pieces released upon impact.

Indiana Jones and The Crystal Skull (2008)

• Directed by Steven Spielberg
• Starring Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf, and Karen Allen.
• Box office of 790 million on a budget of 185 million
• Trivia
  • To prepare for the role, the 64-year-old Ford spent three hours a day at a gym, practiced with the bullwhip for two weeks,[4] and relied on a high-protein diet of fish and vegetables. Ford had kept fit during the series’ hiatus anyway, as he hoped for another film. He performed many of his own stunts because stunt technology had become safer since 1989, and he also felt it improved his performance. Ford felt his return would also help American culture be less paranoid about aging (he refused to dye his hair for the role), because of the film’s family appeal: “This is a movie which is geared not to the young segment of the demographic”
  • In 1979, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg made a deal with Paramount Pictures for five Indiana Jones films. Following the 1989 release of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lucas let the series end as he felt he could not think of a good plot device to drive the next installment. He chose instead to produce the prequel television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. The following year, Harrison Ford would express his feelings that, while he was uncertain on if the Indiana Jones character had been fully explored or not, he had the impression that Last Crusade would be the final Indiana Jones film and that, as much he enjoyed playing Jones, he felt that a trilogy was enough, though he wouldn’t rule out working with Lucas and Spielberg again. Comic book writer Lee Marrs claimed in a 2023 interview with the IndyCast podcast that Lucasfilm Ltd. was considering to make a continuation to the film series by bringing River Phoenix back as a younger Indy, hence why Dark Horse Comics hoped to keep running their Indiana Jones comic book line, though Phoenix’s death in 1993 put an end to such possibility.
  • As Young Indy aired, Ford played Jones in one episode, narrating his adventures in 1920 Chicago from 1950 Wyoming. When Lucas shot Ford’s role in December 1992, he realized the scene opened up the possibility of a film with an older Indiana set in the 1950s.
  • Harrison Ford was adamant that he got to wield Indiana’s famous whip. Paramount executives wanted the weapon to be computer generated because of new movie safety rules, but Ford branded the rule “ridiculous”.
  • Harrison Ford convinced David Koepp to include more jokes about Indy’s age in the script, believing they would help reduce the “American paranoia about aging.” He also refused to dye his hair for the role, arguing Indy’s appeal wasn’t in his youth, but in his imagination and resourcefulness: “My ambition in action is to have the audience look straight in my face, and not the back of a stuntman’s head. I hope to continue that, no matter how old I get.”
  • Karen Allen was not aware her character was in the script until director Steven Spielberg called her in January 2007, saying, “It’s been announced! We’re gonna make Indiana Jones 4! And guess what? You’re in it again!”. Karen greeted Spielberg about the same way Marion greeted Indiana back in that bar in Tibet; given their notoriously problematic relationship.
  • Cate Blanchett and Harrison Ford had never met before this movie. The first time they were introduced was on the first day of filming, where Indiana and Spalko first meet. Blanchett said it was ideal to be introduced to him dressed as Indiana Jones, because she’d always been a big fan of the character.
  • Sir Sean Connery was approached for a cameo appearance as Henry Jones, Sr., Indiana’s father, but he turned it down, finding retirement too enjoyable. George Lucas later stated that, in retrospect, it was good that Jones, Sr. did not appear, as it would disappoint the audience when he would not come along for the adventure. Harrison Ford also joked that he was getting old enough to play his own father, so Sean wasn’t needed anymore.
  • John Rhys-Davies was approached to reprise his character Sallah in a very brief cameo in the wedding scene. But he turned it down, because he felt that having Sallah just appear as a crowd member would cheat the audience and cheapen the character.
  • Steven Spielberg cast Russian actors in the roles of Russian soldiers, so their accents would be authentic.
  • The nuclear bomb test that Indiana Jones finds himself in is loosely based on the Operation Teapot atomic bomb tests of 1955, detonated on the Nevada Test Site. Most notable is the use of buildings and mannequins to observe the destructive force of the explosion, which was also featured in the nuclear bomb test in this movie. The announcements and countdown preceding the explosion are based on the Ivy Mike test of 1952, the very first detonation of a hydrogen bomb (most notably the warning “Do not remove goggles or face blast until ten seconds after first light.”)
  • It’s mistakenly said that the jungle chase was filmed in front of a bluescreen. In fact, all of the sequence was filmed in a real jungle, CGI was used to add some plants and erasing areas of the ground. You can see this on the Disc 2 of the DVD
  • This is the only Indiana Jones movie not to receive any Oscar nominations.
  • With a final budget of $185 million, this is, as of 2020, the most expensive movie directed by Steven Spielberg.
  • When running away from the Russian tent camp, Indiana Jones says “This is intolerable!” which Henry Jones, Sr. said in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
  • Night Shyamalan and Tom Stoppard were each asked to pen a draft of the screenplay.
  • Michelle Yeoh was rumored to be up for a role in this movie, and had discussed the possibility with an enthusiastic Steven Spielberg, on the set of Memoirs of a Geisha (2005).
  • Originally, Henry Jones, Sr., Short Round, Sallah, and Willie Scott were to make an appearance at Indiana’s wedding.
  • At the end of the bike chase when the motorcycle slides on its side you can hear the chewbacca roar from Star Wars as it comes to a stop.