American actor Harrison Ford as the eponymous archaeologist in a scene from the film 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade', 1989. Photo / Getty
American actor Harrison Ford as the eponymous archaeologist in a scene from the film 'Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade', 1989. Photo / Getty
Steven Spielberg has revealed which of the four Indiana Jones movies he's directed is his least favourite.
The legendary director is the subject of an upcoming documentary called Spielbergin which he says he isn't a huge fan of his 1984 film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
Back in 1989, Spielberg told the Sun-Sentinel that he felt the second film in the Indiana Jones franchise was "too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific".
Actor Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg. Photo / Getty
"I thought it out-poltered Poltergeist. There's not an ounce of my own personal feeling in Temple of Doom."
The film's executive producer and co-writer, George Lucas, has previously spoken about the personal events that perhaps contributed to the movie's dark tone.
"Part of it was I was going through a divorce, Steven had just broken up and we were not in a good mood, so we decided on something a little more edgy," he said to Empire Online.
"It ended up darker than we thought it would be. Once we got out of our bad moods, which went on for a year or two, we kind of looked at it and went, 'Mmmmm, we certainly took it to the extreme.' But that's kind of what we wanted to do, for better or worse."
Screenwriter Willard Huyck told Ain't It Cool that Harrison Ford wanted to meet with him before filming began to discuss the script.
American actor Harrison Ford as the eponymous archaeologist and actor Sean Connery as his father Henry Jones during a motorcycle chase scene. Photo / Getty
"The meeting started out with him saying, 'This is really cool. There's some really great stuff and some really funny stuff in it.'
"We started going through the script and the first scene we got to was a scene with Short Round ... we got to the end of the scene and he said, 'This one line bothers me. The kid's supposed to be 10, I don't know if he'd say something like this.' We said, 'Yeah, but he's a real cocky kid ... He's wisecracking with Americanisms and so forth.' He said, 'I don't know ... It's a great line. I think it's probably something that Indy would say'."
At the end of the meeting, the screenwriter realised that Ford was "poaching" all of Short Round's funny lines.
Banquet of doom
In one particularly memorable scene, Indy, Short Round and Willie Scott are guests at a lavish dinner in India. On the menu is bugs, snakes and monkey brains.
"The banquet scene was a joke that went wrong," the Indian-born British actor who played Chattar Lal told Empire.
"I got a great deal of flak for it because people kept saying, 'How does an intelligent man like you agree to be in a film which shows Indians dining on beetles and eels?' Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so f**king smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film."
Bugs bugged everyone
The movie featured a lot of bugs which proved to be a handful not only for the producers but also for the actors. "The bugs were much harder to work with than the snakes," producer Frank Marshall revealed.
"You can arrange a pile of snakes. That's impossible with bugs. People were also much more scared of the insects. Every once in a while you'd hear this shriek when the bugs found their way on to the tap-dance rehearsal stage - a bad place for any bug to be."
