Chapter 6, Part 3 - Harrison Ford: From Artisan to Artist

As was his custom on his other films, Ford did most of his own stunts for Blade Runner. One memorable scene had him clinging precariously to a ledge, hundreds of storeys above the teeming streets.

‘We were using a 65mm Mitchell camera,’ explained effects man David Dryer, ‘which weighed about 75 pounds. With that kind of weight cantilevered out over Ford there was always the chance that the camera would break a casting and come right down on him. So we rigged a special plate and support to get the camera actually looking back down on itself.’

It was Rutger Hauer’s job to haul Ford up onto the roof. ‘Harrison didn’t want to fall down that twenty foot drop, or whatever it was. So he was hanging there, with a wire for support, but it was still kind of tough to get him up.’

But Ford was dismissive of the danger involved. ‘That shot where I’m hanging from the girder ... well, god knows, I’m not hanging 30 storeys above the ground there. Not only am I not hanging from the girder, I’ve got a safety belt on and a wire that’s got me clipped to the bottom of the girder ... and I’m acting like I’m hanging from a girder, from the contortion of my face, the sweat of my brow. That’s all acting ... wonderful acting!’ But on a more serious note Ford is careful to draw a clear distinction between what he does and ‘real’ stunts. ‘What I’ve done in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Blade Runner is “physical acting”. Stunts are falling off a tall building or crashing a car. Something you’re silly enough to think isn’t going to hurt the next day.’

Ford claims he wasn't really dangling from a girder by his fingertips
30 storeys above the ground ... but I don't believe him for a second.

Meanwhile, rumours abounded that Ford had drastically altered his appearance for the movie, one American newspaper even claiming Ford played Deckard with a shaved head. ‘The crewcut was my idea,’ said Ford. ‘And I had to talk Ridley into it, because he was afraid that it might make me less ... gorgeous. The haircut couldn’t be done unless Ridley was there. It took about four hours to get it. With long pauses for consideration by Ridley. My ambition was always to get it right down. Real short. I wanted to give the impression of a character who has given upon himself, was unconscious of his appearance and had lost, to a large degree, that ego that keeps us all doing things like combing our hair, brushing our teeth and all of that. I thought it was important to suggest that and change my appearance in some way. I think it’s more interesting for an audience, even if they know right away who it is. They don’t have the same expectation of you if you don’t look the same. It gives you a foot forward.

‘And one of the other things that drives me nuts when doing a four month shooting schedule is when someone is fiddling with your hair between every shot. I just can’t stand that. It just drives me nuts. If I could have short hair on every film ... I mean, some of my best friends are hairdressers, but it does drive me nuts. The first thing I do after a film where I have long hair is cut it all off.’ The beard was also Ford’s idea. ‘The first day of Blade Runner, I’m shaved. When the events begin to take over my life, it hardly seems a proper time to shave ... when things are going the way they are in Blade Runner, there doesn’t seem time for a bath and a shave. I think that kind of detail goes to make up the character. I try not to lose sight of those little things.’

An early continuity pic of Ford ... here his hair
is longer than it appeared in the final movie.

By this time, Ford had had a chance to think through Deckard’s relationship with Rachael. ‘It’s clear that Deckard doesn’t think very much about women at all,’ he told the author of Blade Runner souvenir magazine. ‘He’s the type of guy that would see them occasionally but not have any use for them around the house. He has a wife and child but they seem to have gone in search of a better life. Deckard acknowledges on Rachael’s first appearance that she is attractive. But then she becomes a puzzle and, when he figures out she is a replicant, he seems to have no further use for her. He sees Rachael as a zero. But her display of emotion, even though he knows it’s false, implanted, pulls him out of his despair. As he begins to become involved with her, he is forced to confront what is really going on around him.’

THE RELEASE

Director Ridley Scott called ‘cut!’ for the last time on Blade Runner during the second week of July, 1981. The production was already over-schedule and over-budget. The filmmakers busied themselves with such vital post-production activities as editing, dubbing and adding the excellent Vangelis music. The following January, the first of the Blade Runner trailers was released in America. It featured scenes from the movie under the music of the Inkspots, enhancing the idea of Blade Runner as a 1940s pastiche.

A rough cut of the film previewed in Denver, Colorado. The feedback from that screening indicated the fans were unhappy with the abrupt ending of Deckard and Rachael stepping into the lift and the doors slamming shut behind them.

‘Fortunately, we had also shot an alternative ending, with Deckard and Rachael leaving the city together in a Spinner, heading towards the unpolluted Northwest,’ said Scott. Also at this stage, there was no Harrison Ford voice-over to explain the more ambiguous scenes in the film. I was lucky enough to see this version at an early preview in London around March, 1982, and feel this ‘first draft’ to be far superior to both the theatrical release cut and the later ‘Director’s Cut’ released on VHS video.

When the film came out on June 25, 1982 in America, the 1940s look and the laconic (some would say, ‘bored’) narration was singled out by the critics as the chief target for attack. Ford was a little defensive about such comments. ‘I thought it had the makings of a very original film,’ he said. ‘It was no ambition of mine to play the character like a Forties Bogart figure, but it was always on Ridley’s mind. It was always my hope that there wouldn’t be a voice-over, that we wouldn’t need one. I thought the character needed to be a representation of a certain type of physical environment, the result of that kind of life. The voice-over was always Ridley’s idea, from the beginning.’

Scott was a little more philosophical. ‘We never addressed the problem of the voice-over early enough,’ he told me. ‘I wanted the voice-over from the beginning. The screenplay was written with a voice-over.’ But that wasn’t the voice-over that appeared in the finished film. And Scott was far from happy with the end result. ‘The voice-over is an essential part of the Marlowe-type character of Deckard and also to a degree helps clarification. One of the most interesting aspects of Apocalypse Now was the voice-over. It was incredible. I think Coppola went on for nearly six months trying to get that right. I think, with hindsight, I would have re-done the voice-over in Blade Runner, and I think Harrison would as well.’

As it turned out, the final narration was no masterpiece and it jarred against the other aspects of the production. Of particular note was the corny speech over the scene in which replicant Roy Batty dies. Ford’s tired voice proclaims. ‘I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life. Anybody’s life. My life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have it got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.’ Raymond Chandler, it’s not.

Ridley Scott directs Ford during the final showdown
with Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).

Almost predictably, the reviews weren’t good.

Playboy’s Bruce Williamson thought Blade Runner was a ‘major disappointment’ despite ‘smashing production values and fine actors’ and summed up the movie saying, ‘by the time Ford and Hauer face off for their climactic showdown, Blade Runner had grown dull – a simple case of Philip Marlowe meets Frankenstein.’

The British trade publication Screen International felt ‘the special effects dominate the film while the plot and characters fade into the background,’ and pointed out that ‘in spite of his voice-over ironies, Rick Deckard is no Philip Marlowe.’

The American trade bible Variety said that ‘Ford’s frequent inertia mutes the detective angle of the story which is couched in some hard-boiled Chandleresque narration and in the long run proves to be the weakest aspect of the pic.’

Some critics believed that the level of violence in Blade Runner was more explicit than was necessary. Ford countered this in his usual eloquent style. ‘There’s a really unfortunate and ill-advised attitude to the violence in the film. I am conscious of violence in a film. I abhor it when it is used for the sake of itself. I was anxious to make sure this character represented the abhorrence of violence. And he does. He wanted to get out of the police force because he couldn’t stand the killing. After every incident of having to kill someone, the character’s revulsion is clear. And, ironically, he is not killing human beings. That’s what the thematic backbone of the film is. They’re not really human beings. And yet, his empathy with something that looks like a human being – which is later to lead him into a romance with a machine affects him.’

In spite of the negative criticism of the film, Ford’s performance was praised. Scriptwriter David Peoples was enthusiastic about Ford’s portrayal of Rick Deckard. ‘Harrison is an absolutely magnificent actor,’ he commented. ‘He’s amazing. He’s like the great old guys. He becomes Deckard. I mean, you don’t see him act like Deckard, he is Deckard and Deckard is different from Han Solo and entirely different from Indiana Jones. In Blade Runner he’s a seething guy with a lot inside him. He’s a guy who’s got a lot of problems, who’s holding a lot in, and Harrison does it brilliantly.’

Science fiction author and friend of Philip K. Dick’s, Norman Spinrad was more restrained about Ford’s performance. ‘Harrison Ford is fine in the rather undemanding role of Deckard,’ a comment that seems to me to be sniffy and dismissive.

In my view Blade Runner remains probably the most literate science fiction film ever made. Ford’s performance is a masterpiece of understatement and contributed mightily to the film’s artistic success. Ford himself has spoken critically of his involvement in the film, stating that he’s very unhappy with Ridley Scott’s later claims that Deckard was always intended to be a replicant. However, I never got that Deckard was any kind of replicant from the movie in any of its cuts, just that the momentary doubt about his own humanity the character experiences is enough to finally convince Deckard that replicants are worth no less than human beings.

Some people thought this scene indicated that Deckard
was a replicant because his eyes glowed in the same
way as Rachel's ... I'd want more evidence than that.

Yet Blade Runner was an extremely important step in Ford’s career. It was his first opportunity to show what he could do as a serious actor. It was becoming obvious that Ford was a far better actor than his Star Wars and Raiders vehicles allowed audiences to see. But further expeditions into the area of serious acting would have to wait. Already the date for the beginning of principal photography of the third part of the Star Wars saga was approaching. It was almost time for Ford to return to the worlds of robots and rayguns as Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. But not before he’d rested up a while. ‘It would take an Act of Congress to get me to work before Jedi,’ he said, ‘I haven’t had six months with the kids for a long time.’

But Ford would be back at work quicker than he expected. Melissa had been around on set much of the time during the filming of Raiders, working with Spielberg on the script for E.T. During the filming of E.T., Spielberg had Melissa work with the child actors, rehearsing their scenes. It was inevitable that Ford would end up with a role in the movie. Spielberg also persuaded Melissa to play the part of the nurse who takes the “drunk” Elliot to the principal (played by Ford). As with most of the other adults in the film, their faces would not be seen. But nervous Melissa’s hands trembled so badly during her scene she pleaded with Spielberg to scrap the footage. So not for the first time in his career one of Ford’s performances was consigned to the cutting room floor.

Chapter 5, Part 3 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

‘Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?’

Most people would think that an actor who also did so many of his own stunts, like Harrison Ford, would have enough on his plate in a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not so. The folk who made Raiders knew that the more severe the trials suffered by the hero, the more the audience would be rooting for him. Also, a hero with a failing seems more vulnerable and easier to identify with for an audience. So the filmmakers gave Indiana Jones a fear of snakes and needless to say, Indy met more than just a few snakes during his adventures in Raiders. The Well of Souls was filled with them.

‘Steven Spielberg kept wanting more and more snakes,’ said Ford, ‘but he had to make do with six thousand garden and grass snakes flown in from Holland, and used bits of garden hose to fill the spaces the boas and pythons couldn’t.’

Fords’s co-star, Karen Allen, wasn’t mad about doing the scene in the Well of Souls at first. ‘Harrison has on his boots and gloves, and leather clothes, and I have naked arms and nothing on my legs or feet. In the beginning it was tough, because I just couldn’t stand the snakes on my feet. But I got used to them.’

Producer Frank Marshall, who shot some of the snake footage, wasn’t wild about reptiles, either. ‘I had to cure myself of a common phobia of snakes. But once you see other people, like a snake handler, not worry about it, then you touch one. Then I got to be real comfortable with them. Some of the shots I did were a real challenge. Snakes aren’t afraid of anything, they’d even go right into the fire. So we had to invent a way to get them to stay away from the fire.’

Though most of the snakes used in the scene were harmless, the crew did use a couple of cobras, whose bite can kill, to add a little real danger for Indy.

‘When we used the cobras,’ recalled Howard Kazanjian, the film’s co-executive producer, ‘we had a hospital gurney on the set, and outside the stage we had ambulances with open doors. On the end of the gurney was an open medical kit with a hypodermic needle placed into the phial of serum from India.’ This does sound like a typical piece of studio hype.

The publicity folks obligingly airbrushed the cobra's
reflection out of the picture in this still, but
you can see it quite clearly in the movie.

In the shot where Indy comes face-to-face with the angry cobra, it’s pretty easy to see the cobra’s reflection in the sheet of glass that separates them. The gurney and the hypo were probably for the unfortunates whose job it was to handle the snakes off-camera.

Harrison Ford dismisses Indy’s fear of snakes with his characteristic easy smile. ‘They don’t bother me at all. When I was a kid, I worked in a boy scout camp as a nature councillor, I used to collect them. Used to run and catch every snake we could. And I’m amazed that that’s the most frightening scene for most people.’

But, as I said, all heroes must have a failing. There is something the intrepid Ford doesn’t like. ‘Spiders!’ he told Movie Star magazine. ‘Not because they’re creepy, but inside my house they multiply, and then their kids have kids. Ugh. All those spiders all over the place.’

One particularly gruesome scene in Raiders does just happen to have a few spiders in it. The scene in the Temple in Peru. But unlike the scene with the snakes, it was the spiders that had to be watched out for rather than their human co-stars. ‘It’s funny how people think tarantulas are so dangerous,’ said producer Frank Marshall, ‘when in fact they’re very fragile creatures. If they fall or you drop them, they die. You have to be very careful with them. We did lose one of them one day when two got in a fight – a battle to the death.’

But for Ford, it was the snakes that had the last laugh: shortly after the opening of Raiders, Ford told author Tony Crawley of a strange incident. ‘Back home,’ said Ford, ‘just the other week – you’re not going to believe this – I got bitten by a damn snake in my garden!’

‘I put as much of myself into the characters as possible.’

The only other thing Harrison Ford had to do in Raiders of the Lost Ark was portray the character of Indiana Jones. Director Steven Spielberg had nothing but praise for Ford’s abilities as an actor. ‘Harrison is a very original leading man,’ he said. ‘There’s not been anybody like him for 30 or 40 years. In this film he is a remarkable combination of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan and Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He carries this picture wonderfully.’ 

Ford effortlessly conveyed the many aspects of
Indy's character - scholar, brawler, adventurer, scoundrel.

Ford was well aware of what was expected of him. ‘It’s a question of responsibility to define the character for the audience, to make the film as good as you can.’

But he had a good ally in Steven Spielberg. ‘Steve allowed a kind of collaboration that was really a lot of fun for me. I like to become really involved as much, and as long, as possible. If I had a little bit of an idea, Steve added to it, and then I added to it, and then he added to it, and it built into something we both thought was better than before ... or so stupid we both ended up rolling about on the floor with laughter.’

And, in the spirit of Indy’s line in the movie, ‘I’m making this up as I go,’ Ford and Spielberg were making changes to the script even during actual shooting.

‘My only impulse to change lines comes when the words are impossible to get out of my mouth,’ said Ford. ‘The process of film-making involves so many situations and personalities that it becomes a very liquid medium. The physical presence of actors and crew are concrete factors, but the script should relate to them more like a road map of probabilities than a rigid blueprint.’

The biggest change Spielberg and Ford made to the script was to delete the ‘Sword vs the Whip’ duel that was written as a climax to the battle in the marketplace in Cairo. In the film, Indy comes face to face with a giant of a swordsman. The swordsman performs an intricate routine with a huge scimitar. Indy, unimpressed, pulls out his revolver and shoots him. Not sporting, but efficient.

‘I was in my fifth week of dysentery at the time,’ recalled Ford later. ‘The location was an hour and a half drive from where we stayed. I’m riding to the set at 5.30am, and I can’t wait to storm up to Steven with this idea. I’d worked out we could save four whole days on this lousy location this way. Besides which, I think it was right and important, because what’s more vital in the character’s mind is finding Marion. He doesn’t have time for another fight. But as is very often the case, when I suggested it to Steven – “Let’s just shoot the sucker” – he said, “I just thought the same thing this morning.” Sure, the idea was nothing. Putting it on film, that’s the most difficult part.’

The whip vs scimitar battle would have been fun, but Ford
and Spielberg were right to drop it. Indy had to save Marion ...

That scene also told the audience much about Indiana Jones. The world-weary expression on Indy’s face as he draws his gun, sums up the character’s directness. As Ford explains, ‘Indy is a kind of swashbuckling hero type, but he has human frailties. He does brave things, but I wouldn’t describe him as a hero. He teaches, but I wouldn’t describe him as an intellectual. I wanted to avoid any elements in the role that might be too similar to Han Solo. But Indy doesn’t have any fancy gadgetry keeping him at a distance from enemies and trouble. The story is set in 1936, after all, and he’s right in there with just his battered trilby and a bull-whip to keep the world at bay.’

Star!

‘All I care about is good acting,’ George Lucas was once quoted as saying. ‘Star value is only an insurance policy for those who don’t trust themselves making films.’ But when Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in America on July 12th, 1981, that’s exactly what Harrison Ford had plenty of.

‘There’s more excitement in the first ten minutes of Raiders,’ said Playboy’s Bruce Williamson, ‘than any movie I have seen all year. By the time the explosive misadventures end, any moviegoer worth his salt ought to be exhausted.’

Just about all the reviews were of the same opinion. Raiders was a masterpiece of popular cinema. ‘Surely destined to go down in history as one of the great, fun movies,’ said Britain’s trade journal, Screen International.

‘Raiders represents Spielberg’s best work in years, a return to the briskness and coherence that have been missing since Jaws,’ said Time magazine.

At the press screening I attended in 1981, the opening twelve minutes received a standing ovation from the several hundred jaded film hacks in attendance. Now that’s a reaction.

The film’s reception at the box-office was nothing short of exuberant, which came as no great surprise, ending up as the highest earning movie of 1981. Its position in the all-time box-office hit list is just as impressive, with the film at the 40th position earning a US gross of over $242 million.

At the 1981 Academy Awards, Raiders was nominated in the categories Best Music, Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Picture, and won for Best Sound, Best Special Effects, Best Art Direction and Best Editing. The film also earned Ben Burtt and Richard Anderson a Special Oscar for Achievement in Sound Effects Editing.

Ford himself was happy about his involvement in the film and the end result.

Indy and Marion share a Gone with the Wind moment
as they're reunited after all those years.

‘Raiders is really about movies,’ he explained. ‘It is intricately designed as a tribute to the craft. I’m quite in awe of the film, and the way it was accomplished. Steven set out to make an epic film, technically complex, on a short schedule. He finished twelve days early and under budget. He didn’t waste any time in retakes. Steve was very fast and efficient, and that’s the way I like to work.’

Yet his experience on Raiders did leave Ford with one cautionary thought ‘I occasionally wonder how much longer I can perform in heavy action roles,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Working in sub-zero blizzards and 130 degree deserts is incredibly demanding, physically. Sometimes I think the most difficult part of being in films is being cool as an airplane rolls over your leg – and acting like it doesn’t hurt at all.’

As Harrison Ford’s next film project drew closer, his attitude had mellowed a little ‘With me,’ he said, ‘the last film is always the toughest. I’ll soon be down on record as saying Blade Runner was the toughest.’

By the time Ford had finished with Raiders in late 1980 and returned to his home in Benedict Canyon, Melissa had moved in with him and the tabloids were inexplicably in another feeding frenzy. One of the first guests they welcomed as a couple was British film director Ridley Scott who was courting Ford for the lead in his next picture, a science fiction detective yarn based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Chapter 5, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

Keeping Indie independent

Despite his enthusiasm for the project, one aspect of Raiders bothered Ford. ‘My only immediate reservation about playing Indiana Jones,’ said Ford, ‘was that in the script the character was a little bit like Han Solo. Steven Spielberg and I wanted to make sure that the characters were spread apart. We did that by making use of the opportunities that existed in Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay.’

Time was too short for a re-write of the script. Yet Spielberg recognised in Ford a native ability with dialogue and wanted to implement some of Ford’s suggestions. What happened was like a scene out of a Let’s-make-a-movie movie. ‘The production was based in London,’ said Ford, ‘and Steve and I sat on the plane from Los Angeles and went through the script, line by line, for fourteen hours. By the time we got to Heathrow, we’d worked out the entire film.’

It’s just as well that they had, for no sooner had Spielberg and Ford arrived in Britain than the entire cast and crew were whisked off to La Rochelle in France to spend the first five days of the movie’s shooting schedule filming the submarine hijack of the Bantu Wind. It was during these five days that Ford was to get his first taste of the stunts he would be required to perform in the course of portraying Indiana Jones. ‘Swimming to the submarine didn’t involve danger,’ said Ford, ‘it only involved discomfort.’ The worst was yet to come.

Steven Spielberg directs Harrison Ford in the Peruvian Temple set
that features in the strong opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Star Wars had put the phrase ‘special effects’ into everyone’s mouth. Suddenly, after Star Wars opened, reviews were peppered with the words. It was as though George Lucas had invented the concept all by himself. With Raiders, Lucas was to elevate another previously ignored movie art to star status. Stunts.

Much was made, at the time, of the fact that Harrison Ford did many of his own stunts for the film. ‘Hell,’ he quipped, ‘if I hadn’t done some of the stunts in Raiders, I wouldn’t have been seen in the movie at all.’ Yet strangely Ford is no kind of keep fit freak. ‘People always ask me how I keep in shape. Every time the question comes up, I can manage to sneer. It’s a common enough question, considering Raiders. And I say, being in movies is enough exercise for me.’

In reality, Ford was lucky enough to have some of the best stuntmen and stunt directors in the business working with him. Stuntmen are always used for the most dangerous ‘gags’ for the simple reason that if the star of the film were to hurt himself and hold up shooting, hundreds of thousands of dollars would be wasted.

‘There were some very capable stuntmen doing some of the action bits, but I probably did a good deal more action stunts than an actor normally would do. That was important because we wanted to have our fights always be character fights, instead of just having whatever spectacular event a stuntman could come up with. Indiana Jones fights in a certain way, which Steven (Spielberg) let the stuntmen and me choreograph. Some of Indy’s battles are incredible. “How can Indy possibly do all this?” We had to take the edge off that with a bit of humour and at the same time not make fun of the material. So Indiana Jones had to be a character with a sense of humour. It’s Indy’s way of looking at life that makes our fights unique!’

Glen Randall was the stunt co-ordinator on Raiders. Says Randall, ‘They talk about the dangers stuntmen go through, wrecking cars and airplanes, but I think the stunt that gets the most people hurt in this industry is the simple fight routine. When you throw a punch, you’re throwing it with all the force you’d normally use to hit someone, but you’re missing them by inches. There are a lot of stuntmen who just cringe when they find out they’ve got to do a fight with an actor who’s not had a lot of experience doing them – ’cos nine times out of ten, they’re going to get hit!’

Harrison Ford raced the boulder ten times
- astonishing that he won every time.

One of the most spectacular thrills in Raiders is in the opening sequence when Indy races the giant rolling boulder for the exit in the Temple. It was Ford himself outracing the rock. ‘Looked a little scared that scene, didn’t I? I’d have to have been crazy not to be. It wasn’t a real boulder, but it wasn’t cardboard, either. It took 800 pounds of plaster to make it roll right. And if I had tripped, I could have been in big trouble. The director thought at first we ought to use a stuntman - but I thought I could do it and Glen Randall, our stunt coordinator, agreed. We all felt the more action scenes I could personally do, the easier it would be for the audience to identify with and believe in the character. But if I didn’t trust the stunt guys who were manning the safety devices and looking out for me, I never would have done it. No way!’ The scene was shot from five different angles, twice from each angle. ‘So Harrison had to race the rock ten times,’ said Spielberg. ‘He won ten times and beat the odds. He was lucky. And I was an idiot for letting him try!’ 

Indy’s escape from the Well of Souls provided an opportunity to the filmmakers for a really spectacular stunt. In an effort to break a hole through the wall of his prison, Indy topples a huge statue of a jackal god and rides it as it falls, a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Slim Pickens’ riding the Atom Bomb to his last round-up in Dr Strangelove. Harrison Ford, intrepid but not stupid, knew the time to step aside for professional stunt double Martin Grace.

As Glen Randall explained, ‘The Jackal was 28, maybe 29, feet high. Plaster of Paris but still incredibly heavy. And we put big hydraulic rams on one leg and hinged it at the bottom so we knew exactly the plane it was going to fall in. It could only fall one way, if everything went right. We had a huge breakaway wall for it to fall through.’

But for all the planning, something went wrong as the stunt was filmed. If you watch closely during this scene in the movie, you’ll see ‘Indy’ lose his footing for an instant as the statue begins to topple. ‘Yes, it went too soon,’ agreed Martin Grace. ‘And that’s when you have to think very fast. I was actually still hanging down when it started going. I should have been actually on my position ... Stunt people are usually very fast thinking people. In situations like that you have to think very fast and get it together. We’ve got sort of lightning reflexes, very sharp minds and that’s a great combination to come up with the goods.’ Grace emerged unscathed.

With Ford doing so many of his own gags, it’s no surprise that he had a couple of near misses himself.

‘There’s a scene where I run through the jungle,’ Ford told an American magazine, ‘swing on a vine, let go the vine, fall into the river, grab onto the pontoon of a seaplane that’s taxi-ing, get onto the wing and climb into the cockpit as it was taking off – and the plane crashed on take-off.’

Of course Ford wasn’t hurt. But it does show that no matter how careful you are, accidents will happen.

Ford and George Lucas sit in the shade beneath
the Flying Wing aircraft on location in Tunisia.

Harrison Ford must have been on a lucky streak during the filming of Raiders. He had had another near miss on location in Tunisia during the shooting of the Tannis Dig sequence. Ford told the story to Prevue, the magazine published by Raiders’ concept artist Jim Steranko. ‘Indy has a fight which takes place in and around the propellers of a Flying Wing airplane. The engines are running full tilt and one set of wheels is chocked, so the plane’s going round in circles. The bad guy is supposed to throw me down in front of the wheels and I was supposed to roll over backwards to get away from the wheels.

‘All day long the technical crew was having trouble with the plane. It weighed a couple of tons, so they were powering it with low-gear, high-torque electric motors – the kind that can push through a brick wall without slowing down. They had to stay out of camera range, at the end of a cable 50 yards away.

‘I still wanted to do the fight myself. I’m able to add bits of character touches to moments like these, and when the audience recognises the actor, it adds credibility to what is normally straight action stuff. We rehearsed the scene several times, then decided to shoot it.

Ford wanted the audience to see it was really him fighting
the tough German soldier beneath the Flying Wing.

‘Everybody’s ready and the take begins. I go down and start to roll away – and my foot slips, right under the rolling plane’s tyre.

‘Everybody was yelling, “Stop! STOP!” while the tyre crawled up my leg. Luckily the brakes worked – inches before my knee was crushed – but I was pinned to the sand.

‘I’m not normally a worrier, I know they’re not going to kill the main character in a twenty million dollar film. I also know Indy wouldn’t look good with a peg-leg. I was a lot more careful about stunt work after that!’

And he’d have to be. Still to come was the hazardous chase in which Indy starts by leaping from a horse onto the speeding German truck that’s carrying the Ark, and ends with our hero falling from the front of the truck, crawling hand over hand beneath the vehicle, then being dragged for a couple of miles down the road in the dirt before climbing up the tail board. You’d think for that Ford would insist on a stuntman. He did, and he got one ... for the long-shots. In the close-ups, there was Ford, hanging onto the rear of the truck, scraping up the gravel road on his belly. As usual, Ford was dismissive. ‘It couldn’t possibly be dangerous,’ he said at the time, ‘because I have a few more weeks shooting the picture.’

It's pretty unlikely that it's actually Ford in this shot
- almost certainly stuntman Martin Grace.

Being so closely involved in so many of the gags on Raiders has given Harrison Ford a stuntman’s outlook as far as ‘falls’ are concerned. ‘The stuff that always turns out to be dangerous is the stuff nobody thinks about. It’s not the dangerous stunts – which you think about, protect yourself, calculate and worry about, so that you take the danger out of it – it’s the stuff you didn’t think was dangerous that sneaks upon you.’

Chapter 5, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

From the Stars to Star

‘Harrison Ford is more than just an actor playing a role in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was involved in a lot of the decision-making about the movie as we went along. And this wasn’t by contract, it was because I sensed an exceptional story mind and a very smart person and called on him time and time again.’ Steven Spielberg, director of Raiders of the Lost Ark

‘The little film that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to make together is growing by the minute. Shooting begins of Raiders of the Lost Ark on May 15th, 1980 at George’s happy hunting ground of Elstree Studios – and already, before a single shot is completed, they have four sequels in the planning stages,’ was how British fantasy film magazine Starburst announced the start of work Lucas’ follow-up to the Star Wars saga in February, 1980. The report gave Lawrence Kasdan as the script writer, Frank Marshall as producer, but no hint as to the cast.

Before long, rumours were circulating that Raiders of the Lost Ark was not a new project at all, but the third part of the Star Wars saga. Said Empire Strikes Back producer Gary Kurtz of that idea, ‘I can categorically deny that. It’s not science fiction at all. It’s a Thirties action adventure type story about a search for a lost treasure. A typical Clark Gable, soldier-of-fortune kind of movie.’

No more news issued from the Elstree set of Raiders until the movie opened in America on May 25th and at London’s Empire cinema on July 30th, 1981.

FROM THE SANDS OF HAWAII TO THE SANDS OF THE SAHARA

The tale of Raiders’ genesis was reported both in Dale Pollock’s Skywalking (the George Lucas biography) and in Tony Crawley’s The Steven Spielberg Story. Both books told of Lucas’s retreat to the Hawaian beaches to forget the horrors of making Star Wars, and of Spielberg’s joining him there with the news that Star Wars had been a monumental hit. Over a sandcastle, the world’s two most successful filmmakers hatched a plot to make a movie that would mix the mythic qualities of the occult and the derring-do of the Saturday matinee serials and out-Bond Bond in the process. The co-author of the original story of Raiders, Philip Kaufman, was originally slated to direct, but when he dropped out of the project, Spielberg stepped in.

At this stage, the project still had no writer. Until Spielberg introduced a young Chicago advertising copywriter, Lawrence Kasdan to Lucas. Spielberg had read a screenplay by Kasdan called Continental Divide and was trying to acquire it to produce for himself.

Behind the scenes on location in Tunisia, with Karen Allen,
Spielberg, Ford and Rhys-Davies.

‘When Spielberg first read it,’ said Kasdan, ‘he told my agent, “I’m doing a movie with George Lucas and I think this guy would be great to write it. Would it be all right if I showed George Continental Divide?” And we, of course, agreed. Then I came in and met George – he had read the script and liked it – and at that first meeting, George hired me to write Raiders.’

Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan spent a week thrashing out the basic plot of Raiders. These sessions were preserved for posterity on tape and at the end of the week Kasdan went off to write the first draft script.

‘I left those meetings feeling I was in pretty good shape and then sat down and realised, Uh-oh, this is going to be hard!’ said Kasdan. And hard it was, at least hard enough to keep the young writer occupied for a full six months.

Finally, Kasdan took the finished script in to show Lucas. What happened next came as something of a shock. The scriptwriter working on Empire, Leigh Brackett, had died suddenly. Lucas desperately needed a writer to take over. Could Kasdan handle it? ‘But you haven’t even read Raiders, yet,’ protested Kasdan. Lucas only smiled. He was following his instincts – which were rarely wrong.

Meanwhile Spielberg had read Kasdan’s Raiders script and was delighted. ‘Larry didn’t stick with our story outline one hundred percent,’ commented Spielberg, ‘A lot of the movie is Larry’s own original ideas, his characters. George provided the initial vision, the story and the structure of the movie. Then George and I together provided key scenes throughout the film. And Larry essentially did all the characters and tied the story together, made the story work from just a bare outline, and gave it colour and some direction.’

With the script in the safe hands of Lawrence Kasdan, Lucas and Spielberg could turn their attention to who was to play the key role of Indiana Jones.

The auditions for the movie were to be held at Lucasfilm’s West Coast offices. ‘We wanted an unknown, originally – a total unknown. Conceitedly, George and I wanted to make a star out of Johnny the Construction Worker from Malibu. We couldn’t find a construction worker in Malibu, so we began looking at more substantial people in the film industry.’

Both Lucas and Spielberg had a picture in their mind’s eye as to the kind of hero they were looking for. Lucas saw Jones as a scruffy playboy, the kind of adventurer who, on duty, dressed like Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Spielberg’s Jones was more of a grizzled alcoholic, gruffly romantic and ruggedly handsome.

Steranko's visualisation of Indiana Jones made it into the
film pretty much intact.

Lucas and Spielberg then approached well-known Marvel Comics artist Jim Steranko to produce some concept paintings to nail down a visual appearance of the character of Indiana Jones and his world. Steranko came back with four paintings, which defined the appearance of Indy, from the fedora hat, which Steranko had added unbidden, to the leather jacket which Lucas had asked for and the Sam Brown webbing, again Steranko’s addition. Lucas and Spielberg were so impressed with the artist’s work that they asked him to produce a further fifty paintings, one for each major scene in the movie. But the catch was that the artist would only have fifty days, a deadline that would be gruelling, to say the least. Steranko, not wanting to turn in sub-standard, rushed work, declined the assignment.

The filmmakers’ first choice for the role was TV actor Tom Selleck. Selleck was enthusiastic but aware that the new pilot he was working on, Magnum P.I., might turn into a full series for CBS television. CBS didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to take up the option for the first series of the show. ‘The show had sat there and nobody wanted it. And the option was about to lapse,’ recalled Lucas. Itching to get on with Raiders, Lucas contacted Magnum production company Universal with a request that Selleck be released from his contract. But while Universal were agreeable, CBS were suddenly alerted that the two biggest names in Hollywood were interested in ‘their’ star for a movie and instantly picked up Selleck’s contract for Magnum P.I. So Lucas and Spielberg still had no lead actor for Raiders.

‘We were stuck,’ said Spielberg. ‘We had three weeks left to cast the part of Indiana Jones, and there was nobody close. Then I saw The Empire Strikes Back and I realised Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. I called George Lucas and said, “He’s right under our noses!” George said, “I know who you’re going to say!” I said, “Who?” and he said, “Harrison Ford! Let’s get him.” And we did!’

Harrison Ford was able to play the many sides of Indiana
Jones' character with ease - he was at the same time
brawler, scholar and sophisticate

According to Skywalking, Harrison Ford had read the script for Raiders shortly after Kasdan had finished it but had remained cool towards the project. ‘They could find me if they wanted to,’ Ford is quoted as saying. Nevertheless Ford must have known that the part was perfect for him. ‘It was clearly the most dominant single character in any of George’s films,’ said Ford, ‘quite in variance with his theories about movie stars and what they mean.’