Behind the Scenes: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Spielberg, 1989) with Harrison Ford

Larry Moore. He does that. He does that like that. The original story for the third film was a Haunted Castle movie. But Stephen had just finished Poltergeist, so he said, I don't want to do another Haunted Castle movie. So I said, OK. I said, what about the Holy Grail? He said, oh, you brought that up last time. I don't like that idea. You know, the Holy Grail isn't strong enough. And I said, well, give me a chance with it. I'm going to take the Haunted Castle and put it at the beginning for the teaser, and then I'll do the Holy Grail. And we did that script, but it didn't really turn out that well. With Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I wanted to flesh out Indy's relationship with his father. And I said, here's a time we can really do a really good character study of who gave birth to this guy. I said, George, let's see who inspired him. Let's do a father-son story. And George said, well, is that going to be conducive with a Grail search? I said, well, the search for the father is the search for the Holy Grail. And if they're estranged by bitterness of experience, you know, different ideologies or different approaches to archaeology, the father is more professorial than Indy ever was. The father's more critical of Indy. So I basically built up this kind of relationship between Indy and his dad. And then when it came down to casting, I said that George is only one person that can play Indy's father, and that's, you know, James Bond. And the original James Bond, the greatest James Bond, Sean Connery. And so we went for broke. We went after Sean, and fortunate for us in the movie, Sean said that he would do it. I was absolutely delighted, and I had a lot of notes, as usual, about the whole piece. And, I mean, after all, if you're going to make a film with the father of Indy, you really have to have some kind of eccentricities and what have you. And anyway, at first it didn't bode too well, because I think George had a different idea, Lucas, of what it was about. Probably a bit more Calvin-like and conservative in that way. Anyway, when we went to the meeting at Amblin with George and Stephen, it went very well. Well, I was a strong proponent of the idea of bringing Indiana Jones' father into the story. And showing some new aspects of his character that we hadn't seen in the first two films. The third film benefits greatly from Sean Connery's presence. It kind of elevated everybody's game. I think it's by far the most sophisticated in many ways. And it was maybe the most fun of all of them, because it had great locations, great physical sequences. It had a terrific leading lady, Alison Doody, with a real intriguing story to tell. The woman who had a relationship both with my father and with me, and the complications that ensued from that. I had great fun with it. Well, just another day at the office. I told Stephen, what if we started out with him as a little boy? Just let us see if we can work this out. I think it might be an interesting idea, and it gives the whole thing so much more depth. So he said, well, okay. I was interested in playing a young Indy and kind of had some insight on Harrison's way about him, being that I worked with him on Mosquito Coast. And while doing Mosquito Coast, I kept a close eye on Harrison and noticed some of his traits. When he would turn around, I would sometimes mimic him and get a few laughs. How about this? I felt close to it. I felt I could do it. Give me that moment of humiliation, and then go. Go right, go fast, right, good, that's lovely. Well, River, you know, I love River's work, especially when he was in Stand By Me, and I think Harrison actually was the one that suggested River. He said to me, the guy that looks most like me when I was that age is this actor named River Phoenix. I believe that's a Harrison Ford idea because he played Harrison's son in Mosquito Coast. And I met River and thought he was great in casting. Right, that's right, exactly, that's good. I wouldn't do that, but I like when it wraps around you. Wrap it around you again, I like that. The movie has chosen to pick young Indy up at a certain point in his life where he experiences many different things which are very significant and forever change him, forever. And basically he'll never be the same. For instance... Oh, my God! You see how he gets this phobia for a snake and how he learns how to use a whip. And he cracks that whip. And in the process of doing so, he goes wah-poo, and the very end cuts him, and there you have the scar. We thought it would really be fun to show how Indy Annick Jones got the scar on his chin because in real life, Harrison Ford has a scar on his chin already. Oh, I had a car crash when I was about 22 years old, 23 years old. Ran a car off a road and into a telephone pole. Yeah, but the second one is the one where it flies back into the face. He teethed pretty well. River did it before with the telephone. Indy Annick Jones and the Last Crusade, I just wanted to bring back the spirit of the original Raiders and have some fun. I wanted to bring the cast back that I had missed in Temple of Doom, so Elliot came back, and he was in a key role, and bringing back Salah and just bringing the spirit of what got us so pregnant with the series originally in 1980. In a way, I was rather the sort of father figure in the first one, and then I was real father turned up. My role in that direction has been superseded, so Steven Spielberg has turned him, I'm very glad, into a sort of figure of fun who's got three left feet when he's outside his own environment. And he never stops doing the most terrible things at the wrong moment, and it's great fun. There's quite a lot of comedy involved. Does anyone here understand a word I'm saying? I suppose it was my friendship with my next-door neighbour, Robert Watts, who's executive producer, as you know, that pulled me into this whole genre, really. And indeed, he did Star Wars, the first Star Wars. And this quite small part came up in Empire Strikes Back, and I went to meet them, and I got it. And so when Indiana Jones came along, there was a part of the sergeant, the German sergeant, for which I was eminently suitable, and I went up to be interviewed for it, and I didn't get it. And the next day, my agent rang and said, well, they want you to go along for Walter Donovan. I said, what? You mean the main villain? He said, yeah. He's American, don't forget he's American. So I did this terrible phony interview with a ghastly American accent. It was awful. And I got it. I couldn't believe it. It's one of the most happy experiences of my life. By the time we got to the third film, we had a pretty well-honed team. Most everyone had worked on the two previous films, and we were a pretty fast-working, efficient group, which was good, because it was probably the most complicated of the films that we had done. We shot in Venice. Well, Venice was another thing, because Venice in summertime is really crowded. And I'd said going into this film, I don't want to go near Venice in the Tory season. Guess what? We shot there in August. We got control of the Grand Canal from like 7am to 1pm on one day. But there was the TV aerials on the top of the hotels on the other side of the Grand Canal. There was nothing I could do. There's a problem when you're shooting, period. I couldn't do anything. Dougie said, it's all right, you won't sneeze at Michael. Thank God for that! But we did it, and we managed. I was living in London, and I simply went for the audition, thinking there was no possibility of me getting it, because I was 21 in Irish, and they were looking for a 29-year-old Austrian. Before that, I'd done some TV, I'd done work with Jonathan Pryce, I'd done a Bond film, A View to a Kill, playing Jenny Flex. I think I was one of the first girls that they saw. I auditioned and met with Steven Spielberg and everybody, and then they asked me to come back to do a screen test. I remember thinking, oh God, you know, will it be me? And I was lucky, I was really lucky. Don't look at me like that. We both wanted a girl. Basically I had to acquire an Austrian accent, so I did a lot of work for that. Before I knew it, I was on the set shooting the first day, and it was actually one of the last scenes. So I arrived on set with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and Denim Elliot and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and little Alice in Duty, and with an Austrian accent filming one of the last scenes. So I was really thrown in the deep end. Action! The rats was the follow-up to the bugs, which was the follow-up to the snakes. I think we're running out of things to do here, you know. My job was, how do I find 10,000 rats? We had a rat breeder, we had a couple of rat breeders, and we started breeding rats. Because in order to have rats that aren't infected with some virus or disease, you have to basically cultivate them from living births. So our animal handlers gave birth to something like 2,000 living rats, and they were everywhere. The set was half water, it was like an aqueduct, and we had rats, you know, walking the very narrow lips of the aqueduct and coming out of holes. Rats in poor Alice in Duty's hair. I put bugs in Kate Capture's hair, put snakes around Karen Allen's neck, and now we're putting rats in Alice's hair. I mean, do we have any shame? No, we don't. Unfortunately, the female characters in Indy had to go through the most abuse of the kind of creepy, crawly, disgusting scares. That was a big bone of contention as well at the audition. They were asking whether I would have a problem with that scene, and I said absolutely not. They're not your average sewer rat. You know, they were clean rats, and there was no problem with the rats. Happily, rats are another thing that don't bother me very much. When I was a young teenager, I was a nature counselor and coincidentally did have as pets black-hooded rats, first two and then pretty soon many, many, many more as they multiplied, and so I was quite used to handling rats. Actually, I mean, they have personalities, rats do, compared to snakes and insects. Man bites rat. Freak accident. I'm not going to set a live rat on fire. I might have no shame, but I do draw the line somewhere. We had a lot of mechanical rats that were created just to set on fire. So all those were mechanical rats that were emulated toward the end of that scene. An awful lot of the movie for me was very physical. I mean, the running scenes, I mean, the whole piece in Venice, I cannot tell you how scared I was. I'm running in high heels, my shoes are giving way at this stage, they're very wet, and I'm jumping from wet shoes onto a wet boat, and it was tricky. I was driving this boat, and I had never driven one of these boats before, and the whole thing was just move into the scene, get out of the scene, let them do the fight, and I kept banging into the walls, and they were going, it's fine, it's fine, we just come back into the scene now and go out of the scene, and it was just chaotic. Chaotic, but they knew exactly what they were doing. It was just mad for me, and it was a very physical scene as well, with Harrison fighting on the boat and everything. I hate shooting in the water, even in tanks. Well, we were on the back lot of Elstree in the little pond there, I guess they call it the studio lake. Not quite a lake, it's much smaller than that. Elliot Scott and George Gibb had built this tremendous propeller on the back of part of a ship, and the thing moved around, and it was made of metal, so it was not safe to be anywhere near it, and we weren't, and we did use stunt doubles for certain scenes. That part where the propeller was in that tank was about 15 feet deep, but the rest of the tank was only about 4 feet deep. So we had the boat that was rigged onto a long track, and we had a big winch that pulled the boat along slowly into the propeller, and as the propeller chopped up the boat, we had explosives in the back of the boat just to enhance it and make it look a bit more interesting. We made the back of the Chris Craft inboard motorboats a little bit longer so the prop could have a lot of boat to eat up and not put the actors in harm's way, and by shooting with a very long lens, I think I shot with a 250mm focal length lens, it made you think that the actors were closer to the props than they actually were. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. I'm very Scottish. He's very Scottish? Yeah, very Scottish. Expert on Scottishness here now. Today's expert on Scottishness. I had a Scottish terrier that looked like that. Yeah, that's what I know about Scots. And action. Perfect issue, Junior. Well, Sean, at first he resisted the idea of playing my father. He's only 12 years older than I, and also felt that the character was too thinly drawn, and he's a great student of history, Sean is, so I think he brought a lot of ideas to George and Stephen which were incorporated into his character. He is less Yoda-like than originally thought of, and quite the match for his son in many ways, including the fact that the central heroine has had a physical relationship with him before she ever meets me. Sean made major contributions to his character and to kind of the story throughout the whole production. Sean would come over to George and I and say, look, anything Indy does in this story, in the context of this story, I have done better. But we were able to twist it into something funny and make it all kind of humorous rather than serious. One wanted to make not a very harmonious relationship to begin. When we discussed it, Blackfish sleeping with the same woman was a bit of anathema for George, but he eventually came round to it because it's possible and funny. We had dialogue, like, sitting down for the first time in Harris and says, well, you know, you never took any notice of me when I was a kid. Well, that's a terrific formula, and it makes for good comedy character and fun stuff that plays right. Fire's like a wild animal. Once it gets going, it takes a lot to stop. Working with fire, you have to really be careful what you're doing because it can easily get out of hand. On the different parts of the set and all the curtains and the drapes and the furniture, everything is fireproofed with a special solution. You have what we call a gas poker. It's like a long bar, could be 3 feet or 6 feet long with a long slot in it. Yeah, Dave, no higher, that's good, no higher than that. And fire comes out the gas poker, and then when they cut, we just turn all the gas bottles off and the fire just goes out. Kids don't try this at home. It's really best left to professionals like us, people who really know what they're doing. The search for the Holy Grail is also the search for Henry's book, his diary. You're going the wrong way! That diary is sort of like the Ark of the Covenant. Keeps switching hands, goes back and forth. The good guys have it and the bad guys have it and the good guys get it back. So the movie does become a chase movie, and when I cut the movie together and looked at it, Mike Kahn and I put it up on the screen, just the two of us, we realized that the film did not have enough action, at least not enough action that I thought the audience was expecting. And cut! So we thought of a good scene in the sidecar with the motorcycle and did a very short chase, shot it up in the Bay Area, outside of where George lives in Lucas Valley. And that was fun to shoot. You know, we had a lot of Nazis in the film. All of those uniforms I think were genuine ones that I found in Eastern Europe somewhere. Joanna Johnston worked with me on the two last Indiana Jones pictures. I would give her research pictures and sketches and drawings and things and then she'd go out and find it all. All you guys who do this, you can have your fingers crossed behind you. We played one of the scenes on the Zeppelin. All the passengers were wearing fur coats and hats, and it was supposed to be in the wintertime. And I played it without my trousers, and Harrison said, you're not going to play the scene without your trousers. I said, well, if I don't, I'll be stopping all the time because I sweat enormously, I sweat very easily. Well, he did the same. Michael Kahn, what he contributes when he edits the sequence that's been put together with the special effects, the designer, the cameraman, and of course Stephen's direction, now Michael, with his skill, will fine-tune it so that the audience's emotions are played out to the absolute edge. I edit from feeling, and if something feels right, then I go with it, I show Stephen. Sometimes you say, why'd you do it? I say, well, it felt right, because that's the biggest positive thing you could say, is that it felt right. If you try to edit cerebrally, you know, from knowledge, you don't get the feeling. You don't feel the scene, it becomes mechanical, and we always try to get beneath that, Stephen and I. The shot that I like when the plane goes into the tunnel is this one moment where the pilot of the plane just kind of casually looks as he passes Indy and his father in the car. There was so much humor to be mined in a father-son movie, especially when they haven't been getting along in 20 years. The fact that Indy's dad keeps topping Indy. He uses the umbrella to make the birds, the seagulls, take flight, and then get caught up in the props coming around the corner for a third strafing run, and that brings the airplane down, and Indy just looks at his dad walking away with the confidence of a man who still has an umbrella on a nice sunny day, the umbrella's up, and Indy looks at his father with so much love in his heart for his dad, with a whole new level of respect and admiration, and that's what made that movie worth shooting. Sean, the minute a pigeon comes out, start running. Okay, and... And roll. And release the pigeons. The seagulls, that was a problem, because seagulls aren't trainable. What we did in the end, having got a guy to try them, he said, you can't do anything with them. What we did was we put fake seagulls all over the beach. Okay, Sean. Action, Sean. And where Sean comes and flaps the umbrella and they fly off. For all the birds flushing out through camera, they're all white doves, they're not seagulls at all, because they're trainable. Why don't we just use a Vistavision camera, clean and mat them all in later? Let George Lucas worry about it. The tank chase, the Messerschmitts, the tunnel, all those things, I wanted to find somewhere that was workable, good infrastructure and the rest of it, and Spain, of course, has it. Almeria in Spain, some moons ago, in the days of the spaghetti westerns and everything, was a huge filmmaking centre. I did a western down there in the late 60s. So I went back there and we found all the locations in Almeria for the tunnel, where the plane crashes in, we did the stuff with the Messerschmitts, we did the stuff with the seagulls, and the entire tank chase. In the original script, there was no tank sequence. There was one scene with the tank. George wanted an old World War I. George said, look, I just want an old World War I tank in this movie. I don't know what to do with it, but we have to have a tank in the picture. So I basically wrote the scene in storyboards. I wrote the entire horse and tank, then Indy jumps on the tank, and then Sala comes with the horse, and he gets back on the horse again with the father, he transfers the father back on the horse. All that was done storyboard. And then this is just after the tank explodes. Then a little further on, we did this. OK, this is where we make a hard turn left to right. Left to right. Originally in the movie, it was just going to be a small French Renault tank. We went to the museum, we looked at these different tanks, and I thought to myself, I'm going to build it for real. I'm going to build it in real steel, where it looks solid and heavy and weighs 28 tons. It won't bounce around like a toy, see? Here we actually had two tanks. We had another tank which was built from aluminium, and this tank was pulled along by an open-back truck so we could put the cameras on it and things like that. And the tracks were reproduced in polyurethane, and the tracks never actually touched the floor. That was used for the close-ups of Harrison's head near the track. Sean Connery bouncing up and down, things like that. It's a very original sequence. The notion that George and Stephen had about putting my father in the tank and me having to thus stop a tank, and all of the physical opportunities that that presented for stunts and also joke, gag. The scenes on the tank was originally scheduled for something like, I think it was 2 1⁄2 days or something, and I think we went to about 8, or it might have been longer, 10 perhaps. But it didn't matter because it was a lot of invention with a lot of ideas and the kind of comedy that comes out of the reality of it. When we started shooting, the scenes where Harrison Ford is hanging on the gun, we did all that with Harrison Ford. We never used a stuntman. And we found this ridge of mud about eight feet high with a pathway along the top, and we had prop men running along the top with wheelbarrows tipping clay and dirt on top of Harrison Ford as it was going along to make it look more exciting. Here we are. It's just after the big explosion. We turn left. You got that? Good. Don't keep blowing off because I can't use the parts where it comes off his head. OK, boss. The hat was always coming off. But you pull it down as tight as you can and stop when it flies off and start all over again. That should do it. Well, it was great to shoot in Jordan. David Lean had shot Lawrence of Arabia in Jordan, and we were guests of the Royal Palace in Aqaba. We were guests of King Hussein and Queen Nora, and they treated us great. We actually stayed at the Royal Palace for the five, six days we were shooting it. Queen Nora, with her kids, drove me to location a couple of days. And even though we couldn't, like we did on Temple of Doom, walk in Sir David's footsteps, we were able to shoot Petra, which was an amazing piece of architecture just cut right into the sandstone canyon walls. I mean, this is a great drama to tempt a director to say, I'll make that movie, to prove whether you believe or don't believe the myth of the grail. Donovan turns the gun on to Daddy and shoots him right in the stomach, and he falls over. The healing power of the grail is the only thing that can save your father now. It's time to ask yourself what you believe. Now, Indy has a finite amount of time to discover the grail, the cup of Christ, and to bring back the healing liquid to feed the father and to pour over the bullet hole and to make it all go away. It's redemption, redemption of the soul, redemption between a father and a son. And that's where you know a story's working, when you have that kind of drama. And you can shoot one of the leading characters. Well, it was a little tricky, and we were all a little nervous about that. You know, that sort of evolved in the script before we actually took that chance. So it seemed very logical to connect it that way and have the extra pressure on at that point of Sean Connery dying in Indiana Jones, having to get the grail and get back in order to save his father. He's got to make a jump to the eye. He's got to really hope it works. And he goes, ah, and it works. OK, the eye hole. What's the next word? E-E. E across there. It's not getting too far. Good, that's good. He goes here to the E, and then H. There's a tree on the H there. Let's make the H where the F is, so it's a longer jump. OK. Well, you know, Indiana Jones' Last Crusade, the whole movie thematically is about leaps of faith. You know, personal leaps of faith, the trust, your love for your father when all your experiences have told you that there's not a relationship to be had there. It's one leap of faith after the other. And of course, there's many betrayals on that sort of broken highway. One of the greatest leaps of faith was the one where Indy has to step into nothingness and winds up stepping onto a forced perspective, onto an actual wall made of rocks that is painted to look like what's below, meaning the perspective looks like there's nothing there. And he must make a leap of faith and take that one final step until he hits a rock bridge that spans the abyss. And that was one of the most interesting things ILM did. Well, you know the actor Robert Edison who played the knight at the end, that extraordinary monk-like figure, just guarding this one great secret. He was such a wonderful actor, Robert. Fantastic voice, too, a wonderful rolling voice. And he came in, and I thought he lent a tremendous gravitas to that part. But at the same time, he was able to take that wonderful line and chose poorly in such a dry way. But it was really funny. When I saw it, it got an absolute belly laugh. When Elsa takes the grail, she tries to flee. The minute she crosses the seal, she's thrown off her feet by an upheaval. She falls and drops the grail. That's when the crack forms. On the different parts of the set, I think we had about 5 gimbals, what we call gimbals, and that is when the ground can sort of rock and roll, and they're all hydraulically controlled so we can give the appearance of an earthquake. Then we had a cat that appeared in the earthquake, which Shadows and Duty falls down when she's trying to get the golden chalice. And the great moment in that movie for me is the moment where, first, Indy is holding Elsa, and Indy says to Elsa, give up the grail. You know, honey, I can't hold you. Give it up, and Elsa keeps trying to reach greedily for the grail cup, and of course, the glove comes off her hand, and Indy can't save her, and she falls to her death. All of a sudden, as Indy almost slips over, the father grabs him. Now the roles are reversed. Here's father holding son, and Indy has the same kind of moment. You know, he's being attracted to the grail, and the greed that Elsa felt in her heart suddenly suffuses through Indy. And all through the movie, you'll recall, Dad only calls him, you know, Junior. The whole film, he tortures him by calling him Junior, but for the first time, he says Indiana, and that stops Indy, and then Indy takes his other hand, and he's pulled to safety. And that was the bonding moment between father and son. The thing I like the most about the film is, in the end, the real pleasure was in finding each other and throwing the grail away and realizing that, you know, Indiana being with his father was more important than any of this other stuff that was going on. It was a great ending, because it didn't have anything to do with the object. In the end, we always have to get rid of the object somehow. That's always a problem. And this was the perfect way of getting rid of the object. It was the perfect way of telling the story. So the drama of Last Crusade doesn't end with a truck chase or a climactic upheaval of special effects and ghosts and spirits, but it ends in the most personal way, more personal than any of the previous Raiders movies, where Indy and the father have a meeting of the minds and a meeting of the hearts, and then he's rescued, and we go off to our little epilogue and go save Marcus Brody, whose horse runs away with him. Well, that's getting there, Denim. That's getting there. We got the horse to move a little bit that time. Well, I like movies that are all about craft and collaboration. Films that kind of rely on the best of all departments, you know, the best plasterers, the best electricians, the best painters, you know, the best special effects experts, the best property masters, and when it all comes together and you don't do it in the computer, and I'm not being Luddite when I say this, but when you're really having to rely on all the different departments, just like old Hollywood used to do and old England used to do to realize the director and the producer and the writer's vision and the actor's vision, that's good old-fashioned moviemaking, and I love that. That was great! That was really great! We had an extraordinarily talented group of people. I mean, the whole crew was, you know, first rate, and in a lot of cases, we've all worked together before, so, you know, it's kind of a fun reunion. We all like each other, we all get along really well. People can sort of anticipate everybody's extremely professional and talented, and that's always an exciting experience. And it's always a thrill to see Harrison in that outfit. You know, it's like he becomes that character, you walk on the set, and there he is. And it's such an icon that it's like, oh, wow! It's like no time has passed at all. This is the way I make my living. This is what I do for a living. I think the audience likes a character who is both an academic and an adventurer. I think what's probably the most important contribution that the character has made, that is part of the character, is his tenacity, his unwillingness to give up, his zeal for the hunt, and the pleasure that he takes in going amazing places, seeing bizarre and amazing things, and solving mysteries that lay before him.