FRANK MARSHALL - Producer

Raiders Of The Lost Ark was the first time Spielberg and producer Frank Marshall had collaborated on a project. Marshall, who previously had worked with filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich and Walter Hill, would go on to form Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg and producer/wife Kathleen Kennedy. Marshall would eventually take to directing himself, with Arachnophobia, Alive, Congo and an instalment of the mini series From The Earth To The Moon.  

Raiders has a number of spectacular action sequences which have become classics, and none more-so than Indy being pursued by a huge rolling rock in an underground cave. As dangerous as it appears on the screen, the perils were virtually non-existent in real life. "We had to make it look like it rolled free," explained Marshall. "But we also had to be able to control it. The boulder was on this contraption like an arm; it was free-spinning and the arm was hidden. The boulder tumbled down the chute, then it had to be taken back if we wanted to do another take. But we couldn't do it again very quickly because we had to put in the stalactites that got broken off as it rolled out."

Raiders' production was certainly globe trotting. Among the locations: La Rochelle, France, Tozeur and Kairouan, both in Tunisia, and Hawaii. Much of the indoor footage was shot at the EMI Elstree Studios, England. Exotic landscapes may be great on screen, but they're not always fun for the filmmakers. The conditions were a bitch, according to Marshall. "Almost every movie I've ever worked on, the local people say, 'We've never had weather like this -- never before.' They said it in La Rochelle. They said it in Tunisia. Actually, they said it in England, although it didn't make any difference there."

Raiders' script demanded a horde of animals be wrangled for the production, some of which caused hassles for the crew. Marshall was amongst those not exactly on friendly terms with the critters. "I had to cure myself of a common phobia about snakes," Marshall admitted. "But once you see other people, like a snake handler, not worried about it, then you touch one. Then I got to be real comfortable with them. Which was a good thing because I was elected to do the second camera shots of them. Steven would give me little drawings of the shots that he wanted and then I would spend two or three days trying to do it. Some of the shots were a real challenge. I ended up not liking the monkey because he was impossible to work with. Didn't listen to me at all. The rats I hated the most. For some reason the snakes didn't bother me after a while. But seeing big rats -- it was kind of creepy."

The opening temple sequences involved another unsettling species of animal...tarantulas. "It's funny how everyone thinks tarantulas are so dangerous, 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." 

In addition to his producing chores, Marshall winded up onscreen in a brief role, as a Nazi pilot who gets knocked for a loop by Marion during one of the film's best scenes. "The stunt coordinator came up to me one day and said, 'Look, I've run out of faces, do you want the German pilot?' So I said, 'Sure.' Now I see why I was asked -- first, the guy gets whacked over the head; then; it's 130 degrees and he sits the cockpit with top closed, wearing a jumpsuit and a little hat. So, the temperature ended up around 180." *

KATHLEEN KENNEDY - Associate to Steven Spielberg

As Kathleen Kennedy, a now successful producer who was associate to Spielberg at the time, explained, the bad weather did have an upside. "It was the worst summer in England in three years, so they said. But this happened to George Lucas, too. He ran into the same thing in Norway for Empire [Strikes Back] where it was the worst blizzard in fifty years. When he did American Graffiti it was the worst weather in two hundred and fifty years in the town in filmed in. So, George considers it to be good luck if somebody immediately says to him, 'This is the worst weather we've had'."

Kennedy remembers Raiders as a "profound experience". It was the first time she, Marshall and Spielberg worked together, and would certainly not be the last. "Steven told me that he definitely wanted me to produce movies with him. He also recognized, however, that even though I had a body of work that I had done in television, which to a large degree related to what I was being asked to do in movies, I still had to become familiar with the technical side and make those adjustments.

"I walked out to the air strip and there was nobody but Steven out there. He was walking around the Flying Wing, really pondering. I asked him what he was thinking about. He said, 'I'm trying to think of how I'm going to edit together 120 shots for this fight sequence. I'm about halfway through it in my mind.' We hadn't even started shooting it yet. That was a whole choreographed scene that he was editing in his head before he had even begun to shoot it."

Although Raiders remains the best experience of her career, she remembered as aspect of the filming that was a little less pleasant.  "What I distinctly remember about Tunisia was that running around as a woman with a [two-way] radio on your hip in a very religious country was not readily accepted, and I didn't realize this. We were shooting in a town called Kairouan, one of the five holy cities that face Mecca, and I actually had a couple of men try to burn my arm with cigarettes because they were so insulted. In this town, the women usually went around veiled, so these men really were incensed by the idea of a woman taking on a certain amount of authority." *

ROBERT WATTS - Associate producer

Associate producer Robert Watts, who would go to produce the Indy sequels, spent a lot of the pre-production schedule scouting locations around the world. In several days, he had flown to and from Mexico City, Honolulu, Kauai and London.  "We'd spent three nights on airplanes."

Much of the film takes place in Egypt, although authentic location filming was ultimately not required, saving time and money. "When I heard that this picture was set in Egypt, I asked three questions: do we see the Sphinx, do we see the Pyramids, do we see the Nile? And when the answer was no, I said, 'Well, then, we don't have to go to Egypt'. We used one of the Tunisian locations we had used on Star Wars -- the canyon -- but basically we were looking for quite different locations. We required Arab streets; we required an archaeological dig site, as well as mountain roads for a mountain road chase -- which we then changed to an oasis chase."

Shooting in Tunisia was uncomfortable for everyone, as illness and conditions caused many a headache. In comparison, shooting in Hawaii for the film's opening sequence set in South America, would thought to be a snap. This, however, was not the case. "We started in Kauai on Tuesday the 30th of September," Watts explained. "Everybody had thought, 'Isn't it terrific, Hawaii's going to be just wonderful!' But we didn't have one single place to shoot in Hawaii, not one. The first place we were shooting was down a narrow dirt track and then down what was virtually a cliff face into a hole full of mosquitoes, where we shot the exterior of the South American temple. It was a wonderful location with a pool and a waterfall, but t was very difficult place to work. It was hard for the cameraman to light because it was so dark. And to get the equipment down you had to use a crane. Worst of all, the pool was the breeding ground for thousands of mosquitoes. We had a man there with a mosquito fogger every morning and we all covered ourselves with anti-insect bite stuff. But we still got bitten."

When it came to creating the scene in which Indy retrieves the precious idol in South Africa, the temple it's located in needed a bit of extra decorating. For this, something from his previous film, The Empire Strikes Back, was recycled. "On the bog planet set in The Empire Strikes Back we used a creeping vine that is called Old Man's Beard. When were done with the bog planet we took all that creeper down and left it up on the backlot of the studio, we used a lot of that Old Man's Beard again; and not only that, we took some of that English Old Man's Beard all the way to Hawaii and hung it down the mosquito hole. The same stuff that had been on the bog planet and in the studio in England ended it's life down that mosquito hole in Hawaii."

Despite the scale of the movie, along with the wide array of stunts, and weather woes, the movie came together surprisingly well. As Watts explained, "It was a very complex picture logistically because we shot in four countries in the space of 73 days -- and it wasn't a story about two people and a dog, it was a big story. What was extraordinary was that we shot it 12 days under schedule, and yet we didn't leave anything out. In fact, we had more shots than were in the script." *