Indiana Jones: Raiders Of The Lost Ark - 10 Retrospective Observations As The Movie Turns 40

One of my favorite scenes in all of movie history is the scene in the valley where he's about to destroy it, and you get that amazing speech about the ark and humanity passing through history. I just want to dive into that: how it was written, how you approached it on set, what direction you were given. I'd love to just learn a bit more about that sc


Based on lengthy story discussions with Lucas and Spielberg, Kasdan masterfully boiled the plot down to its essence and turned in a script that perfectly encapsulates the spirit of its hero, as well as the spirit of adventure its


Simply put, people of non-Western nationalities are shown as exotic caricatures at best and non-white bad guys at worst. The Hovitos tribe, Toht’s Nepalese gunmen, and the Egyptians only exist to hinder or help Indy, having little to no agency to speak of. While their depictions are a product of the archaic adventurer genre’s trappings, the racially insensitive subtext can’t be igno


While the cast and crew were out in Tunisia, shooting the Cairo-set scenes for Raiders of the Lost Ark , they all got really sick from food poisoning. John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in the movie , apparently got so sick that he soiled himself during a scene that required him to bend over. The only person involved in the production who didn’t get food poisoning was Steven Spielberg, because he had brought his own food from home – which reportedly consisted of dozens and dozens of cans of Spaghetti-O’s – and didn’t eat any of the local food that everyone else was hav


Framed by a grandfather (Peter Falk) reading the story to his grandson (Fred Savage), The Princess Bride briskly moves from scene to scene in an escapist adventure anchored by such wonderful actors as Robin Wright, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin, Wallace Shawn, and André the Gi


Keanu Reeves doing the majority of his own stunts meant that the editor wasn’t beholden to cutting on stunt doubles and could linger on takes for longer than the average Hollywood action movie. As a result, John Wick ’s action scenes are much more immediate and visceral. The fights have the kind of clarity that gets lost when editors have to cut between stars and their stunt doub


Every fight scene in Kill Bill , especially the House of Blue Leaves massacre in Volume 1 , was meticulously crafted. Tarantino choreographed the fight scenes and all the mid-action cuts on the page before shoot


To the filmmakers’ credit, Sallah is a fun and well-written supporting character who was expertly brought to life by Davis. Still, this doesn’t excuse the casting of a Welshman for a character clearly written as an Egyptian. The fact that Davis actually spent majority of his youth in Tanzania because his father was a colonial officer doesn’t help matt


There aren’t a lot of biopics that fall into the martial arts genre, but Ip Man is a prime example of both. The great Donnie Yen stars as Ip Man himself , the legendary Wing Chun grandmaster who taught Bruce Lee how to fi


The aesthetic can make for fun period pieces, but World War II itself has become a cliché. Today, setting a story during the war is seen as a shortcut to gaining audience sympathy since the genre’s simplistic morals are basically prem


The unique seven-act structure of Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay harks back to the bite-sized plot progression of those serialized adventure tales, while the production design perfectly recaptures the aesthetic of those early serials with a modern filmmaking


With the masterfully simplistic premise of an elite squad infiltrating a high-rise controlled by a drug kingpin, Gareth Evans kept the focus of The Raid solely on the action. There’s no exposition or unnecessary subplots, just an all-out war between cops and cro


But like the serial adventures that inspired Spielberg and George Lucas to create Indy, some parts of Raiders of the lost ark updates Ark didn’t age well. None of these detract from the movie’s cultural impact and its entertainment value, but they cast some harsh light on what is normally seen as an adventurous and light-hearted throwback. Here are 10 things from Raiders of the Lost Ark that didn’t age w


I'm afraid I might disappoint you. It's very much the same thing. Steven doesn't give any acting direction - that is, he doesn't talk about [it]. He expects you to have done your research; to have done the background stuff. He's not going to tell you what you should be thinking as a character at this point in time. What he will say while you're working is, "Look right, look left" because he's looking at what the visual looks like. It's the great thing about somebody who knows their job so well. Once somebody who knows their jobs so well makes a choice, then you just go with it. And that was always apparent with him. It would be breathtaking: you'd come on the set, expecting to do a scene which in the script is a small scene in a tent - a small scene between me and Anthony Higgins and Wolf Kahler, which was set in a tent. When I got to the set, it was an enormous valley. It was a construction site. People with donkeys and ladders carrying sand around, as though they were building the pyramids. And that was entirely Steven leading with his vis