10 Iconic Movie Moments With Unexpected Origins

6. Bringing A Knife To A Gunfight - Raiders Of The Lost Ark

The Scene

Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) finds himself chased through a market square and confronted by an Arab swordsman in Steven Spielberg's action-adventure masterpiece.

But just as the two men prepare to square off, Indy pulls out his pistol and shoots the swordsman dead - with an abject look of exasperation, no less.

It's without question one of the most famous scenes in the entire Indy quadrilogy, and a fantastically simple piece of character development.

How It Happened

The genesis of this moment is nothing short of legendary. During Raiders' Tunisia shoot, Harrison Ford was stricken with a bout of dysentery, meaning he couldn't be too far from a toilet at any one moment.

This resulted in the confrontation with the swordsman being curtailed to a single beat, as it was originally intended to be an extended fight sequence, for which stuntman Terry Richards had practised for weeks.

Ford told Spielberg, "Let's just shoot the sucker", to which the director agreed, and the rest is history. As meticulously conceived as this scene might seem, it was effectively improvised on the day of shooting, all because Ford had a case of gut-rot.