Remembering Raiders Of The Lost Ark: The Making Of Indiana Jones

Cameras started rolling on Raiders Of The Lost Ark on 23 June, 1980, and the next few months would take Spielberg, Ford, cast and crew from Hawaii to Hertfordshire and California to Cairo.

Elstree Studios in England, familiar to Lucas from his anxiety-ridden experience filming the bulk of Star Wars there, was the base of productions for a significant portion of the shoot, housing sets that included the Well of Souls and Marion Ravenwood’s bar.

And the Star Wars parallels didn’t end there, for John Williams was responsible for the iconic Raiders March while its chief writer Lawrence Kasdan also scribed The Empire Strikes Back. For the most part Tunisia stood in for Egypt as one of the prime locations, and the scene in which Indy threatens to blow up the Ark was shot in the very same spot where Jawas capture R2-D2 on Tatooine in A New Hope. And the lovable droid and forever-companion C-3PO even make brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances as hieroglyphs on the wall of the Well of Souls.

Spielberg returned to Hawaii, where his own adventure with Indy began a few years’ prior, for the opening scene set in the Peruvian jungle, while the French resort of La Rochelle served as the base of operations for the Nazi U-boat sequence. And although Spielberg, as promised, brought the movie in on time and under budget, the production was far from hassle free.