Indiana Jones’ final bow: Harrison Ford recalls being ‘second choice’ for hit franchise

Harrison Ford is set to appear on-screen as Indiana Jones for the last time with the fifth installment of the franchise, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.”

In May, the actor broke the news to fans during a presentation at the D23 Expo in an emotional speech, saying, “This is it. I will not fall down for you again.” He also thanked the fans for helping to make playing Indiana Jones so special.

“Indiana Jones movies are about fantasy and mystery, but they’re also about heart,” he said through tears. “We have a really human story to tell as well as a movie that will kick your a–.”

Here’s a look at a few behind-the-scenes secrets from the previous four movies in celebration of Ford’s final bow as the famed archeologist.

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Raiders of the Lost Arc – 1981

When George Lucas was writing the screenplay for the first Indiana Jones movie, he pulled from his surroundings for certain elements of the story, including his hero’s name. In the making-of-doc featured on the movie’s Blu-ray disc, Lucas explained he had a dog named Indiana at the time and thought it was a good fit.

Once Lucas partnered with director Steven Spielberg, the two settled on the character’s last name, changing it from Smith to Jones, and the rest is history.

After the character’s name was locked down, it was time to find the right actor to portray him on-screen, their first choice being Tom Selleck. The Blu-ray making-of-doc also explained how Selleck was unable to participate because he was contractually obligated to star in  “Magnum P.I.” TV series. While Lucas was hesitant to cast Ford in another one of his movies, the role eventually went to him. Ford and Lucas had worked together on “Star Wars” with Ford playing Han Solo.

Ahead of the fifth Indiana Jones movie’s release, Ford addressed the casting news himself, telling Deadline, “How I got the job? Tom Selleck had the job, but he also incurred an obligation to do a television series, and he was unable to get out of that contract.”

“I became the second choice, and I’m very grateful for Tom,” he said. “Thank you, Tom, man. If you’re listening, thank you again.”

Filming the iconic opening scene proved to be more dangerous and challenging than anyone anticipated due to the size and weight of the boulder that chases Ford through the set. It was 22 feet in diameter and made completely out of fiberglass, making it weigh around 500 pounds.

Spielberg loved the look of the fiberglass boulder so much he wanted to maximize the amount of time it was seen on-screen, adding 50 feet to the track it was rolling down, putting more pressure on the crew whose job was to keep Ford safe, according to Entertainment Weekly.

According to the Blu-ray featurette, carvings of R2-D2 and C-3PO can be found among the hieroglyphics when Indiana Jones is exploring the Well of Souls, paying homage to Lucas’ other successful franchise, “Star Wars.” Apparently it was Spielberg’s idea to include this Easter egg in the scene.

In another scene taking place in the Well of Souls, Indiana Jones and his companion, Marion Ravenwood, find themselves surrounded by a room full of snakes. Turns out, the snakes were real and weren’t just the work of talented CGI artists.

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“We had 2,000 or 3,000 snakes, and they hardly covered [the set]. I couldn’t get a wide shot. I couldn’t go back because I would see there were no snakes on the sides. So, that’s when I said to Robert Watts or to Frank Marshall,” Spielberg said in the documentary featurette. He was then heard saying on-set, “We have to get more snakes. You know what we really need? We need about 7,000 snakes, in addition to the 2,000 that we have here, to make it work.”

During a 1981 appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Spielberg revealed they ended up using 7,000 snakes in the final cut of the scene.

Temple of Doom – 1984

Fans of the Indiana Jones franchise have likely noticed the second film is much darker, but what they may not know is that’s because both Lucas and Spielberg were going through breakups when making the film.

“Part of it was, I was going through a divorce, Steven had just broken up, and we were not in a good mood, so we decided on something a little more edgy,” Lucas told Empire Magazine in 2012. “It ended up darker than we thought it would be. Once we got out of our bad moods, which went on for a year or two, we kind of looked at it and went, ‘Mmm, we certainly took it to the extreme.’ But that’s kind of what we wanted to do, for better or worse.”

Ke Huy Quan, the breakout child star who played Short Round in the film, won Spielberg over but was never meant to be in the movie in the first place. During an interview with Deadline in February, Quan revealed he actually stole the role from his brother after he “tagged along” for his audition.

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He told the outlet that Spielberg and Lucas were having trouble finding a Chinese boy to take on the role of Short Round, leading them to have an open call in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

“My brother went to audition, I tagged along, and I was coaching him what to do behind the camera,” Quan recalled. “The casting director saw me and asked me if I was interested in reading for him. I said yes, and the next day, we got that fateful call from Steven Spielberg’s office.”

Lucas and Spielberg continued the trend of using live animals in their films, choosing this time to use real bugs in the scene where Kate Capshaw’s character is covered in bugs. More than 2,000 live bugs were used while filming the scene, making it look very realistic.

Comparing their experience with snakes in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to their experience working with bugs in “Temple of Doom,” producer Frank Marshall explained he would rather work with snakes because “you can arrange a pile of snakes” and “that’s impossible with bugs.” Capshaw on the other hand would rather have worked with neither.

“The bugs were really gross, really bad. I think I took a Valium,” she told Empire Magazine in 2012. “Steven was there every second, he wasn’t going to make me do anything that he wouldn’t stand next to me for. The bugs would go in and out of your clothes – you couldn’t make that not happen.”

Last Crusade – 1989

By the time the third movie came around, Spielberg and Lucas were over their breakups and looked back on “Temple of Doom” a little shocked as to how dark the movie actually was. Spielberg was more than happy to return to a lighter tone for “The Last Crusade.”

“I wasn’t happy with the second film at all. It was too dark, too subterranean and much too horrific,” Spielberg told the Sun-Sentinel in 1989. “I thought it out-poltered ‘Poltergeist.’ There’s not an ounce of my own personal feeling in ‘Temple of Doom.’”

When it came to filming the third installment, the most uncomfortable scene to film was when Sean Connery and Ford were pictured inside a fictional German zeppelin. Apparently, the temperature was so hot both Connery and Ford took their pants off to feel some relief.

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In a making-of-documentary, Connery said he was the first to take off his pants, and once Ford caught wind of the idea, he followed suit. Connery said he felt it was necessary, otherwise “I’ll be stopping all the time because I sweat enormously, I sweat very easily.”

In keeping with the tradition of using live animals rather than special effects, Lucas and Spielberg used more than 2,000 rats to film the Venetian Catacombs scene in which Jones and his companion set fire to catacombs while looking for clues to the Holy Grail, unleashing angry rats.

Filming with the rats proved to be quite difficult as the original actress cast as Indiana Jones’ companion, Amanda Redman, quit once she heard they would be using real rats, per the BBC. She was eventually replaced by Alison Doody. Production also had 2,000 rats bred specifically for that scene in order to compensate for any rats dying while filming.

Per the Washington Post, producers of the film approached their insurer, Fireman’s Fund, to make sure the cost of the rats would be covered because they were fearful of losing too many rats through the course of filming. Although this was an unusual request, insurers reached an agreement with Spielberg, writing the first-ever rat insurance policy with a 1,000 rat deductible. They came to this agreement after Spielberg told them he could get the shot with at least 1,000 rats.

Throughout his search for the Holy Grail in “The Last Crusade,” Indiana Jones traveled to many different locations, including the Temple of the Sun in Alexandretta. The temple is a real place, actually called the Al-Khazneh, in Petra, Jordan, where part of the movie was filmed.

According to a making-of featurette, the king and queen of Jordan at the time, King Hussein and Queen Noor, visited the set of the film and invited Spielberg and the rest of their crew to the palace. 

“It was great to shoot in Jordan,” Spielberg said in the featurette. “We were guests in the royal palace in Aqaba. We were guests of King Hussein and Queen Noor, and they treated us great. We actually stayed at the royal palace for five, six days we were shooting. Queen Noor, with her kids, drove me to location a couple of days.”

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – 2008

Decades after the third Indiana Jones film hit theaters, Spielberg, Ford and Lucas came together for a fourth film. The fourth movie, “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” brought in Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett and also saw the return of Jones’ original companion, Marion Ravenwood, played by Karen Allen.

LaBeouf played Mutt Williams, who is revealed to be Jones’ son from his relationship with Ravenwood. Mutt’s real name is Henry Walton Jones III, but his nickname, Mutt Williams, was Lucas’ way to pay homage to famed Hollywood composer, John Williams, who wrote the score for all the Indiana Jones films.

One main difference in the fourth film, when compared to two of its three predecessors, is rather than fighting against the Nazis, Jones is up against Russians and the Soviet army. This change can be attributed to Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List” in 1993.

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In 1991, Spielberg married Kate Capshaw, the actress who played Jones’ companion in “Temple of Doom,” after the two met on the project. Many years later while filming “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” the director experienced a full-circle moment when his daughter, Sasha Spielberg, who he shares with Capshaw, appeared in the film as the waitress who punched LaBeouf in the face.

When the movie was released, LaBeouf publicly criticized it on a number of occasions, claiming both he and Ford weren’t happy with the way it turned out. He told the Los Angeles Times “24 Frames” blog “the movie could have been updated” and “there was a reason it wasn’t universally accepted.”

“I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished,” he told the outlet. “You get to monkey-swinging and things like that, and you can blame it on the writer, and you can blame it on Steven, but the actor’s job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn’t do it. So, that’s my fault. Simple … I’ll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven.”

LaBeouf later admitted his comments ruined his relationship with Spielberg. Mutt Williams is not included in the fifth and final installment of the franchise.

In June 2011, Ford said he thought LaBeouf was “a f—ing idiot” for trashing the movie.

“As an actor, I think it’s my obligation to support the film without making a complete a– of myself,” Ford told The Guardian. “Shia is ambitious, attentive and talented – and he’s learning how to deal with a situation which is very unique and difficult.”

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny – 2023

The fifth Indiana Jones movie premiered in theaters on Friday and follows the story of Indiana Jones connecting with his goddaughter, Helena Shaw, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as they try and find a dial that has the power to change history.

In the movie, audiences are met with cuts from different time periods, leading to a sequence that Ford considers his “favorite.”

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“It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever done in a movie,” Ford told Vanity Fair this month. “And I did it to express his vulnerability and his age. Anyway, I think it’s a great sequence in a damn good movie.”