Moedred
04-13-2008, 02:21 AM
From the Web Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20070529123258/www.indianajones.com/raiders/bts/news/f20060818/index.html) of the official site.
Around the World with Indiana Jones
August 18, 2006
by Marco Fromter
(This article originally appeared in the German Star Wars Fan Club magazine.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark
While the first Indy adventure opens in a jungle setting somewhere deep in the wilds of South America, the shooting actually took place on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai along the Huleia River on the eastern coast. About a decade later, Steven Spielberg returned to this location for Jurassic Park.
Further into the movie, Indy is shown giving a lecture in the classroom of a typical American university. These scenes were actually shot at the University of the Pacific (Conservatory of Music) in Stockton near San Francisco. The actual city hall building in San Francisco served as the exterior of the Washington D.C. location seen at the end of the film, where Indy and Marion rejoin on the steps following their adventure with the Ark.
The Tunisian Sahara Desert made a suitable double for the exterior shots set in Egypt, which included the dig at Tanis, the truck chase, and the battle between Indy and the German mechanic. Various sites were used in the Chott El Jerid, a large salt sea near the Algerian border, while other sites were found in the oasis towns of Tozeur and Nefta as well as the Sidi Bouhel Canyon. This canyon had previously served as the setting for the notorious Tatooine scenes of Star Wars a few years earlier, and is located to the east of the vacation resort Tozeur at the edge of the Chott. Fittingly, the canyon has come to be called the Star Wars canyon. For visits to this landscape, it would be advisable to rent an off-road vehicle and, if at all possible, to have a guide available.
Marion Ravenwood's bar, the Raven, unfortunately does not exist in reality. The complete set was built in London at Elstree Studios (Hertfordshire) and was struck before production wrapped. Elstree Studios had served the Star Wars productions by housing many of the otherworldly sets called for in the scripts. For Raiders, however, the more earthbound Chachapoyan Temple and the Well of Souls were constructed.
The Nazi U-boat scenes were shot at an abandoned Nazi base in the French city of La Rochelle. At the same time, Wolfgang Petersen was working at this locale for his movie Das Boot, specifically for the scene where the bombers attacked the base. Spielberg and his crew briefly borrowed the U-boat for their work on Raiders.
Bavaria Productions, who owned the prop, demanded that the U-boat be taken back to port if the waves became higher than one meter. Because of this the shooting had to be interrupted frequently. Various models and parts of the submarine are still kept for viewing at the Bavaria Filmstadt in Munich to this day. Every once in a while, one of the tour guides remembers to mention the connection with Indiana Jones.
The outdoor shots of Indy's house were taken near Drake High School on Acacia Avenue in San Rafael, California. Sallah's house is in Cairo, which was also where the scenes of the marketplace were taken. The Cairo locations required the removal of hundreds of TV antennas attached to the tops of buildings, since these would not have existed in the late 1930s.
Temple of Doom
Robert Watts and Elliot Scott were given the task of scouting out locations for the second Indy movie. According to Scott, this part of the production was not an easy endeavor. First, a background had to be found which resembled Shanghai of the thirties -- a difficult task when one considers the modern skyline of Shanghai. The shooting took place in the inland port of Macao -- at the estuary of the Pearl River on the side facing away from Hong Kong. Near the local floating casino "Floating Macao Palace" the shots were taken on Rua da Felicitade. Ten years earlier, the same location was used for James Bond -- The Man with the Golden Gun.
The palace of the Maharajah was built completely at the Elstree Studios. Originally the plan had been to create this set in the city of Jaipur in order to shoot in an authentic location. But authorities in India demanded numerous alterations to the script as well as the approval of the movie by the Indian government. This eventually led to the decision to produce these scenes in the studio instead.
The Indian village where Indy, Willie, and Short Round begin their quest for the Sankara stones was shot on-location in the middle of a tea plantation high above the town of Kandy in Sri Lanka. Visitors to this locale should be on the lookout for the Hantane Tea Estate. The scene on the 100-meter high bridge was also shot in Sri Lanka, with the production crew borrowing on the expertise of dam-building engineers located nearby to construct the perilous prop.
Since location shoots abroad are time-consuming and expensive, suitable doubles are often sought out closer to home. The Nang Tao Airport, for example, was shot at the Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato, California, a bit north of San Francisco. The snow-covered Himalayan mountain locales were cleverly imitated by sites on Mammoth Mountain on the California side of Yosemite National Park, where Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round slide down in the inflatable raft into India. Specifically, the shots were taken in Yosemite at the Tuolumne and American Rivers.
Last Crusade
The third part of the series quite literally was a trip around the world. The movie starts with young Indiana Jones, played by actor River Phoenix, in Moab, Utah, at locations shot at the Seven-Mile Canyon in Arches National Park. While the next scene, which features young Indy in hot pursuit of a circus train, appears to have been shot near the Arches location, it was actually filmed hundreds of miles to the south in Colorado. The Cumbras and Toltec Railroad still services this location for travelers and has become one of the main tourist attractions there.
While the classroom scenes for Raiders were shot in the U.S., a suitable replacement was found in the UK for the Last Crusade. Rickmansworth Masonic School, a girls school, is fairly easy to find and can be reached by car taking the A 404. If by train, one can get off at the Rickmansworth Station and then cover the remaining distance by foot or cab.
Other locations used in England included the street where Indy receives an autograph from Adolf Hitler. Doubling for Berlin, the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire (near Buckingham) also provided the location for the Berlin airport. In the halls of the New Royal Horticultural Hall in Westminster, a somewhat fantasy-like German airport was recreated. This hall had previously been used for films like The Saint and Richard III. The building representing the exteriors of the Berlin airport can be found on Treasure Island, San Francisco, at the corner of Avenue of Palms and California Avenue.
The pursuit on the motorboats was shot at the English Tilbury Docks in Essex, while another chase sequence -- fleeing from the Nazis on the motorcycle -- was not taken anywhere in Germany. Instead, the scene was shot in Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County. One scene that actually was shot in Germany was the fictional Castle Brunwald where the secret Nazi base was located.
The name of the castle used in the movie led many location hunters to believe that it was supposed to be Castle Brunnwald (spelled with two "n"s) in upper Austria (near Bad Leongelden on route to Grotberg). The keen-eyed are quick to notice, however, that Castle Brunnwald has little in common with the castle seen in the movie -- it's smaller, has fewer towers, and visually has nothing in common with Brunwald Castle from the movie.
The actual castle can be found in a totally unexpected corner of Rheinland-Pfalz in the town of Mayen, Germany. Castle B�rresheim, which to this day looks just like the castle seen in the movie (although the image was flipped), consists of both the ruined Castle of Cologne and the later Castle of Trier.
The Venice scenes were actually shot in...Venice! The San Barnaba Church, where Indy finds the reference to the Grail, can be found in the Dorsoduro district at the Canale Grande.
The Turkish train station where Dr. Marcus Brody meets Sallah was actually shot in Spain. The station can be found about 60 kilometers east of Granada and 170 kilometers northeast of Malaga in a small town called Guadix, which is situated between the Mediterranean and the Andalusian back country. The German tank sequence was also shot in Spain at an old airfield in Majocar, a little village close to Almeria.
In the movie, the Holy Grail is found in the Crescent Canyon. In reality, this is the treasure of the city Petra, Jordan, going by the name Al Khazneh. The location is somewhat distant from the capital city Amman, but will prove to be the highlight of any trip to Jordan. To reach it, one must take a three- to four-hour bus trip (230 kilometers) from Abdali to Petra, then cross a 1500-meter long canyon by foot, donkey, or camel. At times this canyon is no more than two meters wide, but it is over 100 meters deep. Al Khazneh itself is 50 meters high and 30 meters wide and has been chiseled right into the red rock of the canyon wall.
Incidentally, it wasn't Jordan's blood red sun that Indy and friends galloped into at the end of Crusade -- it was actually that of the Figure 3 Ranch in Clyde, Texas (near Amarillo).
Around the World with Indiana Jones
August 18, 2006
by Marco Fromter
(This article originally appeared in the German Star Wars Fan Club magazine.)
Raiders of the Lost Ark
While the first Indy adventure opens in a jungle setting somewhere deep in the wilds of South America, the shooting actually took place on the Hawaiian Island of Kauai along the Huleia River on the eastern coast. About a decade later, Steven Spielberg returned to this location for Jurassic Park.
Further into the movie, Indy is shown giving a lecture in the classroom of a typical American university. These scenes were actually shot at the University of the Pacific (Conservatory of Music) in Stockton near San Francisco. The actual city hall building in San Francisco served as the exterior of the Washington D.C. location seen at the end of the film, where Indy and Marion rejoin on the steps following their adventure with the Ark.
The Tunisian Sahara Desert made a suitable double for the exterior shots set in Egypt, which included the dig at Tanis, the truck chase, and the battle between Indy and the German mechanic. Various sites were used in the Chott El Jerid, a large salt sea near the Algerian border, while other sites were found in the oasis towns of Tozeur and Nefta as well as the Sidi Bouhel Canyon. This canyon had previously served as the setting for the notorious Tatooine scenes of Star Wars a few years earlier, and is located to the east of the vacation resort Tozeur at the edge of the Chott. Fittingly, the canyon has come to be called the Star Wars canyon. For visits to this landscape, it would be advisable to rent an off-road vehicle and, if at all possible, to have a guide available.
Marion Ravenwood's bar, the Raven, unfortunately does not exist in reality. The complete set was built in London at Elstree Studios (Hertfordshire) and was struck before production wrapped. Elstree Studios had served the Star Wars productions by housing many of the otherworldly sets called for in the scripts. For Raiders, however, the more earthbound Chachapoyan Temple and the Well of Souls were constructed.
The Nazi U-boat scenes were shot at an abandoned Nazi base in the French city of La Rochelle. At the same time, Wolfgang Petersen was working at this locale for his movie Das Boot, specifically for the scene where the bombers attacked the base. Spielberg and his crew briefly borrowed the U-boat for their work on Raiders.
Bavaria Productions, who owned the prop, demanded that the U-boat be taken back to port if the waves became higher than one meter. Because of this the shooting had to be interrupted frequently. Various models and parts of the submarine are still kept for viewing at the Bavaria Filmstadt in Munich to this day. Every once in a while, one of the tour guides remembers to mention the connection with Indiana Jones.
The outdoor shots of Indy's house were taken near Drake High School on Acacia Avenue in San Rafael, California. Sallah's house is in Cairo, which was also where the scenes of the marketplace were taken. The Cairo locations required the removal of hundreds of TV antennas attached to the tops of buildings, since these would not have existed in the late 1930s.
Temple of Doom
Robert Watts and Elliot Scott were given the task of scouting out locations for the second Indy movie. According to Scott, this part of the production was not an easy endeavor. First, a background had to be found which resembled Shanghai of the thirties -- a difficult task when one considers the modern skyline of Shanghai. The shooting took place in the inland port of Macao -- at the estuary of the Pearl River on the side facing away from Hong Kong. Near the local floating casino "Floating Macao Palace" the shots were taken on Rua da Felicitade. Ten years earlier, the same location was used for James Bond -- The Man with the Golden Gun.
The palace of the Maharajah was built completely at the Elstree Studios. Originally the plan had been to create this set in the city of Jaipur in order to shoot in an authentic location. But authorities in India demanded numerous alterations to the script as well as the approval of the movie by the Indian government. This eventually led to the decision to produce these scenes in the studio instead.
The Indian village where Indy, Willie, and Short Round begin their quest for the Sankara stones was shot on-location in the middle of a tea plantation high above the town of Kandy in Sri Lanka. Visitors to this locale should be on the lookout for the Hantane Tea Estate. The scene on the 100-meter high bridge was also shot in Sri Lanka, with the production crew borrowing on the expertise of dam-building engineers located nearby to construct the perilous prop.
Since location shoots abroad are time-consuming and expensive, suitable doubles are often sought out closer to home. The Nang Tao Airport, for example, was shot at the Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato, California, a bit north of San Francisco. The snow-covered Himalayan mountain locales were cleverly imitated by sites on Mammoth Mountain on the California side of Yosemite National Park, where Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round slide down in the inflatable raft into India. Specifically, the shots were taken in Yosemite at the Tuolumne and American Rivers.
Last Crusade
The third part of the series quite literally was a trip around the world. The movie starts with young Indiana Jones, played by actor River Phoenix, in Moab, Utah, at locations shot at the Seven-Mile Canyon in Arches National Park. While the next scene, which features young Indy in hot pursuit of a circus train, appears to have been shot near the Arches location, it was actually filmed hundreds of miles to the south in Colorado. The Cumbras and Toltec Railroad still services this location for travelers and has become one of the main tourist attractions there.
While the classroom scenes for Raiders were shot in the U.S., a suitable replacement was found in the UK for the Last Crusade. Rickmansworth Masonic School, a girls school, is fairly easy to find and can be reached by car taking the A 404. If by train, one can get off at the Rickmansworth Station and then cover the remaining distance by foot or cab.
Other locations used in England included the street where Indy receives an autograph from Adolf Hitler. Doubling for Berlin, the Stowe School in Buckinghamshire (near Buckingham) also provided the location for the Berlin airport. In the halls of the New Royal Horticultural Hall in Westminster, a somewhat fantasy-like German airport was recreated. This hall had previously been used for films like The Saint and Richard III. The building representing the exteriors of the Berlin airport can be found on Treasure Island, San Francisco, at the corner of Avenue of Palms and California Avenue.
The pursuit on the motorboats was shot at the English Tilbury Docks in Essex, while another chase sequence -- fleeing from the Nazis on the motorcycle -- was not taken anywhere in Germany. Instead, the scene was shot in Mount Tamalpais State Park in Marin County. One scene that actually was shot in Germany was the fictional Castle Brunwald where the secret Nazi base was located.
The name of the castle used in the movie led many location hunters to believe that it was supposed to be Castle Brunnwald (spelled with two "n"s) in upper Austria (near Bad Leongelden on route to Grotberg). The keen-eyed are quick to notice, however, that Castle Brunnwald has little in common with the castle seen in the movie -- it's smaller, has fewer towers, and visually has nothing in common with Brunwald Castle from the movie.
The actual castle can be found in a totally unexpected corner of Rheinland-Pfalz in the town of Mayen, Germany. Castle B�rresheim, which to this day looks just like the castle seen in the movie (although the image was flipped), consists of both the ruined Castle of Cologne and the later Castle of Trier.
The Venice scenes were actually shot in...Venice! The San Barnaba Church, where Indy finds the reference to the Grail, can be found in the Dorsoduro district at the Canale Grande.
The Turkish train station where Dr. Marcus Brody meets Sallah was actually shot in Spain. The station can be found about 60 kilometers east of Granada and 170 kilometers northeast of Malaga in a small town called Guadix, which is situated between the Mediterranean and the Andalusian back country. The German tank sequence was also shot in Spain at an old airfield in Majocar, a little village close to Almeria.
In the movie, the Holy Grail is found in the Crescent Canyon. In reality, this is the treasure of the city Petra, Jordan, going by the name Al Khazneh. The location is somewhat distant from the capital city Amman, but will prove to be the highlight of any trip to Jordan. To reach it, one must take a three- to four-hour bus trip (230 kilometers) from Abdali to Petra, then cross a 1500-meter long canyon by foot, donkey, or camel. At times this canyon is no more than two meters wide, but it is over 100 meters deep. Al Khazneh itself is 50 meters high and 30 meters wide and has been chiseled right into the red rock of the canyon wall.
Incidentally, it wasn't Jordan's blood red sun that Indy and friends galloped into at the end of Crusade -- it was actually that of the Figure 3 Ranch in Clyde, Texas (near Amarillo).