"I did this for four months on Indiana Jones. I mapped out everything. I knew exactly what the different pitfalls and cliff-hangers were going to be, and how they were going to be lit. Those four months also involved scouting locations and watching the sets go up. Standing in a basic plywood structure that hasn't yet been plastered can be inspirational. It showed me how high the sets were and how much breadth and depth they had. There were times I re-drew whole sequences because of the sets."
"We shot for 85 days in Macau, Sri Lanka, London, and in San Francisco. We shot all the blue screens at ILM. The jungles and elephants were in Sri Lanka, but all the exteriors of the palace were paintings and miniatures.
"The movie was shot principally 80 percent on sound stages in London and 20 percent outdoors. For me, this was a pleasure. I love location shooting, but the older I get, the more I'm getting the homing instinct to build it and shoot it indoors. I don't like to wait. When it rains on me, and I want sun, or when it's sunny and I want it to be overcast; I feel beter when I can create the environment."
"We had a budget of $28 million, and we delivered Paramount a $28 million movie. I went over budget in some sequences, and came in under budget in others. I went over schedule with certain scenes, and came way under in others. It was almost all a wash. We actually came in five days under schedule."
"Sometimes I consciously cut days out of the schedule knowing I needed five more elsewhere. It was like robbing Peter to pay Paul. I needed extra days in the quarry room, so I took days out of the banquet scene. I needed more days on the mine train set, so I took a day out of the spike chamber. It's really a matter of how much time you give the crew to finish a shot."
"When I needed to cut a day out of a sequence, I went to Dougie (Slocombe, the director of photography), and said I needed him to help me buy a day or two that I had to have two weeks later when we would get to the quarry set. Could we go a little faster? And Dougie would go faster, the whole crew would get on our side, and I'd get 30 shots in that single day as opposed to 19 the day before. It's just a way of cooperating to buy time later. Of course you can't make deals with the crew to work faster all the time. I only needed to rob Peter to Paul perhaps four or five times. Maybe the lighting could have been better for Bougie's taste, but we both agree the audience doesn't notice. The overall impression is a beautifully photographed movie. I'm that way directorially. There are certain sequences where I'm really proud of the shots, and others that just state the events of the story. There are those scenes where I want to selfishly say, 'Look what I did,' and Dougie has his moments where he can say that, too."
"Movies are unharnessed dreams, but if they become too costly, or if danger is a factor, or it will take ten years to get there, you have to pull back on the tack and compromise your dream. The mine train chase, for example, seemed impossible before we started shooting it, but with the help of Dennis Muren and all the creative geniuses at Industrial Light and Magic, we made the impossible, possible. In other instances there were things I visualized but couldn't do because of time and money. I wanted the quarry fight to be even more complicated than what's on the screen right now. One of the reasons I enjoy making Indiana Jones movies is because I'm a firm believer that in an adventure saga every sequence needs to have two or more activities happening simultaneously. Where Indiana is accusing the Maharajah and the palace authorities of stealing the Shankara stone from the ancient village, on the other side of the table in this four-star palace restaurant, unspeakable entrees are being served to Willy Scott and Short Round. With the sequence inside the crusher room as Indiana and Short Round are about to be crushed or skewered, whichever comes first, Willy is having her own problem with tens of thousands of insects. But when we finally arrive at the quarry scene where Indiana fights the giant temple guard on the moving belt heading to the stone crusher, I was interested in creating a third and fourth series of occurrences. No major sequences were eliminated due to production considerations because we had underwritten the action as opposed to overwriting it. I felt everything was lean. All the action sequences in the script were in short form. We talked about the most amazing mine train chase, the most amazing crusher room scene, and the most amazing cliffhanger over a looo-foot gorge. But it all didn't make it on paper, and I found it was a lot easier in my storyboard to extend these sequences even beyond what we had written."
"The crusher room scene with the fight on the conveyor belt was particularly hard to pull off because by the time we got to the end of the take, we'd be too close to the crusher. I'd look down at the crusher and say, 'Hey, we aren't supposed to be anywhere near the crusher for another two pages. Get back.' The continuity was a very hard. The sequence starts 70 yards away and by the end of the sequence, they are actually at the crusher going into it. But I had to cheat all over the place. I cheated it by 20 feet a shot. Sometimes were 10 feet closer to it, and four cuts later, 20 feet further away from it. But what makes this film and movies like this believable, is that we never defy gravity. No one goes off a cliff, stands in midair, looks down and waves bye-bye. Yet we come very close to that, and its my job to walk the thin line between the incredulous and the impossible. To keep it entertaining without tipping one way or the other. And to keep it so fast, the audience doesn't have time to question what works and what doesn't."