How the Sierra Nevada became the filming location
“[Producer] Frank Marshall and I have always gone back and forth with teasing each other,” says Dick Vane, the location manager for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” “So he said, ‘Oh, I got you a job,’ and I said, ‘Great, what is it?’ And he said, ‘Oh, we’re going to shoot a snow scene in August.’ And I said, ‘No, come on, really. What’s the job?’”
Vane recalls feeling hesitant about the charge, until Steven Spielberg encouraged him, telling him, “It’s fine. Mammoth got a lot of snow last year.” Fortunately, he was correct. The 1982-1983 winter season was one of the snowiest winters on record, with more than 670 inches recorded at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory.
Vane says Mammoth was the first and last location they scouted for the snow scenes. The crew had about 10 feet of snow to work with, even in the middle of summer, he recalls, and they used snowcats to move the snow as needed to make it look like northern India (notwithstanding the lodgepole pine trees).
A few seconds of the scene gliding along the snowy slopes of “the Himalayas” were shot with green-screen technology, but most were done the old-fashioned way: shooting take after take as the actors' stunt doubles slid down a snowy course crafted by the Mammoth staff. “They worked out a path it would stick to,” Vane says, “so we knew where to put the cameras because the raft would go exactly where we wanted it to every time.”
“But it was slow going,” he adds, “since all the stunt guys had to go back up to the top for every take.” He estimates they had a crew of about 100 people staying in Mammoth, working for about a week to get every shot needed for the roughly 30-second scene.
Mammoth was easy compared with the rafting scenes
The white water rafting part of the scene was shot in two areas, Vane says. The action-filled, high-octane white water rapid shots were shot on the Tuolumne River near Yosemite National Park, while scenes with dialogue between the actors were shot on the South Fork of the American River, east of Sacramento.
Vane started the scouting trip with a helicopter flight over the Tuolumne River and then consulted with a local white water guide to show his team the best specific rapids on the river. That part of the process was simple, he recalls, noting that Spielberg immediately OK'd the photos they sent him of the rapids they’d chosen. But that was the end of the easy part.
“Working on the river was brutal, because it was summer and there was a lot of poison oak. And to get all the camera equipment and grip equipment and everything down to the riverside, you had to go down steep canyons,” he tells SFGATE with a laugh. “We were pretty much manhandling everything.”
Ford, Quan and Capshaw spent their time only in the Sierra
However, that was easier than shooting the scenes with actors Ford, Quan and Capshaw. According to Vane, no actors were present for shooting in Mammoth or on the Tuolumne. The cast was still shooting in England while stunt doubles filmed in California. But for the dialogue scenes on the river that required the actors, the production team decided to film on a more accessible segment of the South Fork of the American River, in the Sierra foothills near Folsom. On the day Ford and Spielberg flew in to start filming the scenes, however, Vane had a problem: The river had almost entirely receded.
“When I got there in the morning, it wasn’t a good feeling, since George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and Craig Marshall were flying in that morning,” Vane says. “The team hit me on the walkie-talkie and said, ‘Hey, where’s the river?”
As Vane describes it, it was a dry river bed. “There had been a problem with a hydroelectric thing the dam worked on, so they just shut the river off.”
To buy himself time before the actors and director arrived, Vane had to think quickly. “Meanwhile, they’d landed, so I called them and said ‘Well, uh, how about a breakfast burrito?’” Vane recalls. The actors took him up on the suggestion, buying Vane time to call around and eventually get the dam opened and water flowing in the river again.
However, the process wasn’t as quick as he needed, and he recalls that he purposely took a wrong turn while leading the actors to the river to buy himself a little more time. “I gotta tell you,” he laughs, “for a location manager, it was gut-wrenching, since the only thing they had told me to do is ‘find them a river.’”
The actors’ white water scenes were a little tamer
As Vane tells it, all of the “hairy white water scenes” were shot with the actors’ stunt doubles. But scenes with dialogue on the water, including one in which Capshaw’s character helpfully screams to “put on the brakes” mid-rapids, were shot with a more controlled method. “This was in the days before digital stuff,” Vane says. “So we had to do it the old-fashioned way: just tie the raft off to the shore where you could see rapids in the background.”
“Steven, the bigger stuff he could do with green screens and stuff,” Vane says of the movie’s most ridiculous action sequence. “But when you’re out there in the middle of nowhere doing what we were doing — no, that was all us. No special effects.”
He says they spent about 10 days shooting on the river and two or three days shooting at the decommissioned Hamilton Air Force base in Marin County. It stood in for the fictional Nang Tao Airport in Shanghai, where the film’s stars board their doomed flight. With all eyes on Harrison, one of Hollywood’s top actors at the time, viewers may not have noticed that the movie’s painfully British airport host Art Weber is none other than actor Dan Aykroyd. “Oh, Aykroyd was hilarious, as you can imagine,” Vane remembers.
Though the scene lasts a mere six minutes, it’s one of the most over-the-top action scenes in any blockbuster of the 1980s. It’s so over the top, in fact, that the Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters” devoted an entire episode to testing whether any of it was physically possible (spoiler — it's not).
Vane thinks it’s that extreme impossibility that makes it so memorable, though his favorite Indy film will forever be “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” “When Raiders was done, I went to the cast and crew screening,” Vane says. “And, oh, I couldn’t believe it. The first 20 minutes, watching that movie, you just go, ‘What!?’ Oh, my God,” he says, referring to the famous scene in which Indian Jones runs from a giant rolling boulder. “All that stuff in the beginning. Wow.”
After finishing work on “Temple of Doom,” Vane went on to work on many more of the most popular films of the past 30 years, including “E.T.,” “Harry and the Hendersons,” “Arachnophobia,” “Home Alone,” several John Hughes movies, “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” and six Judd Apatow movies. He retired in 2016, but in chatting with him, it’s clear he has extremely fond memories of his time in Hollywood.
And when asked about how Indiana’s hat manages to stay put through a drop from an airplane, high-speed tubing adventure and white water rapids, Vane has an easy answer.
“Well, he’s just that good,” he laughs. “No, no — I’m sure they had it strapped on Harrison’s head. But, well, he wouldn’t be Indy without the hat.”