Originally posted by Bryan Curtis
Why is the second Indiana Jones movie so dark?
It's strange when two filmmakers can hardly stand to look at one of their movies. Especially when that film was as lucrative ? and, for me, as beautifully sinister ? as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. So when I met George Lucas in December, in advance of the release of Red Tails, I asked why he and Steven Spielberg always seemed to be renouncing it.
"Oh, I'm not renouncing it," Lucas said. Which is fair enough. Lucas mostly sounds sad when he talks about Temple of Doom. It's Spielberg who recoils from its heart extraction, its human sacrifice, its monkey-brain buffet. He once told a journalist that Temple of Doom was "too dark, too subterranean, and much too horrific."
"People say, 'Why's it so dark?'" Lucas said. Then he began to explain.
"I was going through a divorce," Lucas said, "and I was in a really bad mood. So I really wanted to do dark. And Steve then broke up with his girlfriend, and so he was sort of into it, too. That's where we were at that point in time."
That's the reason Temple of Doom, which comes out as a part of the Blu-ray boxed set September 18, is difficult for its creators ? and lots of Indy fans ? to love. It's a breakup movie. It's a record of gloomy images that were scrolling through its creators' heads. "Sometimes," Lucas told me, "you go to the dark side." For two bummed-out guys, Temple of Doom was a catalog of what it's like to get your heart ripped out.
As the 1970s became the '80s, Lucas and Spielberg found the grown-up world creeping into their lives. What a bummer. The movies they'd made starting with Jaws and Star Wars hadn't just sidestepped adult stuff; they'd made an implicit case that an extended childhood was OK, even preferable. Lucas liked to call his work "effervescent giddiness."
Now, Lucas saw his personal life crumbling. He'd married Marcia Griffin, a crack film editor, in 1969. She'd been with him for every milestone, every box office record; they'd once celebrated her birthday at the Raiders of the Lost Ark wrap party. But Lucas was, by his own account, a famously disciplined workaholic ? he refused to take a vacation from 1973 to 1977. In June 1983, less than three weeks after the release of Return of the Jedi, he and Marcia announced their divorce.
Lucas never betrayed his emotions in front of colleagues. Instead, he threw himself deeper into his work. "It's not that he's glum," says Sid Ganis, who was a senior vice-president at Lucasfilm at the time. "He's emphatic. When he's onto an idea, or not liking something, or wanting something, or railing against the way the industry does its business, he does it with intensity. In those days, double the intensity."
Spielberg, who's two years younger than Lucas, was poleaxed by his friends' divorce. "George and Marcia, for me, were the reason you got married ? " he told 60 Minutes in 1999. "And when it didn't work, and when that marriage didn't work, I lost my faith in marriage for a long time." Spielberg had his own problems. He'd just split with Kathleen Carey, a girlfriend of three years. A few months earlier, Spielberg had told People, "I think Kathleen and I will have kids."
Suddenly, the two most successful moviemakers on the planet were under-40 bachelors. Spielberg played video games. Lucas took guitar lessons. Harrison Ford, their star, acquired the ultimate '80s power symbol: a personal trainer. He hired Jake Steinfeld, the Long Island muscle man who would go on to found the fitness line Body by Jake.
Indy was going to take off his shirt a lot more in Temple of Doom, so Ford and Steinfeld hit the weights. "In the first one he was all closed up, baby," Steinfeld tells me. "In Temple of Doom, he was looking like Adonis Jones." Lots of movie stars get into shape before a picture. But even when Temple of Doom was shooting, Ford and Steinfeld rose at 5 a.m. to plow through Steinfeld's regimen of push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and dips. "I'm not kidding you, man, he'd get down and bang out a thousand sit-ups," Steinfeld says.
Pretty soon, Steinfeld was training Lucas and Spielberg, too. "I was given to Wheels [Steinfeld's nickname for Spielberg] as a birthday present in 1983 and we hit it off," Steinfeld says. "His first workout was at his house in Coldwater Canyon. He said to me, 'I haven't exercised since eighth-grade gym class.' I think he was wearing sneakers with black socks."
Steinfeld guided Spielberg through push-ups and pull-ups ? the same workout as Ford. A few hours later, Spielberg was in pain. "He called me afterward," Steinfeld remembers, "and said, 'I had a lot of fun, but I can't move my body. Should I go to the hospital?'"
The darkness Lucas brought to Indiana Jones solved a nagging problem of success. Let's call it The Empire Strikes Back Problem. With Raiders, as with Star Wars, Lucas had created something almost everyone loved. Now he had to deliver the same product in a slightly different package.
Lucas first pictured Indy driving a motorcycle atop the Great Wall of China.1 He would run among dinosaurs, like in one of Lucas's favorite novels, The Lost World. But the Chinese government wouldn't grant him permission to shoot there.
So Lucas hit on India. Temple of Doom would revive Rudyard Kipling just as Raiders revived serials like Commando Cody. The Sankara stones, which were given to a Hindu priest on a mountaintop by Shiva, were the new Ark of the Covenant. In the summer of 1982, Lucas and Spielberg met Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, the husband-and-wife team who'd written American Graffiti, in Lucas's backyard. They spent two days hashing out the movie.
The filmmakers were perfect complements. "George was very interested in story," Huyck remembers, "and Steven was very interested in visual." Katz and Huyck supplied details about India: They'd traveled the subcontinent, collected Indian art,2 and even had photographs of the Thuggee demonstrating their strangling technique. Pretty soon, the four of them had a rough outline of what was then called Temple of Death. It would start with a Shanghai melee (a leftover from the original Raiders script), then drop its heroes from a plane (ditto), before beginning the journey into hell that would comprise the bulk of the movie.
Spielberg was slightly baffled. "The Sankara stones, the Eastern religion, a lot of the stuff in there ? he didn't fully grasp what it was," Lucas said. "So it was harder for him to sort of interpret that into something we have a stake in. And let's face it: It's my fault."
We often think of the Indy movies as the perfect collaboration between director and executive producer. But it's more interesting to look at where the two men split. Raiders of the Lost Ark was made after Spielberg went way over budget on his World War II comedy 1941 and blew much of the cachet he'd earned in Hollywood. Lucas set out to teach Spielberg not to be a slave to art. "I said, 'You don't want to be these kinds of things [big, giant movies] anymore,'" Lucas remembers telling Spielberg. "'This is like a useless exercise.'
He says, 'I don't. I don't like making these big, giant movies.'"
Lucas continued: "I said, 'Let's do a TV show. Let's do an old Republic serial, do it the old-fashioned way, do it really fast. Just have fun.
"He says, 'Yeah, I can do that!'"
Raiders, unlike 1941, came in early and under its final budget. "Steve has always now lived by that," Lucas said. "He's gone over on a few things. But at the same time, most of the movies are really budgeted tightly, they're really well done, fast, professional."
If Lucas helped mold Spielberg into a thrifty, moviemaking machine, then Spielberg reserved a little intellectual autonomy for himself. He not only turned down several of Lucas's proposed Indy stories, he maintained a bit of distance from the whole enterprise. He liked to say he was just a "director for hire" ? more loudly when the films flopped. After Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Spielberg explained, "When [Lucas] writes a story he believes in ? even if I don't believe in it ? I'm going to shoot the movie the way he envisaged it."
But during the making of Temple of Doom, the two men were walking the same dark path. When Spielberg heard of the Thuggee plot, he imagined torchlight and bubbling lava. "As I think you can see in the movie," producer Frank Marshall says with a laugh, "there's a lot of darkness being worked out."
The menacing tone solved The Empire Strikes Back Problem. The filmmakers had a second issue. We'll call this The Prequels Problem: When you tinker with what works, you risk upsetting your first fans.
With Temple of Doom, the government of India responded before the fans. The filmmakers had submitted the script and asked to shoot in Jaipur. The Indian government read the stuff Lucas and Spielberg had come up with and told Lucasfilm ? in their own bureaucratic way ? to get lost.
"We were rejected for having the word 'maharaja' in the script," Marshall says. "It was too late for us to try and change things. So we went to Sri Lanka and did a matte painting of the palace. We never shot in India."
Vic Armstrong always got told he looked like Harrison Ford. He was 6 feet tall, Ford was 6-foot-1. When the stunt double put on a fedora and, say, leaped from a horse onto a moving tank ? one of the great stunts in The Last Crusade ? few viewers could tell the difference. Only Armstrong's lilting British accent gives him away. Using clever camera angles, Spielberg was able to shoot about the majority of the fight with Armstrong.
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