Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a 1984 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, based on a story by George Lucas. It is the second installment in the Indiana Jones film series and a standalone prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark. The film stars Harrison Ford, who reprises his role as the titular character. Kate Capshaw, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth, Philip Stone and Ke Huy Quan, in his film debut, star in supporting roles. Set in 1935, in the film, after arriving in British India, Indiana Jones is asked by desperate villagers to find a mystical stone and rescue their children from a Thuggee cult to all appearances practicing child slavery, black magic and ritual human sacrifice in honor of the demon Kali.
Not wishing to feature the Nazis as the villains again, executive producer and story writer George Lucas decided to regard this film as a prequel. Three plot devices were rejected before Lucas wrote a film treatment that resembled the final storyline. As Lawrence Kasdan, Lucas's collaborator on Raiders of the Lost Ark, turned down the offer to write the script, Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who had previously worked with Lucas on American Graffiti, were hired as his replacements.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released on May 23, 1984, to financial success, grossing $333.1 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing film of 1984. Initial critical reviews were mixed, with criticism aimed at its strong violence, as well as some of its darker story elements, and controversy over its portrayal of India. Critical opinion has improved since 1984, citing the film's intensity and imagination. In response to some of the more violent sequences in the film, and with similar complaints about the Spielberg-produced Gremlins, Spielberg suggested that the Motion Picture Association of America alter its rating system, which it did within two months of the film's release, creating a new PG-13 rating. Temple of Doom was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. A third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, followed in 1989.
Plot
In 1935, American archeologist Indiana Jones survives a murder attempt in China from Shanghai Triad crime boss Lao Che, who hired him to retrieve the remains of Nurhaci. Jones flees from the city accompanied by his young orphan sidekick Short Round and nightclub singer Willie Scott, unaware that the plane they are traveling on is owned by Lao Che.The plane's pilots dump the fuel and parachute away, but Jones, Willie and Short Round escape using an inflatable raft before the plane crashes. The trio ride down the slopes of the Himalayas and fall into a river before arriving at the Indian village of Mayapore.
There, the villagers plead for Jones' aid in retrieving a sacred lingam stone stolen along with the village's children by evil forces from the nearby Pankot Palace. Jones agrees to do so, hypothesizing that the stone is one of the five Sankara stones given by the Hindu gods to help humanity fight evil.
Traveling to the palace, the trio are warmly welcomed and allowed to stay for the night as guests, attending a banquet hosted by the palace's young maharaja Zalim Singh. During the night, Jones is attacked by an assassin, but manages to kill him. He discovers a series of tunnels underneath the palace and explores them with Willie and Short Round.
Finding a temple and a complex of mine tunnels, they observe Thuggee cultists conducting a human sacrifice. The cult, which possesses three Sankara stones, is revealed to have brainwashed Singh and abducted the children of Mayapore, using them as slave labor to find the remaining stones.
During Jones' attempt to retrieve the stones, the trio is captured. Thuggee high priest Mola Ram forces Jones to drink a potion that places him into a trance-like state, under which he prepares Willie for sacrifice. Short Round is briefly enslaved in the tunnels, but he escapes and intercepts Willie's sacrifice by freeing Jones from his trance, who in turn rescues Willie.
The trio defeat multiple cultists, collect the Sankara stones and free Singh and the children, escaping an attempt by Mola Ram to drown them. When he and his men ambush the trio on a rope bridge, Jones severs it with a sword, causing several cultists to fall into the crocodile-infested river far below. As Jones, Willie, Short Round, and Mola Ram struggle to climb up the broken bridge, Jones invokes the name of Shiva, triggering the stones to burn through his satchel. Two stones fall into the river; Mola Ram catches the third, but it burns his hand and he falls and is devoured by the crocodiles.
Indy catches the stone with no ill effects and climbs up as a regiment of British Indian Army soldiers arrives, alerted by Singh, to defeat the remaining cultists. Jones, Willie, and Short Round return to Mayapore to hand over the stone, and Jones and Willie embrace as the villagers celebrate its and their children's return.
Cast
- Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones: An archaeologist adventurer who is asked by a desperate Indian village to retrieve a mysterious stone and rescue the missing village children. Ford undertook a strict physical exercise regimen headed by Jake Steinfeld to gain a more muscular tone for the part.
- Kate Capshaw as Wilhelmina "Willie" Scott: An American nightclub singer working in Shanghai. In a nod to the Star Wars franchise, the nightclub is called Club Obi-Wan. Willie is unprepared for her adventure with Indy and Short Round, and appears to be a damsel in distress. She also forms a romantic relationship with Indy. Over 120 actresses auditioned for the role, including Sharon Stone. To prepare for the role, Capshaw watched The African Queen and A Guy Named Joe. Spielberg wanted Willie to be a complete contrast to Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark, so Capshaw dyed her brown hair blonde for the part. Costume designer Anthony Powell wanted the character to have red hair.
- Ke Huy Quan as Short Round: Indy's young Chinese sidekick, who drives the 1936 Auburn Boat Tail Speedster that allows Indy to escape during the opening sequence. Quan was chosen as part of a casting call in Los Angeles. Around 6,000 actors auditioned worldwide for the part, including Peter Shinkoda; Quan was cast after his brother auditioned for the role. Spielberg liked his personality, so he and Ford improvised the scene where Short Round accuses Indy of cheating during a card game.
- Amrish Puri as Mola Ram: A Thuggee priest who performs rites of human sacrifices. The character is named after an 18th-century Indian painter. Lucas wanted Mola Ram to be terrifying, so the screenwriters added elements of Aztec and Hawaiian human sacrificers and European devil worship to the character. To create his headdress, make-up artist Tom Smith based the skull on a cow, and used a latex shrunken head.
- Roshan Seth as Chattar Lal: The Prime Minister of the Maharaja of Pankot. Chattar, also a Thuggee worshipper, is enchanted by Indy, Willie, and Short Round's arrival, but is offended by Indy's questioning of the palace's history and the archaeologist's own dubious past.
- Philip Stone as Captain Philip Blumburtt: A British Indian Army officer on a routine inspection tour of Pankot Palace and the surrounding area. He assists Indiana by fighting off Thuggee cultists at the bridge with his regiment, the 11th Poona Rifles.
Professional wrestler Pat Roach plays the Thuggee overseer in the mines whom Indy has a large brawl with; Roach had previously appeared as a German mechanic and a Giant Sherpa who brawls with Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dan Aykroyd appears briefly and with a British accent as Earl Weber, who arranges air transport out of Shanghai for Jones, Willie, and Short Round and meets them at the airport. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Frank Marshall, and Kathleen Kennedy have cameos at the airport.
Production
Development
Spielberg later recalled that when Lucas first approached him for Raiders of the Lost Ark, "George said if I directed the first one then I would have to direct a trilogy. He had three stories in mind. It turned out George did *not* have three stories in mind, and we had to make up subsequent stories." Both men later attributed the film's tone, which was darker than Raiders of the Lost Ark, to their personal moods following the breakups of their relationships. In addition, Lucas felt "it had to have been a dark film. The way Empire Strikes Back was the dark second act of the Star Wars trilogy." Spielberg had said "The danger in making a sequel is that you can never satisfy everyone. If you give people the same movie with different scenes, they say 'why weren't you more original?'" "But if you give them the same character in another fantastic adventure, but with a different tone, you risk disappointing the other half of the audience who just wanted a carbon copy of the first film with a different girl and a different bad guy. So you win and you lose both ways."Lucas set the film a year earlier than the first to avoid re-using the Nazis as the villains. Spielberg originally wanted to bring Marion Ravenwood back, with Abner Ravenwood considered as a possible character. In developing the story, Lucas conceived of an opening chase scene with Indiana Jones on a motorcycle on the Great Wall of China, followed by the discovery of a "Lost World pastiche with a hidden valley inhabited by dinosaurs". Another idea was to feature the Monkey King as the plot device. However, Chinese authorities refused permission for them to film in the country, requiring a different setting. Lucas wrote a film treatment that included a haunted castle in Scotland, but Spielberg felt it was too similar to Poltergeist ; so the setting transformed into a demonic temple in India.
Lucas came up with ideas that involved a religious cult devoted to child slavery, black magic, and ritual human sacrifice. Lawrence Kasdan of Raiders of the Lost Ark was asked to write the script. "I didn't want to be associated with Temple of Doom," he reflected. "I just thought it was horrible. It's so mean. There's nothing pleasant about it. I think Temple of Doom represents a chaotic period in both their lives, and the movie is very ugly and mean-spirited." Lucas hired Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz to write the script because of their knowledge of Indian culture. Gunga Din served as an influence for the film.
Huyck and Katz spent four days at Skywalker Ranch for story discussions with Lucas and Spielberg in early 1982. They later said the early plot consisted of two notions of Lucas's: that Indy would recover something stolen from a village and decide whether to give it back, and that the picture would start in China and work its way to India. Huyck says Lucas was very single-minded about getting through meetings, while "Steve would always stop and think about visual stuff."
Lucas's initial idea for Indiana's sidekick was a virginal young princess, but Huyck, Katz, and Spielberg disliked the idea. Just as Indiana Jones was named after Lucas's Alaskan Malamute, the character of Willie was named after Spielberg's Cocker Spaniel, and Short Round was named after Huyck's dog, whose name was derived from The Steel Helmet.
Lucas handed Huyck and Katz a 20-page treatment in May 1982 titled Indiana Jones and the Temple of Death to adapt into a screenplay. Scenes such as the fight scene in Shanghai, the escape from the airplane, and the mine cart chase came from earlier scripts of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In Raiders, the headpiece for the Staff of Ra was originally conceived to be in two pieces, with the first piece in the museum of General Hok, a Japanese-allied Chinese warlord in Shanghai. Jones was planned to steal that piece, and then use a giant gong as a shield as General Hok fired a submachine gun at him during his escape, much like the final moments in Club Obi-Wan. Kasdan said that was too expensive to produce for the earlier movie. After that, Jones was to fly to Nepal to find Marion and the second piece. In flight, he fell asleep and all of the other passengers on the plane bailed out and parachuted to safety, leaving him to escape alone using an inflatable raft to slide down a Himalayan slope to Marion's bar. Kasdan said this was cut because it interrupted the story flow and was "too unbelievable," a complaint leveled by some critics at the finished scene.
Lucas, Huyck, and Katz had been developing Radioland Murders since the early 1970s. The opening music was taken from that script and applied to Temple of Doom. Spielberg reflected, "George's idea was to start the movie with a musical number. He wanted to do a Busby Berkeley dance number. At all our story meetings he would say, 'Hey, Steven, you always said you wanted to shoot musicals.' I thought, 'Yeah, that could be fun.
Lucas, Spielberg, Katz, and Huyck were concerned how to keep the audience interest while explaining the Thuggee cult. Huyck and Katz proposed a tiger hunt but Spielberg stated, "There's no way I'm going to stay in India long enough to shoot a tiger hunt." They eventually decided on a dinner scene involving eating bugs, monkey brains, and the like. "Steve and George both still react like children, so their idea was to make it as gross as possible," says Katz.
Lucas sent Huyck and Katz a 500-page transcript of their taped conversations to help them with the script. The first draft was written in six weeks, in early August 1982. "Steve was coming off an enormously successful movie and George didn't want to lose him," said Katz. "He desperately wanted him to direct. We were under a lot of pressure to do it really, really fast so we could hold on to Steve."
A second draft was finished by September. Captain Blumburtt, Chattar Lal, and the boy Maharaja originally had more crucial roles. A dogfight scene was deleted, as were scenes where those who drank the Kali blood turned into zombies with physical superhuman abilities. During pre-production, the Temple of Death title was replaced with Temple of Doom. From March to April 1983, Huyck and Katz simultaneously performed rewrites for a final shooting script. One scene that made it into the script, but was dropped during filming, was about a snake coiling around Willie. As Capshaw has a fear of snakes, Spielberg noticed how difficult it was for her to film the scene, and decided to skip it.
Huyck and Katz later said Harrison Ford took many of the one liners originally given to Short Round.