“Raiders of the Lost Ark” remains the best Indiana Jones film partly due to its very real sense of danger.
According to John Rhys-Davies, who played Indy’s sidekick Sallah, director Steven Spielberg “was making it up as he goes along.
The script was endless pages of action description.
A lot of the dialogue was (improvised) by Steven; Steven and Harrison [Ford]; or Steven, Harrison and myself.” Indeed, one of the most famous scenes in “Raiders” was improvised by Ford, wherein he shoots stuntman Terry Richards’ swordsman during the Cairo marketplace scene.But while the spontaneous nature of filming “Raiders” lent the film an air of excitement and danger, it also made for a literally dangerous shoot, to the extent that Spielberg was amazed Ford’s stunt team made it through the production alive.
The director has written about his remorse over allowing Ford to perform many of the stunts himself and…
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