It fulfilled his childhood dream and has become one of Hollywood's most iconic films, but Steven Spielberg now admits that the first "Indiana Jones" movie could have turned out a whole lot differently.
"I was a little bit dubious about what happens when they open the ark," he tells Entertainment Weekly in their new cover story. "What actually is going to come out of the ark? There were a lot of crazy things in the script. I wasn't sure how much we could actually get on the screen. We made a lot of it up as we were in postproduction."
As it turns out, the ark releases sand... and then spirits, demons and howling energies that kill the Nazis who had finally had it captured. Scrambling and revising on set is a normal Hollywood process, and it turns out that Spielberg made a good choice, as the film would go on to not only be a hit but spawn three more sequels.
The most recent sequel, "Kingom of the Crystal Skull," came out in 2008, nearly two decades after the the third film, "The Last Crusade." It was not nearly as well received as its predecessors, and Spielberg recently defended one of its most maligned scenes in an interview with Empire Magazine. This time, he knew what he was doing -- it just didn't quite pan out.
"What people really jumped at was Indy climbing into a refrigerator and getting blown into the sky by an atom-bomb blast," he said. "Blame me. Don't blame George [Lucas]. That was my silly idea. People stopped saying 'jump the shark.' They now say, 'nuked the fridge.' I'm proud of that. I'm glad I was able to bring that into popular culture."
Spielberg has two new films out this month, in "War Horse" and "The Adventures of Tintin." They are in many ways dramatically different -- one is about a World War I-era horse, the other a motion capture adaptation of a famed comic -- but they also combine elements of "Indiana Jones." Like Indy, War Horse is set in a time of past conflict, while "Tintin" has the same sense of hunger for adventure. Thirty years after the first "Indy," it's pretty safe to assume that Spielberg has no misgivings or uncertainties with these films.
For more, click over to Entertainment Weekly.