No One On The Set Of Indiana Jones Was Safe From The Pythons
"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 putting the star in harm's way. But it wasn't just Ford and the stunt team that risked their health to make "Raiders."
Snakes have become an important element of the Indiana Jones films, due to them being the character's biggest fear. In Indy's first outing, he and Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) become trapped in the Well of Souls temple along with countless snakes that cover the floor of the chamber. Earlier in the film, Indy and Sallah had glimpsed the writhing floor of serpents from above, prompting Dr. Jones to utter the now famous line, "Snakes, why'd it have to be snakes?" But it wasn't just Indiana and Marion that would have to face down the reptiles.
'Why'd it have to be snakes'
After he and Marion find themselves locked in the temple, Indy has to contend with his biggest fear. This being 1981, there were no CGI snakes at the filmmakers' disposal, which meant Harrison Ford and his colleagues had to interact with real cobras, pythons, and non-poisonous garter snakes for this scene. In yet another example of how dangerous filming "Raiders" proved to be, the entire crew kept antivenom handy while shooting. Thankfully for Ford and Allen, a snake handler for the film made a cameo by agreeing to perform the up-close-and-personal shots that required Allen's character to stand among the reptiles.
Still, it wasn't exactly the most safety conscious shoot. As Spielberg recalled during a 1981 appearance on "The Dick Cavett Show":
"A lot of them were garter snakes but a lot of them were deadly snakes. The Cobras we got from India and we got the Boa Constrictors I'm not sure from where, and the pythons came in. We had many snake Wranglers in the film, we had four of them. They were always being bitten by everything but Cobras, of course, because that's deadly. But the pythons were going after everybody."
The director went on to confirm that the shots of snakes biting people were very much real, adding:
"When something bites and snaps and grabs hold of the character that's a Python and those are real teeth and that's a real actor going, 'Why am I here and why did I make this movie?'"
'Uh help, please'
Further adding to the questionable reputation of the "Raiders" shoot, Steven Spielberg went on to recount to Dick Cavett how he couldn't get a decent scream out of Karen Allen and so resorted to dropping a real snake on the actor in order to elicit a loud enough sound. But while Allen avoided actually being bitten during filming, not every member of the crew was so lucky. As Spielberg recalled:
"Our assistant director had a very severe bite on his hand by a Python and it wouldn't let go. They had to actually walk over and give it a little flick on the snake's tail and the shock wave went up to the snake's head and then he decided to let go."
According to Spielberg, that assistant director, David Tomlin, didn't seem to fazed by the incident and "just walked around the stage saying 'Uh help, please'."
Obviously none of this would fly these days. Spielberg would no doubt find himself on the receiving end of numerous lawsuits were he to allow a similarly reckless shoot to take place today. Thankfully, everyone made it out the other side of "Raiders," and Harrison Ford actually feels very differently about snakes than his character, having revealed that he quite likes the animals.