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As collated by Life Magazine’s 40th-anniversary look back at “Raiders,” Ford (via Entertainment Weekly) explained how the original fight sequence with the swordsman “would take three days to shoot,” a fairly large time commitment for a movie as chock-full of action and location changes as “Raiders” is. Ford continued:
“I was sick, and besides, up to that point, I kept worrying about the fact that I had been wearing this gun that I had never drawn. So, I said to Steven, ‘Why don’t we just shoot the sumbitch?’ He said, ‘Okay.’ He was ready to get out of there too. That’s how we got that scene.”
Although Ford and Spielberg were completely pleased with their clever and elegant (albeit harsh) solution to the scene, Kasdan was less than enthused. As the writer told Joseph McBride in “Steven Spielberg: A Biography,” he knew he held the minority opinion:
“It was very popular, but it disturbed me. I thought that was brutal in a way the rest of the movie wasn’t. I’m never happy about making jokes out of killing people. Steven is more in touch with popular tastes than I am.”
It makes perfect sense that Kasdan would find the improvised and rewritten moment distasteful, if only for the fact that he, as a screenwriter, put a lot of effort and craft into his work on “Raiders.” (Kasdan isn’t quite in a position to decry Spielberg’s moral taste after directing “Dreamcatcher,” but that’s another story.) To his point, the moment was not originally discussed when conceiving the character of Indiana Jones nor the entire story of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and if one sees “Raiders” as a faithful homage to the adventure heroes of pulp magazines and ’30s movie serials, perhaps Indy’s shooting of the swordsman isn’t totally appropriate.
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