Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom's Mola Ram Actor Was Juggling 18 Other Movies At The Same Time

There is no right way to make a movie, but if your industry's process is to pump out over 1,000 new movies a year, you're probably not going to get far if you employ Stanley Kubrick's wear-your-actors-down-with-dozens-of-takes approach.

Obviously, there are world-class auteurs working in India, but the country's approach to filmmaking in general can seem exhausting to the outsider. They double the annual output of North America, which requires a herculean commitment on the part of actors and crew members. Just look up the filmography of Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan. Since making his feature debut in 1992, he's racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 credits and, at the age of 57, he doesn't seem to be slowing down.

This production philosophy is alien to just about every American actor not named Eric Roberts, and it confounds Hollywood filmmakers when they shoot on location in India with Indian actors. This was especially true when Steven Spielberg and company set up shop in the country to make "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."

According to an oral history compiled by Paul Bullock on the making of the movie, the production had to adjust to the Bollywood method of filmmaking. Scheduling the hours of actor Amrish Puri, who plays the heart-extracting baddie Mola Ram, proved to be a major headache. As producer Robert Watts recalled:

"This was something I had never before come up against. The Indian film industry operates in a manner that would drive me stark raving mad. The actors work sometimes two or even three shifts a day, four-hour shift. And they may work on two or three different films; they'll be in one in the morning and another in the afternoon. In the end, we had four different visits from Amrish (one in Sri Lanka, three in London). He had to juggle around all his Indian commitments to do this movie. It wasn't easy."

Was Puri worth the trouble? Absolutely. His Mola Ram is the most terrifying villain in the Indiana Jones series. He could've easily decamped to Hollywood, but he remained in India, where he worked steadily until his death in 2005.

Can you imagine a method actor like Marlon Brando or Dustin Hoffman making two or three movies at the same time? You can't because these filmmakers would never be able to accommodate the former's flakiness or the latter's deep-tissue immersion into an individual character. It's a quirk of culture, one that clearly works well for these two very different industries.