Filming Raiders Of The Lost Ark's Egypt Scenes Were Miserable For Everyone

From early on in Steven Spielberg's career, he learned to get used to the terrible conditions that often come with working on location. Most of "Jaws" was filmed on the actual ocean, for instance, and the production was a disaster. What was supposed to be 55 days of shooting turned into 159, and the movie that was supposed to cost $4 million ended up costing $9 million. Thank God the movie was a huge hit, because it's not clear how Spielberg would've recovered if "Jaws" had flopped in theaters. 

But as difficult as filming in and around water can be, there's also plenty of chaos to come with filming in the desert. As a wise Jedi would later remark, sand is coarse, rough, irritating, and it gets everywhere, which is part of what led to the many Egypt scenes in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" being straight-up agonizing to film. Although Spielberg and co-creator George Lucas still managed to stay ahead of schedule this time — wrapping up the movie after 73 of the 85 days the studio allowed — those sections in the desert sure felt like they took a lot longer. 

"The prevailing temperature in the shade of an umbrella was 130 degrees in the Sahara Desert," Spielberg himself wrote in a 2017 recounting of the production process. "The only relief came when the wind would pick up at around 4 o'clock in the afternoon and cool the breeze to a mere 110 degrees ... It was the least enjoyable location I think I've ever experienced."

"It was virtually a relay race to accomplish as many exciting setups as possible before sundown made us stop shooting," Spielberg wrote further. "And also to get the hell out of there, because none of us liked it there." On top of the heat and the sand, there was the fact that most of the crew ended up with food poisoning. "Some of the local food put a majority of the group through gastric agony," Spielberg wrote, although he himself lucked out because he'd stuck to eating the food he'd brought with him. 

Maybe the hardest part, however, was timing things right so the sunlight would look as good as possible. That digging scene where you can see the characters as silhouettes against the giant orange desert sun is a beautiful shot, popping up constantly in compilations of beautifully-filmed moments in cinema, but it was a moment that had to be filmed during a short, specific period of time. As Spielberg explained, "I felt a little conspicuous jumping up and down and screaming, 'We're losing the light! We're losing the light!' The rest of the British crew just sat there looking up at the sun and quite agreeing with me."

The scariest moment for Spielberg was when Harrison Ford nearly got his leg crushed while filming the scene where Indy fought the buff Nazi by the moving plane, but ironically it was the heat and sand that staved off disaster: "The only thing that saved his leg from shattering in a hundred pieces was the fact that it was so hot that the rubber was soft and pliable and the ground concrete pad was covered over with two inches of sand ... there was enough give between the rubber and the sand that Harrison completely escaped any harm."

The big saving grace of this movie's production was that it was all on land. "I kept saying, 'This is great, but what if this had been on the water?'" Spielberg joked. "Then we would laugh and say, 'Thank goodness we are doing impossible special effects on land.'" Even today, filming in and around water is notoriously difficult; it's a big part of why "Avatar: The Way of Water" took so long to finish, or why "The Gang Goes to Hell: Part 2" is one of the most expensive episodes of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" despite only taking place in one room. After "Jaws," Spielberg told himself he "would never go underwater and work with anything with pneumatics or hydraulic," but life had different things in store for him.

"After 'Close Encounters' I said, 'That's it with 70mm and optical effects and matte paintings,'" Spielberg wrote. "After '1941' I said, 'No more miniatures and no more multiple storylines.' And I wound up smack dab in the middle of it again with 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.'" In the decades since, Spielberg has rarely managed to avoid creating difficult projects for himself, because he is at his core an ambitious director constantly pushing the boundaries of what movies can do. Whether it's making dinosaurs feel real for the first time in cinema in 1993 or just throwing in a stunning one-shot in his 2021 remake of "West Side Story," Spielberg's always giving himself headaches that will undeniably pay off later. Filming in Egypt for "Raiders" might've been a uniquely tough process for him, but it certainly wasn't the first or last time Spielberg suffered for the sake of his art.