Temple of Doom’s effects boss shares how ‘very, very difficult’ Indiana Jones film was made

Forty years ago, Harrison Ford's archaeologist and explorer Indiana Jones returned to the big screen for his second adventure: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This time Indy was accompanied by Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw), a US actor working in Shanghai, and Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), his nine-year-old partner in crime, as they dived into the nefarious activities of a religious cult in India.

"It was a very, very difficult film to make. Nowadays with digital work, it's much simpler to do any of this stuff than it was back then," Dennis Muren, Temple of Doom's visual effects supervisor, tells Yahoo UK having been in charge of bringing Steven Spielberg's fantastical vision to life.

Muren – who was working for George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic at the time, now holds nine Oscars (including one for Temple of Doom) and has worked across many iconic movies such as Star Wars, Jurassic Park and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial – relished the challenge posed by the Indy film.

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"I don't regret it [Temple of Doom], because that's the world I grew up with, doing it with models and miniatures, and you're always overcoming real-world problems and as hard as it was to make the movie, it was hard for us to catch up to do the effects also."

The global nature of Indiana Jones contributed to how much Muren enjoyed it, with Doom filming on location in Sri Lanka, Macau, and the USA. Though the 77-year-old says Kathleen Kennedy — now president of Lucasfilm, but then associate producer on Doom — credits the James Bond series for paving the way for productions like Indiana Jones to happen.

"The Bond movies figured out how to do this travelling from this country to that country and moving the equipment safely. Where do you find the crews? Where do you put everybody up, so they're safe? How do you get them to the locations? The Bond guys, they’re the ones that had to figure it out so they can get made on time and budget, but all over the world."

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"And so the work that came back to ILM reflected that. Every sequence was different because it was taking place in a different place. Everything had to be figured out, even the tri-motor flying around [where Indy, Willie and Short Round escape China, before crashing] needed to be figured out at the beginning of it."

"The bats flying out near the beginning of the film, were actually seagulls that I found out a dump up in Northern California. We had to get them to fly away and then we could shoot up against the sky and put them in. Lots of crazy little things like that, that had to look real but needed to be figured out and the movie was full of those."

The film’s focus on practical effects, grounded landscapes and intense danger is as thrilling now as it was in 1984. From falling out of the sky in an inflatable life raft, to seething lava pits, mine cart chases and an iconic rope bridge action set piece the film is a triumph of visual effects and action cinema.

Dennis Muren explained how three of Temple of Doom's most difficult visual effects shots were done.

The mine cart chase

The film sees Indy and co helping an Indian village to rescue their kidnapped children — and the precious Sankara stones — from the clutches of a murderous cult. It climaxes with a thrilling mine cart chase as the trio seek to escape the temple, much of which was filmed in England with Ford, Capshaw and Quan, however, Muren says there was no way to film wide shots without using miniatures.

To accomplish filming within budget, Muren designed a new technique using the small Nikon F3 still camera, modifying it to fit a 100-foot roll of film to allow wide shots whilst using smaller sets.

“In the end, the figures were about six or seven inches high, and we have this little track that was probably about 70 feet long. We could take it apart and put it back together again, depending on what action was required,” he tells Yahoo.

“We could really make the shots more dangerous by getting the rocks closer to where our camera was going to be — because the rocks were just made out of tin foil, then painted dark brown.”

Muren aimed to make viewers feel like a ‘participant’ who feel the imminent danger Indy is experiencing. "I actually put the camera on the miniature track and drove it along as though you're still in the mine car, just looking forward, and then we have blue screens of the actors we put into them."

"The point of it, for Steven [Spielberg], and for me and everybody else, is that you’re not going through this rock cave. It’s the danger that is going to happen in the next one or two seconds. That is what keeps you energised and staying in the movie theatre watching it."

The lava pit

During a particularly sinister scene, we see Willie being lowered into a gigantic, bubbling lava pit by the cultists. Muren was in charge of making this happen on-screen in wide shots.

He knew it would not be possible to create a life-size version and found it troubling to make it look "really big, dangerous and frightening", finding previous examples of work created with miniatures (as many shots in Temple are) "have not been done very well."

His team used a mixture of methicillin (a thickening agent used in toothpaste), mixed with water and paints lit from beneath. This was then covered with fake rocks, but to create movement, pumps were added.

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"If we can make the swirl like it’s a drain, then you've got a bullseye to look at. That makes it even scarier than just looking at the lava. So when you're being lowered down, not only you're going to burn up, but you're going to be going down this little hole of lava. So it's triple the thrill." Muren says.

"That was probably mechanically the hardest sequence of the film to figure out for those few shots.”

Muren estimates the lava pit model to have been around 30 feet high, and while he wishes he could have made it smaller to ease shooting, he knows it wouldn’t have looked as good.

"But it took that to give it the scale that it didn't suddenly pop out of the movie and you'd say, oh, it looks fake. You know, I'm not following him anymore. It looks like I'm looking at a movie. Which is something you never want."

This scene, amongst others, marked a stark contrast to 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark — the first Indiana Jones movie — which is a much more playful and lighthearted experience. Temple’s more sinister tone (oft speculated to have been influenced by relationship breakdowns experienced by Steven Spielberg, director, and George Lucas, story writer) led to a change in American film rating systems due to parental complaints, and the introduction of PG-13, to slot between PG and R.

Hanging from the rope bridge

While much was filmed on location in Sri Lanka, and a 30-40ft cliff face built in England, Muren’s team worked to ensure the fall from the cliff face — taken by many — looks truly lethal, and felt just as unsettling as the race through the mines.

Muren’s filming took place on a river off of Lake Powell, bordering Utah and Arizona, rigging out a way to descend and drop the camera 200 feet down the cliff face, ensuring it approaches the water, used to represent Mola Ram falling to his doom in the infested waters (shots of crocodiles were filmed at ILM, utilising baby alligators raised by a man working in at a repair shop down the road from the offices).

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Muren says this isn’t really an effect shot but was shot as such, to increase the danger and deadliness of the risk of falling.

Despite its challenges, Muren credits Temple of Doom or Raiders as his favourite films, due to his work on both, including a small, non-speaking role in Raiders, and collaborating with Spielberg.

“I'm always in awe of him, and the actors being able to keep things entertaining when sometimes you see the same kind of sequence in another film, and it'll just be flat. You don't know what happened. Well, they were never flat in these movies.”

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is streaming on Disney+.