Plus, the Indiana Jones star tells EW how she avoided the pitfalls of the damsel-in-distress trope.
Indiana Jones may hate snakes, but Marion Ravenwood isn’t a fan of monkeys.
Or, at least, the woman who plays her,Karen Allen, is not.
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“The monkey was a very unpleasant experience,” she recalls.
I don’t know where that monkey came from.
All I know is we were in Tunisia and that monkey had no training whatsoever."
Harrison Ford and Karen Allen on the set of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images
“It was hot there and the monkey really had no interest in being in the heat.
He was not my favorite costar.
KAREN ALLEN:We don’t know much about what went on between them.
Everett Collection
What I thought when I read that [was] he was a student of my father’s.
My father was very fond of him, so there was a safety zone there.
There was definitely something that happened between them, and he was her first crush, her first love.
CBS via Getty Images
So, it didn’t bother me at all because it’s so vague.
I mean, it’s not like she was pregnant with his child or something [Laughs].
It didn’t really phase me.
Paramount Pictures
I read you developed a whole backstory for Marion.
Can you tell us more about that?
I wrote it 40 years ago.
Paramount Pictures
Where were they born?
Who was their mother?
Where did she go to school?
Paramount Pictures
What was she interested in?”
So I just sat down and wrote five or six pages of her history.
Do I remember the specifics of it?
You’re never going to find those things in the script.
But they’re important to me as I think about and develop the character.
What do you remember about that red embroidered ensemble you wore.
We did them all in Los Angeles before we went over to London to shoot the film.
It’s a period piece, so they were very fanciful costumes, and I liked that outfit.
The white dress, I developed a real negative relationship with.
I would’ve liked to have snuck in and burned all of those dresses.
We discovered a couple of things.
I would usually grab a piece of bread because the flies were less interested in bread.
And so, almost everybody got quite ill on the set.
We all just shrank in the course of the film.
I also read you improvised the scene with Belloq (Paul Freeman) in the tent with the knife.
How did that come about?
We improvised it before the actual shooting of the scene.
I said to Steven, “Why does she put on that white dress?
Like what is the point of putting on the white dress?
She’s trying to escape.
There was really no answer to that question.
I kept trying to say, “What is really going on in this scene?”
And Paul agreed with me.
Marion truly loved Indy, and she wasn’t going to seduce Belloq in this story.
So, Paul and I would sneak off to the tent at lunch, and we would improvise.
We showed it to Steven, and he liked it, so we shot it.
How many real snakes were you dealing with?
What was that filming situation like?
Any fear of getting bit?
They brought in about 6,000-7,000 snakes.
They were all around the set, and there were dozens of snake wranglers looking after the snakes.
They wanted to go to someplace dark and cool.
We had to get used to these snakes right away.
There was no time for us to get to know each other.
I don’t know what we would have done.
I would have had to get a therapist or something.
By day four or five, I was just like, “Okay, bring on the snakes.”
I pushed back all the way through the film on the damsel-in-distress thing.
Often, they would write it so at moments she would become sort of helpless.
I kept having to be the consistency police.
That when the situation came about she never would be somebody who was helpless.
She would always be looking for the solution and looking for a way to protect herself.
Steven was very open to that.
I don’t think sometimes he would notice those things as much as I would.
You want to create somebody who is strong but human.
It’s a funny little razor’s edge.
Each one of the women that they created for each one of those films had their strengths.
Alison [Doody] in the third one is actually an evil character.
She’s more of a villain than a heroine.
And Kate [Capshaw] has a wonderful opening scene where she’s dancing in this club.
It’s hard to go up against that.
Then, he walks in and she punches him in the face.
They just outdid themselves writing that character.
I’ll tell you what Steven said to me when he asked me to do the role.
He said to me, “I see this characters sort of like Patricia Neal inHud.”
It’s very different than Marion, and yet at the same time that was who he was referencing.
But I took the Patricia Neal thing very much to heart.
I think it gave the character in spite of all of the action adventure a soulfulness or grounding.
We were really up on this post and tied to this thing.
Oh, it’s terrible!”
He just talked us through it.
We had no idea what it was that we might or might not have been seeing.
We had no idea what it was that we were really responding to or protecting ourselves from.
Was it satisfying to you?
When I first read it, I wept.
I was so surprised.
Somehow I really internalized this feeling that these guys were meant to be together.
Well, you are married and as far as we know, Marion isn’t dead.
I know you could’t say much, if anything, but would you want to return forIndy 5?
Absolutely, I would want to.
