When Raiders of the Lost Ark burst onto screens in 1981, it redefined the action-adventure genre. Spielberg, Lucas, and Harrison Ford gave audiences a hero who could be both brilliant and clumsy – a man as likely to fall into trouble as he was to escape it in style.
But one of Indy’s most iconic moments wasn’t in the script at all. In the bustling bazaar scene, Indiana is searching for Marion (Karen Allen) when a towering swordsman steps forward, showing off his skills with an enormous scimitar. In the finished film, he just sighs, pulls out his revolver, and drops him with one shot.
Originally, this was meant to be a sprawling, three-page, whip-versus-sword battle. Spielberg had even “searched the world for the best swordsman,” eventually casting British stuntman Terry Richards – a man who’d faced everyone from James Bond to Luke Skywalker.
Richards trained for months to perfect the duel, set to happen while they were filming in Tunisia. By the time the crew reached the desert location, they’d been shooting in 130-degree heat for six weeks.
The water supply was unreliable, the schedule was packed, and most of the crew – including Ford – came down with dysentery – which Spielberg avoided only by sticking to the food and water he’d brought from England.
Harrison Ford, however, was in no condition for a two-day fight scene. As he told Entertainment Tonight: “I went up to Steven as soon as I arrived and I said, ‘Steven why don’t we just shoot this [expletive]?’ and Steven said, ‘My god I was thinking that, too.’”
The idea didn’t come from laziness, as Ford explained in a Reddit AMA: “The scene before this in the film included a whip fight against 5 bad guys… so I thought it was a bit redundant.”
Spielberg later admitted that cutting the duel saved them at least a full day of shooting. “We were then another day ahead of schedule,” he wrote for the American Society of Cinematographers.
The change also turned a potentially repetitive set piece into a perfect Indiana Jones gag – the pragmatic hero taking the easy way out because it’s the smart thing to do.
Ford, though, still admitted to feeling a twinge of regret for Richards: “The poor guy… was a wonderful British stuntman who had practiced his sword skills for months in order to do this job.”