Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

[liam]

Henry Jones, Sr. calls Indiana "Junior" sixteen times. He calls him "Indiana" only twice. He also calls Indiana "son" four times, and "boy" three times. Indiana tells his father not to "call him Junior" (or "that") three times, and almost does a fourth, but is interrupted. Indiana calls his father "dad" a total of fifty-four times, four times when Henry, Sr. isn't in the scene.

[leo]

The BBC's film critic Barry Norman described "Last Crusade" as "easily the best of 1989's adventure capers."

[leo]

Amanda Redman was asked to play the female lead of Elsa, but turned it down because of her real-life fear of rats.

[kristina]

Baking soda was applied to Sean Connery to create Henry's bullet wound. Vinegar was applied to create the foaming effect, as the water from the Grail washes it away.

[morris]

The difficulties shown by the tank driver in maneuvering the vehicle were very realistic. The Mark I tank, or any World War I tank, was so unwieldy, that its manufacturers rushed to produce an upgrade. The Mark IV was ready in only one year's time.

[fred]

Steven Spielberg: [music] Music by John Williams.

[michele]

The tank is a replica of a British and American Mark VIII manufactured in 1918. Its armament consisted of two six-pound guns and seven machine guns. Only one hundred seven were produced due to the end of the war. The tank shown in this movie has a turret replacing the large cupola for the commander and driver, and no machine guns. It is also much faster than the real Mark VIIIs.

[claude]

After fleeing Castle Brunwald and eluding the Nazi soldiers on motorcycles, Indiana and his father come to a fork in the road with a sign indicating left (North) to Berlin and right (South) to Venice. A third city is barely visible on that same sign, pointing at the direction from which the Joneses just came, and it indicates the road to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics.

[nicholas]

The shot of Donovan's death was created over three months by morphing together three puppets of Donovan in separate stages of decay, a technique Industrial Light & Magic mastered on Willow (1988). A fourth puppet was used for the decaying clothes, because the puppet's torso mechanics had been exposed. Complications arose because Alison Doody's double had not been filmed for the scene's latter two elements, so the background and hair from the first shot had to be used throughout, with the other faces mapped over it. Donovan's skeleton was hung on wires like a marionette. It required several takes to film it crashing against the wall, because not all the pieces released upon impact.

[michele]

The tank only moved at ten to twelve miles per hour, which Vic Armstrong said made it difficult to film Indiana riding a horse against the tank, while making it appear faster.

[harry]

Because steam locomotives are very loud, Michael Lantieri's crew would respond to first assistant director David Tomblin's radioed directions by making the giraffes nod or shake their heads to his questions, which amused the crew.

[ella]

Steven Spielberg used doves for the seagulls that Henry scares into striking the German plane, because the real gulls used in the first take did not fly.

[darrell]

The temple at the end of the movie exists, but not in Alexandretta. It is in Petra, Jordan. However, there is no inside to it. The doorway seen on screen is huge - eight or nine people shoulder to shoulder can easily walk through it. It leads to a huge empty square room carved from the top down over two stories high. Similarly, they wouldn't be able to get "lost" down the valley, as it stretches for about a mile or so, and there is no other route but out. Steven Spielberg and his crew were guests at the Royal Palace of King Hussein and Queen Noor during the shoot in Jordan, and Spielberg was even brought to the temple by Queen Noor and her children.

[wallace]

Harrison Ford and Sean Connery passed up three subsequent opportunities to work together. Connery accepted a role in The Hunt for Red October (1990) while Ford declined the role of Jack Ryan, which went to Alec Baldwin instead (Ford later took over the role in Patriot Games (1992)). Ford and Connery declined the roles of Alan Grant and John Hammond, respectively, in Jurassic Park (1993). Connery declined to return to the role of Henry Jones, Sr. in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).

[aaron]

Professor Henry Jones, Sr. speaks with Sean Connery's recognizable Scottish accent. Jones is a Welsh name, meaning that he is likely to be a Scotsman of Welsh descent.

[bernice]

Indy is unfazed by rats, which terrify his father. Sean Connery is afraid of spiders, and James Bond is nearly killed by one in Dr. No. Indy is clearly not frightened by spiders either, as shown in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

[sylvia]

Steven Spielberg devised the three trials that guard the Grail. For the first, the blades under which Indiana ducks like a penitent man were a mix of practical and miniature blades created by Gibbs and Industrial Light & Magic. For the second trial, in which Indiana spells "Iehova" on stable stepping stones, it was intended to have a tarantula crawl up Indiana after he mistakenly steps on "J". This was filmed and deemed unsatisfactory, so Industrial Light & Magic filmed a stuntman hanging through a hole that appears in the floor, thirty feet above a cavern. As this was dark, it did not matter that the matte painting and models were rushed late in production. The tarantula version is used in a comic book adaptation of the movie. The third trial, the leap of faith that Indiana makes over an apparently impassable ravine after discovering a bridge hidden by forced perspective, was created with a model bridge and painted backgrounds. This was cheaper than building a full-size set. A puppet of Harrison Ford was used to create a shadow on the nine-foot-tall by thirteen-foot-wide model, because Ford had filmed the scene against bluescreen, which did not incorporate the shaft of light from the entrance.