New Mexico ... New Haven ... New Indy

Finally, Cameras Roll On the First

Indiana Jones Adventure for a New Generation

It happened at Ghost Ranch, north of Santa Fe, N.M.

Indiana Jones came back.

Following tradition on his movies, director Steven Spielberg broke out bottles of Champagne and offered a toast as cameras got ready to capture the first images of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." "It was like we dropped back to the end of the last one," says producer Frank Marshall. "It was exactly the same. The relationships, the creative atmosphere that was on the set, the respect -- all these elements were there once again."

"There wasn't one person there who didn't believe they were witnessing magic," says co-producer Denis L. Stewart. "Everyone was so happy and full of adrenaline just to see everyone together again making these movies. That carried the day and helped us move through an aggressive schedule."

The first leg of production unfolded in the stunning and desolate desert landscapes of New Mexico. From Ghost Ranch, the company traveled 300 miles southwest to Deming. There, hangers at an old World War II Army Air base were virtually unchanged since their heyday, and with a little set dressing and some War-era army Jeeps and Soviet soldiers, the area was transformed to provide the backdrop for the opening sequences of the movie.

From New Mexico, production traveled east to the home of Professor Jones and Marshall College. "One of the challenges we had on this movie," Marshall explains, "was that we had established a lot of locations in the first three movies which we had to duplicate." Indeed, the interior of the classroom in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was shot in London, while the exterior was shot at the University of the Pacific in Northern California. For "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," the filmmakers would need to reproduce both. The solution, says Marshall, was found at an iconic Ivy League school in New Haven, Conn.

The filmmakers were delighted to find the unique personality and flavor for Marshall College at Yale University. "The exteriors were perfect for the period, the classrooms were great and we had wonderful cooperation from the university and the town," Marshall says. From the classroom to a motorcycle chase through campus halls, quads and town, Yale and New Haven provided a perfect backdrop for Professor Jones, Dean Stanforth and the introduction of Mutt.

As the film's producer, it was easy, in the midst of production, to forget that Indy's workplace had a very familiar name. "I started seeing 'Marshall' everywhere when I got to New Haven' and then I realized that, way back on 'Raiders,' we had come up with the incredibly inventive name of Marshall College," he jokes.

Some of the most critical and challenging sequences in the story take place within the dense jungles of the Peruvian rainforest. "Iquitos is referred to as the 'Gateway to the Amazon,'" says screenwriter David Koepp. "It's the last city before you move into intense jungle, the border where the wild and the civilized meet. It's the perfect place for an Indiana Jones adventure to begin."

In a small town at the jungle's entrance, Indy and Mutt locate important clues that draw them deeper into the mysteries of the Crystal Skull. While the exterior of the town was shot on the Universal backlot transformed by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas into a dusty Peruvian street, the jungle itself was a more difficult find. The filmmakers scouted far and wide for an ideal location that would reflect that primeval forest.

"It's hard to find untouched jungle," co-producer Stewart says. "We searched Mexico, Guatemala, South America, Puerto Rico." Finally the production found what they were looking for a little closer to home. "We looked all over for the right location, and finally decided to look at Hawaii."

The company found their jungle in the southeast corner of the Big Island of Hawaii. On a private tract of land, under the dense canopy of old jungle growth, the filmmakers spent several weeks filming some of the more challenging sequences of the film, including a swordfight atop moving cars.

"The Hawaii location became an excellent place for us to pull off some very difficult scenes," says Marshall "We had a lot of action, a lot of stunts with the actors themselves, so it was important to be in a place where we could pretty much operate without any outside interference."

From Hawaii, the company traveled back home to Southern California and resumed shooting, using nearly every studio lot for dozens of vast and varied sets skillfully crafted by Dyas and his team.

Indiana Jones' home was built on Stage 29 on Universal Studios' famous backlot. "It's one of those archetypal sets that allowed us to show our main character's more private side," says Dyas. The production designer and his team worked hard to replicate Jones' home, carefully pouring over images from the previous films. "We meticulously tried to recreate the style of Indiana Jones' 1930's home interior while keeping in mind the fact that we're now in 1957," says Dyas. Working with set decorator Larry Dias, Dyas sought to create a home that would both reflect Indy's personal style and interests and convey to the audience a real sense of passage of time since the last film. "We filled his living room and study area with beautiful & intriguing archaeological artifacts, objects that Indy has collected over the years during some of his other faraway adventures."

Dyas's team also created several exterior sets at Universal Studios, including the dangerous town where Indy and Mutt land on the first leg of their journey; and a massive, nearly 80-foot-tall, structure that's part of the temple seen in the film's climax.

A disappearing "stone" staircase built around a 35-foot cylinder went up on a soundstage on the other side of Los Angeles, at Sony Studios, formerly the legendary MGM backlot. The task of creating practical stairs that would retract as our heroes swiftly make their way down, fell to special effects coordinator Dan Sudick. (As opposed to the visual-effects work of Industrial Light & Magic, "special effects" refers to practical effects created on set.)

Sudick had handled special effects on Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" and the director was so impressed with his work, he invited him back. "I walked onto the set and it was one of the most exciting things I have seen since I walked onto Joe Alves' set on 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' in that dirigible hanger in Mobile, Ala.," recalls Spielberg.

Across the road, Universal's Stage 27 housed another piece of the production puzzle -- a Peruvian cemetery set. It was a large, multi-level construction that would allow the characters to crawl amid dusty ruins and ancient artifacts under the treacherous eyes of the keepers of the cemetery and its secrets. Running from a ghoulish mob, Indy and Mutt make their way down to the deepest part of the pit that links up to another set built 20 miles away in Downey, California.

At Downey Studios, a number of sets were erected in a massive hangar that, at more than 600,000 square feet, once served as a home to the development of the Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle. Downey would serve as the home of several notable sequences in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" -- among them, a series of cave tunnels in which portions of the adventure unfold, and an experimental military-style bunker that's related to another location filmed in New Mexico.

A 1950s diner, inspired by the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks, was built on Paramount's sprawling backlot, augmenting scenes filmed in Connecticut.

Of all the sets, one stood out as being of particular interest to longtime fans of the Indiana Jones movies: the warehouse. Twenty-seven years ago, it was created with the help of a detailed matte painting and great camera trickery, but in "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," Spielberg wanted to bring to life his matte painting. "I still remember watching that last scene from 'Raiders of the Lost Ark, as a kid," says Dyas, "and wondering how they did it. Little did I know that one day I'd be having real conversations with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas about it, it was very exciting to try and capture the spirit of that scene from the very first Indiana Jones film."

On the Warner Bros. lot, the production took over the massive interior of Stage 16 to build some of the most elaborate sets for the climax of the film.

"Guy had a tremendous challenge because we wanted to do all the sets for real," says Marshall. "He had to build sets that looked ancient, had history behind them, were scary and foreboding -- and then had to put them on stages all around Los Angeles. We couldn't do the whole movie on one lot, like we did in London with the other three, so for the first time in my career, we were on five different studio lots, which may be some sort of record."

Despite their disparate locations, walking around on Dyas's sets gave Spielberg a familiar thrill. "I'd walk on each set and say, 'I'm on the set of an Indiana Jones movie -- how lucky am I that I get to direct another one of these?!'"

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