Raiders of the Lost Ark

Raiders of the Lost Ark, also known as Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a film released by Paramount Pictures in 1981. Directed by Steven Spielberg, it is a fantasy adventure and the first released, though the twenty-fourth, chronologically, in a series of film and TV productions about the adventures of the heroic fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones.

Trivia

• In the classroom scene near the beginning of the film, a male student leaves an apple for Professor Indiana Jones among the crowd of adoring female students.
• The gag where Indiana Jones shoots the sword-wielding assassin in the market was improvised on the set. Harrison Ford had been suffering from dysentery and exhaustion due to the extreme heat of Tunisia during filming. As originally planned, the scene was elaborately choreographed, with Indy facing the expert swordsman and trying to defeat him with just his whip. Some footage of the planned fight was shot (and was seen in at least one of the movie's trailers) but the filming was proving to be very tedious, and at some point Ford had had enough. It has been widely reported that he said to Spielberg, "Why don't we just shoot the fucker?" Spielberg liked the idea, scrapped the rest of the fight scene, and filmed the brief sequence of the shooting that appears in the movie.
• The scene in which Jones threatens Belloq with an RPG was shot in the exact same Tunisian canyon where George Lucas shot a scene involving Tusken Raiders attacking Luke Skywalker in his 1977 Star Wars.
• When Belloq is negotiating with the RPG-totting Indy, you can see a fly go into actor Paul Freeman's mouth. (Actually, the fly just walks across the camera's eye for a few seconds).
• Pat Roach, the actor who played the large mechanic with whom Indy brawls in the famous plane sequence was seen as such a formidable physical opponent for Jones that he returned in both The Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade in similar roles as huge, burly fistfighters.
• In the scene where Indiana Jones is lifting the Ark of the Covenent out of its holding place in the Well of Souls, one of the hieroglyphs is meant to resemble Star Wars characters C-3PO and R2-D2.