Thuggee life! Why Temple of Doom was the darkest Indiana Jones ever
Child slaves, human sacrifice and accusations of racism that saw it banned in India… George Lucas blamed his divorce for the harrowing turn taken by Harrison Ford’s buccaneering archaeologist. Yet 40 years on, the film remains as thrilling as ever
WILLARD Huyck remembers a panicked phone call from a studio executive about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Huyck and his late wife, Gloria Katz, had written the film – a follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark – for the producerdirector team of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
“I got a call from the head of the studio, Michael Eisner,” recalls Huyck. “He said, ‘You’ve got to talk to George and Steve! They won’t listen to me! This film is so violent! I’m getting calls from exhibitors. Kids are p***ing in the seats!’” But, as Huyck told Esiner: “That’s the whole idea. It’s meant to be a scary movie!”
Indeed, Indiana Jones’s second big-screen adventure – which whip-cracked its way into cinemas 40 years ago, on May 23, 1984 – was darker by design.
In the story, Indy journeys to a palace in India, where he discovers a Thuggee cult that performs human sacrifice and keeps a small army of child slaves.
Within minutes, our hero has skewered a henchman to death with a flaming kebab. Later, the film’s villain – a Thuggee high priest who wears a buffalo skull with a shrunken head adornment – pulls the still-beating heart out of a victim’s chest before plunging the poor chap into a fiery pit.
George Lucas, the creative force behind both Indiana Jones and Star Wars, blamed the darkness of Temple of Doom on his personal problems. “I was going through a divorce at the time and I wasn’t in a good mood,” Lucas later admitted to a behind-thescenes documentary.
Between the censor-troubling violence and accusations of racism – Indian baddies eating chilled monkey brains and practising voodoo – Temple of Doom was Indiana Jones’s most controversial chapter. Even Spielberg himself denounced it as “too dark, too subterranean and much too horrific”. But for the generation who lapped up Temple of Doom via TV repeats and VHS, it’s the film that best captured the sheer thrill of Indiana Jones.And Indy himself – Harrison Ford – was as rugged and charismatic as any leading man.
A second Indy film had been inevitable. Spielberg’s Jaws is credited with creating the summer blockbuster but it was the first Indiana Jones adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark – released in June 1981 – that created the formula.
Another Raiders would be like one of Indy’s unearthed ancient treasures – box office gold there for the taking.
Spielberg, then at the peak of his blockbuster powers, had limited availability. They needed a script quickly, so Lucas turned to Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who had worked on the scripts for Lucas’s 1973 breakthrough film, American Graffiti, and the original Star Wars in 1977. Despite the dark cloud hanging over Lucas during Temple of Doom, Huyck insists the story sessions with Lucas and Spielberg were anything but dark. “No, we were just having fun,” he says. “The working situation was unbelievable. We were sitting around a swimming pool at George’s house with him and Steven, doing whatever we wanted – coming up with whatever we thought was funny, or a lark. Like ripping somebody’s heart out!”
At one stage, Lucas toyed with sending Indy to a ghostly castle in Scotland for his second film, an idea that still haunts the franchise as one of the great unmade adventures – somehow adding to the Indiana Jones myth. Instead, the story begins when Indy stumbles across a village in India. He learns that evildoers from nearby Pankot Palace – the home of a 13-year-old Maharaja – have stolen the village’s sacred stones and, more disturbingly, enslaved its children. Spielberg’s biographer, Joseph McBride, suggested the theme of rescuing children may have been inspired by recent trauma in Spielberg’s life: the deaths of an adult and two child actors in a stunt gone wrong on the set of 1983 The Twilight Zone movie, which Spielberg produced and co-directed.
TEMPLE of Doom – at one point called Temple of Death – foreshadowed Lucas’s later Star Wars films. It is in fact a prequel, set a year before the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It opens with a blistering 20 minutes: a big musical number – a Mandarin version of Anything Goes – in a Shanghai nightclub, followed by a delicious fight with Chinese gangsters.
Indy then jumps out of a plane on an inflatable dinghy, which races down a mountain, flies off a 100ft waterfall and lands in breakneck rapids. “The first 15 minutes are pure matinee heaven,” says actor Roshan Seth, who plays the Pankot prime minister. “Sheer, unmitigated matinee delight.” The dinghy sequence was one of several set
‘Spielberg, then at his blockbuster peak, had limited availability. They needed a script fast’
pieces originally conceived for Raiders of the Lost Ark but shelved for timing reasons. Temple of Doom’s rollercoaster-like mine cart chase – created by using miniatures and an actual rollercoaster constructed at London’s Elstree Studios – was also carried over from the earlier film.
This time around, however, Indy has a 12-year-old sidekick, Short Round, Vietnamese-born ChineseAmerican actor Ke Huy Quan, and reluctant love interest Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw). Quan was a firsttime child actor and spoke limited English. He didn’t even want to audition. He’d accompanied his brother to a casting call at their school and caught Spielberg’s attention – though Quan had no idea who Spielberg was.
Quan went on to appear in the Goonies then took a 19-year break from acting, before returning to the big screen in Finding ’Ohana followed by the critically acclaimed Everything Everywhere All at Once, for which he won an Oscar. Kate Capshaw, who later married Spielberg, considered herself to be a more serious actress when she took the role of Indy’s damsel in distress.
She was taken aback by criticism that the Willie character was sexist. “The screeching dumb blonde,” jokes Roshan Seth. “She did nothing but screech as far as I can remember.” Willie is put through the wringer: tormented by jungle animals, nearly sacrificed and covered in flesh-creeping bugs. Capshaw had to take a relaxant to deal with the creatures being dropped all over her.
Spielberg and Lucas intended to shoot Temple of Doom in India but the Indian government was unhappy with the script and wanted changes. Huyck – a collector of Indian art at the time – wasn’t surprised. When production switched to Sri Lanka instead, Huyck told them: “I warned you!”
The film was initially banned in India and sparked protests in Seattle over the portrayal of Indians. It was later released on video. Particularly contentious was the Thuggee villains. Led by terrifying priest Mola Ram, played by the late Amrish Puri, they dwelt in the bowels of the palace – the Temple of Doom itself – where they practised black magic and worked child slaves to the bone. Puri was criticised by the Indian press for his role.
Roshan Seth, a British-Indian actor, doesn’t recall much flak for his own role as a prime minister who partakes in voodoo. “No, no, no,” he says today. “A lot of people loved it.”
Huyck admits that they had immense fun writing the script but were perhaps “not as aware” when creating some scenes and characters – elements criticised as racist stereotypes. “We weren’t as woke as people are now,” he says.
In an often-cited scene, Indy and the gang are welcomed to the palace with an exotic banquet: a python stuffed with live eels, crunchy beetle appetisers, eyeball soup and monkey brains. “That was Steven saying, ‘I want to do the grossest meal you can imagine,’” says Huyck. Though he also admits: “That offended a lot of people.” According to Seth, the scene was intended to be a joke on the Westerners – but the joke was lost. “My character was supposed to be an Oxford-educated Indian who was snide, wicked, sharp and crafty,” says Seth. “He was determined to teach Westerners who think that Indians are savages a lesson they’d never forget. The dinner party was supposed to be a joke – it was a joke that backfired.”
LUCAS called it “goofy ’30s humour”. Certainly, Temple of Doom knowingly trades on some outdated colonial stereotypes – part of Indy’s homage to old-time adventures. Lucas had originally based Indiana Jones on the kind of cliffhanger serials he loved as a child. And Temple of Doom relishes the cliffhanger clichés: secret passageways, boobytrapped rooms, and a rope bridge that leaves heroes and villains dangling above a river filled with crocodiles – a literal cliffhanger.The action took its toll on Harrison Ford, who was injured during a fight scene and had to undergo back surgery. Vic Armstrong stood in while he recovered.
Forty years on, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom has lost little of its darker, more sinister edge. Though in true Indy style, it’s also very funny.
See the fight scene in which a Thuggee henchman (played by British wrestler Pat Roach) is literally flattened in a rock crusher – grisly but hilarious.
The Motion Picture Association of America was alarmed and proposed a potential R-rating, which would have stopped anyone under the age of 17 seeing it. Spielberg used his industry sway to get the film passed as PG.
In the UK, the BBFC insisted on more than a minute’s worth of cuts, including – unsurprisingly – the heart tearing-out scene.
The film wasn’t available uncut in this country until 2012. Viewers who remember the film from old television repeats and VHS may be shocked at quite how graphic the heart scene is.
But for the kids who grew up on Temple of Doom that’s the fun of it: pulsing disembodied hearts, squashed-to-death baddies and monkey brains.
Despite the criticisms, Temple of Doom was a blockbuster hit – the third biggest film worldwide in 1984. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the final film in the original trilogy, arrived in 1989.
Dropping the romanticism of Raiders of the Lost Ark and without the sentimentality of Last Crusade, Temple of Doom is the Indiana Jones concept in its purest form.
“I have heard people say that they think Temple of Doom is the best of the lot,” says Seth.
There’s no introduction or heartfelt goodbye needed – it’s just a rollicking action spectacle.
“It was violent,” says Huyck, “but it was also with a wink. It wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.”