Before he visits Chattanooga to introduce “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation,” the shot-for-shot remake of the first Indiana Jones film that he directed as a teenager, Eric Zala chatted with Chattanooga Times Free Press entertainment reporter Casey Phillips about what kept him going through the seven-year shoot, the dangers of using kids as cast members and the Guinness World Record he’s gunning for.
Q: How old were you when you first saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark?”
A: It had come out billed as “From the Makers of ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars,'” and I wanted to see it but I didn’t have huge expectations. I went to see it at a local theater, and by the time the boulder scene happened, it just split my brain open. I didn’t know movies could do that, in terms of being so thrilling and captivating. That made it stand out as a really singular movie experience. That’s how I came to know “Raiders,” and I loved it.
That’s why later on in the school year, when I saw this kid on the bus – on this hour-long bus ride I had to take every day to school – he had a “Raiders of the Lost Ark” comic book, so I asked to borrow it. That kid was Chris [Strompolos]. That’s how the friendship started and how, later on, when Chris got the idea to remake “Raiders” starring kids, he gave me a call. He knew I was a “Raiders” fan and knew I had done a class project and mistakenly thought I knew something about filmmaking. That lead to the fateful call in the summer of ’82 when he said, “I’m doing a shot-for-shot remake of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ Do you wanna help?” I imagined all the sets were built and the roles were cast and that I’d wander on and help. Little did I know that all Chris had done was to buy the script from Walden’s Books and cast himself as Indiana Jones, as any good producer will do. [Laughs.]
But we got together and collectively shared the thrill of the idea, although our motivations were somewhat different. For Chris, he wanted to be Indiana Jones, and as the director, I thought, “What would a shot-for-shot remake of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ starring kids look like?” There was only one way to find out.
So we began it, having no idea what we were getting into. Thank god, because if we’d known it was going to take seven years, we would have been scared to death. [Laughs.]
Q: Was your fascination with “Raiders” just being an 11-year-old? That’s sort of the perfect age for that film to have hit you. Do you think you’d have had the same reaction if you saw it today at – what age are you?
A: I just turned 46.
Q: So do you think it was a case of the movie hitting you at the right time?
A: Yeah, no question, when you’re at that age, for a lot of reasons. I try to stay in touch with my inner child. I don’t fool myself into thinking it’s identical to what it was back then, but I try to keep that. Of course, never having experienced anything like that before in films was a standout thing. I love movies, but “Raiders” is the only film that seems like it would be fun to do, even now, having done it.
I think it would be different now. It was a perfect storm, in a good way, of different things intersecting. It was the right time. Chris was 11, and I was 12, and home video – that is Betamax camcorders – had just become available commercially to the public, so the technology was now within reach of the home consumer. “Raiders” wasn’t out on video yet, but it would be in a couple of years. Also, the endless summers and relatively unsupervised childhoods of the ’80s that we enjoyed back then, that freedom. All those things played into the film happening.
Q: That’s true. The digital helicopter parenting of the 2010s would make a project this ambitious hugely unlikely.
A: Yeah, yeah. As a parent myself, I struggle not to helicopter parent. It’s all too easy to do, but I aspire to give my kids the same latitude and freedom that I enjoy.
Q: What did you use as a reference? Back then, home video was not as common as it was today. Did you have a copy of “Raiders?” On what medium?
A: It was about ’84. It came out on Laserdisc. We were like, “Ooooooh, we get to watch it.” At that point, I spent a summer drawing over 600 storyboards from memory using various memory jogs – such as every photo we could get our hands on. We snuck in an audiotape cassette recorder when “Raiders” was re-released in theaters in the summer of ’82.
Q: Even with those jogs to help you, your memory must have been amazing to even consider taking on such an ambitious project. How many times did you ultimately see it in theaters?
A: We saw it about three times in the theater, but in the last two, we were aware we were doing “Raiders” so I tried as much as possible to burn each shot into my memory cells. Also helping me was that, yeah, I have a good memory, but the recording we had – though a flawed one hampered with audience cheers and applause – was still a really, really good memory jog in terms of being able to queue it up, close my eyes and have that bringing me back to remember those shots in my minds eye. That was bolstered by all the photographs we could get our hands on. Every day, I was drawing storyboards for the college scene and finding all the photos for Indy’s classroom and queue it up. That was ultimately how we did it.
I was really pleased. For the most part, it’s a pretty faithful rendering. There are a couple of compositions here and there that are flipped, but for the most part, it’s a faithful rendering.
Q: So Chris played Indiana. Was everyone pulling double duty as crew members in addition to appearing on camera?
A: Chris played Indy and is billed as producer. I was director and also played Belloq. Those were the two double-duty ones, mainly. I’m more of a behind-the-camera guy, but the main reason I was Belloq was because I knew I wasn’t going to flake, like a neighborhood kid.
That was a major casting risk at that age – simple flakeage. Probably my brother, Kurt, did more roles than anybody. Any time a neighborhood kid did flake, guess who got pressed into service? The drinking game is to take a shot any time you see Kurt Zala in the credits at the end. [Laughs.]
Jason Lamb, the third “Raiders” guy was predominantly the camera man and special effects, but you’ll see him occasionally throughout our film playing an extra part – a German soldier here, an Arab extra there and also Imam, the Arabian cleric who discerns the runes on the medallion.
There is lots of that. All in all, looking at the end credits, it included about 60 neighborhood kids, with a huge spectrum of commitment and participation. There were kids who played innumerable extra roles to kids who showed up once and figured, ‘No, this isn’t fun’ and never showed up again and everything in between.
Q: Was this fun to do, or once you were in the middle of it, did you simply feel compelled to carry on with it?
A: Yeah, it was fun, but every summer, there was no question. It was kind of like summer camp. It’s like, “It’s June. It’s time to do ‘Raiders.'” We didn’t really question it.
It was fun, but it was also challenging. Sometimes, we were sorely tempted to give up. It was never supposed to take that long. Sometimes, it was tough to get through the naysaying. Certain kids helped but were like, “We’re never going to finish this thing, and if we do, no one is going to watch it.” For all I knew, they were right, but you just have to push through those moments and try to get through.
There were times when Chris was pretty fed up or it would rain. Plenty of frustrations abound. Filmmaking, it has been reflected, is the process of solving one problem after another until, finally, you’re done.
But we pushed through, and as a result, that’s one of the best bits of advice that we give to kids following screenings, “Don’t give up and always finish.” Had we given in to that temptation to just chuck in the towel, this would have just been a box of video tapes in someone’s basement and nobody would ever know about it, and we wouldn’t have had an amazing adventure showing it around the world.
Q: What was the carrot for you? What got you through those moments of frustration?
A: One difference between Chris’s and my personality is that he’s a starter and I’m a finisher. I wouldn’t have had the initiative to suggest we do this project, but once we started, I was sort of the disciplinarian of the group in that I kept saying, “We gotta finish this thing.”
What lit the fire was – I don’t know – I guess it doesn’t count for anything if we don’t complete it. We’d come this far. It was toughest for me, probably two years in, when we finally got to shooting. The first year, all we did was storyboards and pre-production. Year two, we finally started shooting, and it looked terrible. Do you quit at that point, or do you push on? Thankfully, we pushed on.
I don’t know, I’m just kind of driven to complete things. It bothers me terribly if it’s not done. It would have seemed to have been a waste to not finish. I really wanted to see, “What would this movie look like?” That, in and of itself, lit a lot of the fire in my belly those seven years.
Q: That being said, you didn’t finish. You didn’t shoot the fist-fight sequence on top of the plane. Was that just hanging over your heads all those years?
A: It was about 25 years, yeah. We finished but but not, you know? We had cut the scene out, realizing that it was the only scene that was extraneous, but yeah, on some level, even though we “finished,” it nagged at me. I know this subconsciously because I had recurring dreams for about five years after we finished in 1989 that we were filming the airplane scene somewhere. On some level, it bugged me. Eventually, the dreams stopped after five years.
That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to pick up the mantle again in what I think might be the Guinness World Record for the longest time between pick up shots in a movie. I haven’t looked it up, but it seems like we might have that record.
When doing Q&As after the film was discovered by accident, people would say, “So what about the airplane scene?” We would explain that it was out of our reach back then – I mean, how are you going to get a plane and blow it up? – but how “Hey, we should get the band back together again and do this right after all this time. Ha ha. Think anybody would notice the continuity gap?”
In seeing the film, there are already continuity gaps abounding from shooting out of sequence over many, many years as kids. We embraced that continuity chasm, and in fact, we play it up.
When Indy pushes his way out of the well exit in my mom’s basement at age 16 and emerges on the other side as a 44-year-old, in viewing it with audiences, someone likened it to the similar transition in “The Wizard of Oz” [from black and white to color]. You go from this jittery Betamax world to high-definition video with 5.1 surround sound. It’s almost like we passed into a wormhole entering a dimension where we were finally got to do it as we always wanted to but weren’t able to as kids. Finishing and scratching the itch of finally doing it right in such a challenging scene was really gratifying and satisfying after all these years.
Q: Where and when was the airplane scene finally filmed?
A: That was shot in June 2014. We pulled the scene together in a very short period of time, like six months or so. It was mostly done remotely. We had an advantage, among other things, of meeting people along the years since we finished who said they wanted to work with us or who knew about the “Raiders” film and wanted to help make the dream come real.
We did a Kickstarter campaign in February 2014 and raised $50,000. Then, we were in a mad race to get it done in this brief window that was dictated by my work. That was the only time I could fly down to work on it. It was shot in Vancleave, Miss., in this very remote dirt pit that had no roads and running water and there were bears in the woods.
Q: How did it feel to finally wrap up shooting for the sequence and to be able to say, finally, that you’d accomplished what you set out to do?
A: When we finished? Oh, I was elated. Looking at the final playback shot – we were really down to the wire – I had to finish by 4 o’clock that day to catch the last flight out of Gulfport to make it back in time to get to work at 8 a.m. and not be fired. It was very tough to make that.
The last day was an aggressive list of shots. The crew actually eschewed having lunch to push on through. I didn’t want to ask them, but they insisted. I remain so grateful for all of team “Raiders” who pushed through. We finally got it.
The last scene was one of those awkward shots where I have to direct myself as Belloq. I’m standing there in the dirt in my white suit trying not to get it dirty. When we finished, I threw my hat up in the air, did a quick round of hugs and goodbyes and went to my wife, who drove me to the airport. When I settled into my airplane seat still dressed as Belloq, I called Chris and said, “We finally did it. We finally finished.”
There was still a year of post production to get it finished, but we had it in the can. I had dreams of a different sort after this that I had forgotten a shot, that a sheet had blown out of my director’s notebook without my realizing it, but nope, thank god, they were all there.
Q: How much did the shot extend the run time of the remake? How does your run time compare with the theatrical version?
A: It was about five and a half minutes, bringing it to 105 minutes. Ours clocks in about 11 minutes shorter than the original. Some of our shots during those early ’80s years lasted shorter than the original. That’s my best hunch. I know our credit sequence runs longer. [Laughs.] It might have had something to do with that.
Q: As a teen, did you only work on the remake during the summer? Was it on the backburner during the rest of the year?
A: Oh yeah, summer was shooting exclusively, but during the school year, we did lots of preparation. Chris was away in a boarding school on Long Island, and I was in Mississippi, but I would sketch on the back of homework assignments sets that I planned to build in my mom’s basement, which served as our improvised sound stage, this sprawling basement with extra rooms off it. This being the ’80s, we were old school in our correspondence. I remember buying the scimitar for the swordsman in a store at the mall and being so elated that I traced it out and sent it to Chris. I sent polaroids of the progress on sets in the basement and that sort of thing.
Q: That movie is full of a lot of action set pieces, some of them fairly pyrotechnic or just outright life-threatening. Which ones were the hardest or most dangerous to reproduce?
A: I’d say probably the truck scene. Back in the day, that was probably the most challenging. It was a 76-shot sequence shot from multiple moving vehicles that may or may not have been driven by kids with their driver’s permit at the time. That’s probably the most complex to shoot.
Logistically, the hardest to shoot was the Tanis dig. We had to have a caravan of vehicles bringing about 20 kids in Arab costumes and German soldier outfits to a different mud pit back in the ’80s. We shot a lot over two days, which is all we had there. Those would be the main contenders for most difficult, I’d say.
Q: What were your parents saying all those years? Were they supportive? Were they aware what was going on?
A: My parents divorced about a year into it. My dad thought my drawing all the storyboards was kind of silly, I think. My mom, as well as Chris’s mom, was very emotionally supportive, although she said that financially we were on our own.
This couldn’t have been done without mom power. They were good enough to drive us to shooting locations before we had our driver’s permits, initially, although, by the end of it, we were able to drive ourselves. My mom allowed me to set up a tent in the living room for a year and tolerated it. It’s a high-water mark of patience in parenting that I aspire to myself.
But yeah, they were there and thankfully didn’t know “Raiders” as well as we did. Otherwise, when we said, “We’re going to go shoot the bar scene,” they might have had more to say than just, “OK, well, go have fun.” [Laughs.]
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.