No One On The Set Of Indiana Jones Was Safe From The Pythons

After he and Marion find themselves locked in the temple, Indy has to contend with his biggest fear. This being 1981, there were no CGI snakes at the filmmakers’ disposal, which meant Harrison Ford and his colleagues had to interact with real cobras, pythons, and non-poisonous garter snakes for this scene. In yet another example of how dangerous filming “Raiders” proved to be, the entire crew kept antivenom handy while shooting. Thankfully for Ford and Allen, a snake handler for the film made a cameo by agreeing to perform the up-close-and-personal shots that required Allen’s character to stand among the reptiles.

Still, it wasn’t exactly the most safety conscious shoot. As Spielberg recalled during a 1981 appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show”:

“A lot of them were garter snakes but a lot of them were deadly snakes. The Cobras we got from India and we got the Boa Constrictors I’m not sure from where, and the pythons came in. We had many snake Wranglers in the film, we had four of them. They were always being bitten by everything but Cobras, of course, because that’s deadly. But the pythons were going after everybody.”

The director went on to confirm that the shots of snakes biting people were very much real, adding:

“When something bites and snaps and grabs hold of the character that’s a Python and those are real teeth and that’s a real actor going, ‘Why am I here and why did I make this movie?'”