![]() "I’ve gone on this journey with her," she says of Marion. Now that time has passed, and Allen has had a number of years to pursue the subjects she wants, she can look back on Raiders with great fondness. Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty ImagesĪnd learn she did. "My main relationship with Harrison at the time was just learning." But I really felt like I got to learn a lot from him," she says, adding that Ford had much more experience on a highly technical set. "It’s taken a number of years for me to really kind of get to know Harrison. I don’t think anybody can meet the extraordinary way that he sees things." As for her leading man, Harrison Ford, Allen says he's still a bit of a mystery to her, alluding to the actor's famous sense of privacy. He’s very prepared but extremely improvisatory at the same time. "He has a visual imagination and visual clarity. "Spielberg is just an extraordinary director," she says, having worked with him twice now, on Raiders and the fourth movie in the franchise, 2008's Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Other than the unfortunate incident in the desert (the guy came back eventually), Allen says she loved working on the film. We sat there telling stories and sipping whiskey in the desert, not knowing whether this guy was going to come back or not." We climbed up onto the roof of the car and John pulled out of his luggage a bottle of whiskey. "The driver, who spoke hardly a word of English, got out, opened up the hood, started tinkering around for a bit and then disappeared into the night. "We got to the middle of the desert and the car broke down," Allen recalls. They were supposed to be driven overnight from one shooting location to another. The two were in Tunisia in the middle of the Sahara Desert shooting some scenes at the Well of Souls. One of the things I fought for in making the film was when there was a moment in which she might have tipped into the damsel in distress mode, I thought, 'no no no, let her grab a frying pan and knock somebody over the head with it.'"Īllen brings up an incident she experienced with John Rhys-Davies, who played Sallah in the movie. "Or at times, there were no choices that were written, she was just sort of along for the ride. But then, over the course of the script, there were some times when I felt I wanted to make more active choices," Allen says. "The script had this very strong character that we met initially. "Her old lover comes in and she cracks him in the jaw? I thought, 'Well I like this girl!'" she recalls.īut after that initial punch, Marion's heavy drinking, smoking, fighting, and bold moves were things that Allen had to fight to include. The actor was immediately taken with the character. Suddenly I had stuck my toe into the film world." After the movie debuted, Steven Spielberg saw Animal House, and sent Allen the script for Raiders. I just sent a picture and resume and got a call and went in and was offered this role. "There was a little three by five card on the wall. "I got Animal House just by chance," Allen says. As a student of counter-culture theatrical icons like Jerzy Grotowski and Lee Strasburg, she honed her skills in New York before essentially making a 180-degree turn by taking the part of Katy in a 1978 college comedy classic. I played that role, and now I’d like to play something completely different."īefore getting the role of Marion, Allen was a member of an experimental theater troupe for a number of years. Says the actor now, "I spent a few years trying to shake Marion off of me. Instead, Allen wanted to develop her craft, continue working in theater, and pursue more creative outlets. But that wasn’t very interesting to me," she says. "It’s one of those things that, when you do something successfully, there’s an awful lot of people who just want you to do it again and again and again. A huge box office success, the film catapulted Allen to a fame she says she wasn't quite ready for. ![]() "I spent a good number of years running from that film, in a sense," she says, speaking to Bustle for the 35th anniversary of Raiders. But there was a time when Allen tried to escape Marion's legacy, and though she tells Bustle that Raiders is now a pleasant memory for her, and a classic film, there was a time when she wanted nothing to do with it. Marion is a legend, and for strong, independent gals like myself who now slam their glasses down on the bar upside down in tribute, Marion is the co-hero of Raiders. She owns a bar in which she has a shot drinking contest against a man three times her size and wins. She drinks, she fights, and she fires guns. Marion gets captured a few times, but she takes action. A fierce character who's become a feminist icon, Ravenwood went toe to toe with Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones and permeated the minds of little girls everywhere, including myself. Karen Allen's Raiders of the Lost Ark heroine Marion Ravenwood is one for the history books. ![]()
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