“It was a measure of Spielberg’s emotional distance from Raiders of the Lost Ark that he so willingly surrendered his independence to work as an employee of Lucas. Spielberg’s pragmatic decision to prove that he could toe the budgetary line by turning out a piece of unabashed commercial entertainment was only possible, however, because of the mutual respect he and Lucas shared. “I generally let Steven do whatever he wants to do,” Lucas said. “I’m very sensitive to the director and what his problems are because I’ve been a director. And Steven takes suggestions. I mean, I offer lots of suggestions and he takes some of them and some he doesn’t take…. Steven does a great deal of homework when he goes into a picture. He’s very organized.”
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“Lucas could say no to Spielberg, and Spielberg, humbled by his experiences on 1941, would listen. When they disagreed, Lucas would say, “Well, it’s your movie. If the audience doesn’t like it, they’re going to blame you.” Giving in, Spielberg would joke, “Okay, but I’m going to tell them that you made me do it.”
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“Raiders officially was scheduled for eighty-five days of shooting, but Lucas and Spielberg had a secret plan to make it in only seventy-three days. Kazanjian explains that this was done “to challenge Steven to do it on schedule and budget” and to minimize studio interference: “There are times when you’re over a day, but you know you can pick it up somewhere, and the pressure is so great from the studio. George didn’t want that. George had been successful in being able to make his pictures without studios; that was one of the reasons why Raiders and Star Wars were [based] in Europe, because they were farther away from studio control. [Spielberg’s] taste was richer in the shooting than it had been in preparation, but if Steven wanted something else, we took it from someplace else.”
I said to George, ‘It just is too big. We can’t build this thing. It’s going to cost about a million dollars, and we need to make it smaller. We need to do something.’ I had already gone to Steven on that and was vetoed. So I went to George, and George walked into this conference room we were in, I’ll never forget it, and said [sotto voce], ‘OK, listen to what I’m going to do.’ There was the model. He said, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ He picked up the model of the Flying Wing, like he didn’t know that this is the Flying Wing. It had four engines, two on each side. He said, ‘Terrific’—George always talks in short sentences—‘It’s great. Looks super.’ And he broke the ends of the two wings off, taking two of the motors away. He said, ‘How much money do we save if it’s only this big?’”
With that one gesture, they saved $250,000. The film was completed just under its final budget figure of $20.4 million ($400,000 had been added after Harrison Ford was cast.”