The Harrison Ford movie that changed Ti West’s life
Best known for his recent work with Mia Goth, Ti West is one of horror’s most revered auteurs. He broke out in 2009 with two features, The House Of The Devil and Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. Since then, West has spearheaded a new brand of psychological slasher horror with his A24 films X and Pearl, shot back to back in 2022. Here, the director discusses the monumental impact of Harrison Ford on his own creative vision.
When West sat down with Rotten Tomatoes in 2014, he was still reeling from the success of 2011’s The Innkeepers, which he followed up with a modestly-reviewed hippie horror called The Sacrement, focusing on the Jonestown Massacre of 1978. Asked to name his favourite films, the rising director was quick to select Steven Spielberg’s 1984 action adventure, Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom, the second instalment of the original Indiana Jones trilogy.
“When I was a kid I was obsessed with Raiders of the Lost Ark,” West explained. “It was, like, my favourite movie. As soon as I saw it I was like, ‘This movie is amazing.’ I was so obsessed with it, and my parents… I don’t know if they knew there was Temple of Doom or if they just didn’t want me to see it because it was a little, like, edgier. Indiana Jones was my life. And then I remember at school one time someone said, ‘Oh, what about the other movie?’
Shocked and enthralled by the idea of another Jones movie, West track down a video copy of The Temple of Doom and has been a devoted fan ever since. “What’s really amazing about that movie is it totally defies genre constraints,” he said. “That movie is totally bonkers and totally sincere. It doesn’t really fit into any genre category.”
For West, the brilliance of Temple of Doom is its ability to balance relatable, grounded characters with “fantastical” subject matter. “It just seemed like this movie is so great, so any movie could be, like anything is possible,” he said. “Because in this movie, people’s hearts are getting ripped out, and they’re closing up and then they’re still alive, and children are being enslaved by these sort of like ancient Indian mystical people, and they’re trying to find these stones that, put together, have powers, and there’s famine in the village, and they jump out of a plane on a raft, and everything is so turned up in that movie that it just — all the way down to the mine car race — it’s like one of the most awe-inspiring action or adventure movies I’ve ever seen. Yet it’s still totally grounded in the world of, like, this relatable character.”
“I think that movie shows that a lot of other movies aren’t trying hard enough,” West concluded. “Because, even the monkey brains part, it’s just such a memorable movie, it’s so bonkers, and yet it never feels like a joke, it always feels sincere. That to me was like, wow, you can do all these really fantastical elements in movies and you can still take them seriously and it works.”
