"DayPlayer"
1998

Winging It With Flyboy Harrison Ford on the Set of "Six Days, Seven Nights"

VAN NUYS, CALIF.-It's a bright October morning, and the two gigantic hangars on what was until recently a National Guard outpost in this San Fernando Valley town are a telling symbol of the sweeping changes that have taken place locally in the past decade. Since at least the 1930s, Southern California has been a center for world aerospace and weapons production-a manufacturing lead it still holds, if more tenuously than it did once. The Cold War is long over, America is without a rival superpower worthy of the name, and there are fewer women and men in uniform and less competition for extravagances like military landing strips and the planes housed on them than at any time in the past 50 years.

The regional economy is roaring anyway, and the swarm of activity surrounding the sprawling Guard installation is a clear demonstration of one reason why. The movie industry, for all the flack it takes as a wasteful, money-mad and ego-driven enterprise with crummy profit margins, is still Southern California's ace in any economic hole. The action surrounding this vestigial landing site offers living proof: An abandoned space that might be a desolate white elephant in another community is alive and busy, as director Ivan Reitman and actors Harrison Ford and Anne Heche finish up some final shooting on the romantic comedy/adventure flick "Six Days, Seven Nights."

Fittingly, this morning's filming on the otherwise empty airbase involves what could be termed the movie's "mechanical co-star": the small hydroplane Ford's freewheeling pilot character uses to take Heche's uptight urban businesswoman island-hopping after she charters his services and they get driven down in a storm. The character math is classic, collision-of-opposites stuff: Ford, the Gablesque but secretly vulnerable adventurer, Heche the fast-talking city girl with a similarly neurotic fiance ("Friends" star David Schwimmer) waiting in the wings. Today is "blue screen" day-a special shoot dedicated to capturing images of a modified, lightweight, twin-engine aircraft against a huge blue backdrop, with footage filmed off the back of a stunt plane to be superimposed later.

The scheduled action is of Heche crash-landing the vehicle on water while an injured Ford slumps unconscious against its steering wheel. Ford and Heche will be the only actors on camera, but to get the moment right takes a small army. A crew of about 50 hums busily around an array of electric fans, water cannons and a gigantic motion-simulating crane called a gimble on which the full-size plane has been mounted. The gimble operator has perhaps the most frightening task: Seated in front of a control panel resembling the plane's dashboard, he must maneuver the suspended vehicle and its two high-priced stars through a believable series of swoops and nosedives. His unenviable responsibility is to simulate physical jeopardy, without actually creating any.

As Ford and Heche come onto the set, the difference in their physical rhythms speaks volumes. Heche is a bundle of ecstatic nervous energy, and it's easy to conjecture why. "Six Days, Seven Nights" is characterized about town as something of a "career-maker" for Heche, and her heightened exuberance suggests it's a viewpoint she may share. Ford, the 20-year veteran, is more low-key and assured. He ambles about in the margins, munching a piece of fruit, waiting patiently to be told when to climb a long and narrow metal stairway that will place him at the dangling plane's controls.

On take one, a water cannon is fired prematurely. At a moment when Ford and Heche are supposedly well above the waterline, their plane is drenched in ocean spray.

The plane's fuselage is laboriously dried, the stars stay at their post, and 20 long minutes slowly crawl by. Machines are reset and calibrated. Reitman and the technicians improvise a series of hand signals to ensure the mechanical cues will match the footage on Reitman's video monitor, and everyone is ready for another go.

On take two, the unforeseen happens. The gimble operator misreads Reitman's hand gestures, sending the aircraft into a steep nosedive just as Heche pulls back on the wheel and snaps into an upright position. Her head hits the cockpit glass with a thump audible even above the sound of the production machinery, and everything grinds to a halt.

Crew members look at each other as Heche is quickly led down from the plane, the actress clutching her skull in both hands. The faces of the assembled movie-making veterans suddenly look like those of bewildered children, whose mother has just inexplicably taken ill.

Ford goes to Heche, solicitous, says something soft and encouraging. Reitman, an experienced pro, stays calm and focused as he moves over to his female lead's side. "I'm all right!" Heche shouts after a moment, forcing a smile and waving with one hand while rubbing her head with the other.

The technicians give Heche a round of applause, and Ford breaks into a smile.

Four additional takes and a lunch break later, Ford is seated in his air-conditioned trailer parked on hot asphalt about a hundred yards from the shoot while the "Six Days" crew prepares the next set-up. The morning's work is safely in the can, and a few additional glimpses of Ford's behavior on the set have continued to suggest the lack of pretense in his working methods.

He eats with the grips, camera and lighting teams-not, it should be noted, in the comparatively luxuriant private space that has been prepared for him. When he's not readying himself for a shot, anybody with a reasonable cause for approaching him would appear to be allowed to do so; there's no evidence of the pecking order occasionally encountered in places where a star of the first magnitude is at work.

Ford even seems willing to suffer fools gladly, as when a vendor responsible for providing the production's planes approached him in "Six Days'" makeshift cafeteria and tried to hustle up a sale. Ford is a recently licensed and enthusiastic aviator, information this particular vendor had obviously uncovered. It was almost humorous to see one of the most famous and successful personalities on the planet subjected to the kind of pitch a door-to-door salesman might make to a housewife, but if Ford was in on the joke he gave no indication. The offer was politely, even graciously, turned aside.

It's difficult to draw sweeping conclusions about a man based on a morning in the margins of his company but, all in all, Ford would seem to be a relative democrat within the ranks of the Hollywood aristocracy. This workman- like mindset extends to his interaction with the press. In contrast to some performers, who engage in displays of forced chumminess, or else use interviews to demonstrate a philosophical or artistic depth that might or might not be apparent in their work, Ford is almost eerily grounded and pragmatic. Celebrity and its perquisites appear to hold little interest for him. It's the language of business, and the philosophy of the entrepreneur, that color even his most detailed comments about his craft.

"I see this as my business," Ford says when the observation is pointed out to him. "And I do believe that I have a responsibility to the people that I'm in business with to do what I can to help ensure the investment we've all made, both in time and effort. I truly understand the value of reaching the press through the kinds of opportunities that accrue to somebody in my position."

As simple and as matter of fact as that.

If his career is a business, then "Six Days, Seven Nights" is the latest model to emerge from Harrison Ford, Inc's. production line, and it marks a bit of a departure from his recent efforts. Two decades back, Ford's career was launched in the super-successful "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" sagas as a revolutionary kind of action hero-one as handy with a punchline as he was with a punch. After a brief flirtation with highbrow seriousness in the late 1980s via Roman Polanski's "Frantic" and two collaborations with director Peter Weir (the great policier "Witness" and the mis-begotten "Mosquito Coast"), Ford has, in the past decade, mostly settled in as a no-nonsense action star.

It's a type of work he seems both eminently suited to and overqualified for. His steady professionalism has served films like "Patriot Games," "The Fugitive" and last summer's runaway domestic smash "Air Force One" well, while his genuine acting talent, plus a certain middle-aged vulnerability that has crept into his work over time, has occasionally elevated what could have been routine exercises to levels of dramatic complexity rare for the contemporary action film.

Think of the subtle anguish of his playing in the scene in "Patriot Games" when Ford, as CIA analysand Jack Ryan, is called on to watch solarized satellite images of a government-sponsored massacre as the killings are actually happening. Think of every single moment of his performance in "The Fugitive." Where most American action leads content themselves with brandishing guns and outrunning explosions, Ford is one actor who, in even the most improbable contexts, finds a way to act.

"Six Days, Seven Nights" is hardly Ford's first excursion into comedy-by his reckoning, six of his 20-odd star parts have been in comedic roles. But his most recent forays into humor-director Sydney Pollack's "Sabrina" (1995) and Mike Nichols' "Working Girl," which was released a decade back-have been white-collar comedies of manners, as far removed from Ford's usually more adventurous screen persona as Tahiti is from Van Nuys. In "Six Days, Seven Nights" (which director Reitman describes as primarily an adventure film), Ford plays a raffish, soldier-of-fortune type-the first time he's taken on a role that could be compared to his signature Indiana Jones character in a context that didn't include a direct connection to "Star Wars" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark." In a sense, it could be argued that the film is both a step away from his biggest successes of the '90s and an overdue reversion to type.

"I was looking for a comedy," Ford says. "I found this script funny, and my discussions with Ivan suggested that we had the same ideas about it, and that was what led me to this role. On balance, I suppose I'm not well known for comedies, but I enjoy doing comedies. I always look for a change of pace from what I've been doing lately. That's a big consideration [for me], to try to find something different from what I've lately done."

Director Reitman and co-star Heche proved able collaborators. "It's obviously his forte, comedy," Ford says of Reitman. "He's got very good eyes, instinct, ears, for timing and the subtle distinctions. I came quite early to trust him." On the subject of Heche, Ford positively gushes: "Working with her has been a pure pleasure," he says. "She's fast, she's supple, she's distinct, and I think it's gonna be fun to watch."

As the discussion fans out into other topics, Ford offers a series of small surprises about his relationship to his career and his craft. There is his theory of comedic acting, for example, which is essentially that it is virtually identical to dramatic performance, with perhaps an added dimension of self-awareness in the presentation. For him, "comedy does seem to come out of character," he says, "rather than being imposed as a style. I think it's a question of creating a character that has both the limitations and the qualities that cause him to be more comic than that character might otherwise be in the same story told without comic intention. And then you do, of course, a certain amount of shtick to help make it clear that's what the intention is. I don't know that I can pronounce all the comedy rules, but I think I know it when I see it."

Of his virtually unparalleled two decades as a reigning boxoffice icon, he is almost dismissive. Reminded of his appearance at the 1994 NATO/ShoWest convention to receive the "Boxoffice Star of the Century" award, he has trouble remembering the details of the event. The speech he gave that evening was wry and humorous, and it played like a calculated attempt to defuse the rhetoric surrounding the award, whose hyperbolic title had a basis in fact. Factoring in the "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" features as well as his many additional hit films, Ford's movies have generated more boxoffice revenue than those of any other star in the history of cinema.

"It's obviously not the result of my singular efforts," he says flatly, "but the result of luck and a combination of circumstances that's netted me the relationships with Lucas and Spielberg and their talent and skill. So to be lauded for having made money is not exactly the keenest praise.

"Very few people, and I would count critics among them, seem to understand what a person does as an actor," he adds, "what the relationships are between the actor, the material, the producer, the director, the studio involved, what the actual business of being an actor is. And I'm not sure that there's any value in describing it in any detail, as it may in fact be unique in each case. But it's clear to me from reading that few people do actually understand how it all works."

Then there's Ford's relationship to "Star Wars," which would be ancient history if it weren't for the runaway success of George Lucas' 1997 reissuing of the trilogy, and the fact that Lucas is currently at work on three new installments, with an all-new cast. Generations of fans rushed out to moviehouses to relive the adventures of Skywalker, Solo and Leia on the bigscreen. Among them were Ford's wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison ("E.T."), and all of his children. Only one member of the Ford household sat out the rekindled "Star Wars" mania that gripped America in 1997: Harrison Ford.

"It was simply a matter of not wanting to see 20-year-old acting of mine," Ford says. "And that's really the only thing. I don't actually often look at old movies of mine. In fact, not just not often. I never look at old work."

Fair enough. But there might be more in the way of mixed emotions in Ford's attitude toward the character that made him a superstar than meets the eye. He forcefully characterizes his ability to avoid being typecast by the success of the "Star Wars" and "Raiders" franchises as "an effort of will." Asked if it's strange for him that the "Star Wars" universe he helped define has now moved on without him, he says, "No. Not at all," and then doesn't elaborate. And what if George Lucas should complete the three "Star Wars" prequels currently in the works and then move on to fulfill his sprawling plan for a final trilogy, supposedly to take place in the aftermath of "Return of the Jedi," when Han Solo, as played by Harrison Ford, is at least potentially very much a part of the ongoing saga? What if, in a decade or two, Lucas were to approach Harrison Ford with plans for Han Solo to fly again?

Ford takes a long moment to answer. "Ummm... I didn't find Han Solo to be as interesting a character as some others that I've played since," he says, choosing his words carefully. "I would have to, of course, out of respect and loyalty, I wouldn't deign to deny it at the moment. But it seems to me unlikely that it would be a character attractive enough for me to want to play again."

Though that's a response that could set the "Star Wars" cult to wringing its hands and gnashing its teeth, there is nothing in it that smacks of ingratitude or megastar ego. Ford would appear to be a relatively uncomplicated man, with very clear and decisive ideas about the way his life should work and his ultimate agenda. If it's any consolation, he remains committed to doing another "Indiana Jones" movie with Lucas and Spielberg-"if we're able to produce a script that we all have faith and belief in, and have a time that we all three of us can work together. This really is a time when George is too enmeshed in what he's doing right now to entertain it."

In the meantime, Ford gives every indication of having virtually no unfulfilled aspirations where his career is concerned. He is asked if he has ever considered following the lead of megastar actors like Sylvester Stallone and Robin Williams, who have utilized the current vogue for Miramax-style indie productions as a way to stretch their talents. It is not a burning ambition. "I've got plenty of other kinds of work to do," he says, "and I don't really know what the definition of an independent film is, other than that it's not financed by a studio. So I don't recognize that as one of the generic forms. An independent film can be any kind of a film, from a good film to a bad film, and I'm always interested in good films. But I think they have the potential to be a good film, whether they're big or small, or financed by a studio or somebody else."

And what about following the lead of star/directors like Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson-figures who come the closest to matching Ford for durability and for their ability to find roles that wring subtle changes on their established personae while sustaining the momentum of their careers? Would Ford consider trying his hand in other creative areas by producing and directing a few projects of his own?