Harrison talks about his life and career
1997
Up in the
quiet hills of Brentwood, where the driveway gates beckon with a stately, inward
swing, Harrison Ford's hideaway nestles against an opulently green, wooded
hillside.
The star of ``Air Force One'' - and five of the 25 top-grossing
movies of all time - is dressed in jeans, boat shoes and a bottle-green work
shirt. It's scarcely the same attire that his film character, President James
Marshall, wears when Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists from Kazakhstan.
The film opens Friday.
Ford's house is an ice-white, two-story California
hybrid of cottage and bungalow, with big windows and open porches on the second
floor that would seem to be perfect for morning coffee and looking out at the
world.
``It was built in the mid-'40s and it was one story when I got
it,'' says Ford. ``I found the original architect and worked with him on the
design. He was 95.''
French doors open onto a large living room with
dark-stained hardwood floors, and a ceiling, walls and molding painted in three
subtly different shades of cream. Part of his art collection is displayed, on
the walls, including a number of drawings and paintings by the late-19th-century
French artist Edouard Vuillard.
``I'm not an obsessive collector,'' he
says. ``I tend to stop buying when I run out of wall space.''
Ford sits
on one of the room's four couches, which are conversationally grouped with
armchairs on three antique Persian rugs. It's a sociable room and the
55-year-old actor smiles at a compliment on its proportions.
``I've
always believed that architecture should be on a human scale,'' he says. ``It is
not about egos.''
It's also not his primary residence. When he can, he
and wife Melissa Mathison live on their 800-acre ranch outside Jackson Hole,
Wyo., where the Grand Tetons lurch abruptly out of the plains and into an
endless sky.
``You get a sense of reference there,'' he says. ``You feel
part of something that's got order and balance and harmony to it. All the
schizophrenic s-t that we go through in this kind of environment, all the
distraction and noise, all the confusion of misplaced, misdirected energy just
don't happen there.''
Ford confronted that bad energy early in his
career. He'd gone straight from Ripon College in Wisconsin to the Laguna
(Calif.) Playhouse to the contract-player pool at Columbia Pictures, where he
toiled in obscurity, on small films and episodic TV. Frustrated, he quit the
studios around 1970 and worked for a decade as a carpenter and cabinet maker.
This aspect of his career is Hollywood legend.
``I have gone on to
other things, but the myth has gone on far longer than the reality,'' he adds.
``I've delighted in participating in the designs of things, in the houses I live
in, but I've lost most of the tool skills I once had.''
Yet it is
Ford's workmanlike approach to acting that his ``Air Force One'' colleagues
praise. ``He is a superb craftsman,'' said director Wolfgang Petersen. ``He is
always, mentally and physically, perfectly prepared.''
Much of that
preparedness, Ford says, lies in working with his director, producers and
screenwriters to make emotional, as well as intellectual, sense of the
screenplay. ``I think they know it's necessary for me to have that clarity to do
the acting work,'' he says. ``I don't make people do it the way I want to do it.
It's a question of arriving at consensus.''
But he never gives up
his right to script approval, even after shooting has begun. ``It's important to
keep working on it all the way through, to keep that process
going.''
He also painstakingly rehearses the physical and technical
requirements of every scene, working out every move, whether it's walking into a
garden party or ducking an explosion.
``Part of the fun is to meet
those technical obligations,'' he says. ``I like hitting my mark. I like being
there at the right time and achieving the meter and rhythm which allows you to
get from one side of the room to the other, and land with some
authority.''
Wendy Crewson, who plays first lady to his president
in ``Air Force One,'' observes that once Ford has the technical skeleton of the
scene in place, he just wants to go to work.
``There's no vanity
there,'' she insists. ``He's not worried that his face is contorted or his
hair's a mess. He does it flat-out all the time. He's not holding back. He's not
conniving in the scene about how it's going to be best for him. You look into
his eyes and you believe with him.''
Ford gives an embarrassed
smile when told of Crewson's comments. ``She's very generous,'' he responds.
``For me, acting has always been the easiest part. It's always been fun. It's
not hard. The hard part is deciding what to do, not how to do
it.''
Ford never has studied acting, apart from mandated Method
classes as a fledgling contract player.
``The Method, as it were,
did not sit well with me,'' he says. ``I was never able to hone in on that as a
way to work. It took me a long time to develop a way to work, and it revolves
around getting the script right where I want it.''
That kind of
artistic control was a long time coming. Even during the time he quit acting,
though, he continued to meet with directors and producers.
``In
that period of my life, what I believed in more than anything else was tenacity,
that somehow the process of attrition would work for me, and that someday it
would be my turn,'' he reveals.
His first big break was as the hot
rodder Bob Falfa in George Lucas' 1973 classic ``American Graffiti,'' but
carpentry paid the bills until the next one came in 1977, when he played space
rogue Han Solo in Lucas' ``Star Wars.''
His turn finally came in
1981 in Lucas' ``Raiders of the Lost Ark,'' directed by Steven Spielberg - a
movie uniquely designed to appeal to grownups as well as the Saturday matinee
crowd.
The science-fiction classic ``Blade Runner'' followed in
1982. ``Witness'' in 1985, got him an Oscar nomination and established him as
Hollywood nobility.
Ford has starred in fairy tales like
``Sabrina'' (1995) and Mike Nichols' ``Working Girl'' (1988). Suspense films
like ``Frantic'' (1988) and ``Presumed Innocent'' (1990), and all-out actioners
like ``The Fugitive'' (1993) and last year's ``The Devil's Own'' have
established him as Hollywood's box-office king.
Even as ``Air Force
One'' is opening in theaters, Ford is at work on his next project, a comedy
called ``6 Days, 7 Nights'' that became fodder for gossip columns when his
co-star, Anne Heche, came out as Ellen DeGeneres' lover.
``She
(Anne) has great energy and it was a lot of fun. But comedy is a lot like
running on slippery rocks. One misstep and you're up to your a- in cold water,''
he says.
Next year, he'll star in a story of love and war in
Sarajevo, and, somewhere down the road, he'd like to return to one of his
favorite characters.
``I'd love to play Indiana Jones again,'' he
says without hesitation. ``It'll take a while for a script to develop, and then
George and Steven and I have to get together on a time. But we certainly all
have an ambition to do it.''
But in this one, Indiana won't be
battling the Nazis.
``We've strung this out over so many years that
signs of Indiana's age are apparent,'' Ford says with a wry smile. ``I'd like to
see us sneak up into the '50s, perhaps. That's got some
potential.''
There's one last stop at Ford's house, down the brick
steps, past the modest swimming pool and behind the garage. He peels the cover
off his newest motorcycle - one of ``about eight or nine.'' It's a customized
Triumph Speed Triple cafe racer with carbon-fiber wheels and canary-yellow
fairing.
``I never owned a bike until I was about 45,'' Ford
confesses, ``because I never thought I was responsible
enough.''
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Harrison Ford Web is making such material available in an effort to promote research. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.