Sneer we go

Canoe.ca
By Jim Slotek
June 8th, 2003

At 61, he still has none of the charm and all of the sarcasm that made him a star

"If I take my gingko, I'll remember where I put my Viagra."

The line is delivered by noted funnyman Harrison Ford in the cop comedy-drama Hollywood Homicide, in a bedroom scene with onscreen girlfriend Lena Olin. It's one of a handful of "age quips" given him by director Ron Shelton and writer Robert Souza that imply a new lightness of spirit by the action star in the autumn of his career.

Offscreen, the subject is a little touchier.

It's a red-faced Harrison Ford giving interviews this day, insofar as you can assign the word "interview" to his trademark combination of sarcasm and monosyllabic answers delivered in a barely audible rumble.

And no, he's not embarrassed.

"I just played some tennis and I forgot to put sunscreen on," he says. Next question.

At 61, most men would talk up their tennis game. But okay, about that gingko-Viagra line. Was this a way to ... "acknowledge my advancing age?" he says, straight-faced. "No, it's a reflection on the pharmacology of our times. I don't need to acknowledge my age. I am my age. It's just a good line." Says the guy with the earring.

So what was it like turning 60? "I don't remember," he says wryly, "it was so long ago."

So what do you do when you're a movie action star approaching what is for most people the mandatory retirement age? If you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, you consider running for governor. If you're Clint Eastwood, you turn auteur.

If you're Harrison Ford, you still do your own stunts.

In Hollywood Homicide, he and Josh Hartnett play a mismatched pair of homicide investigators trying to unravel the murder of all four members of a highly touted young hip-hop band. Hartnett plays K.C. Calden, a yoga-teaching wannabe actor who joined the LAPD purely as a family legacy. Ford is Joe Gavilan, a fiftysomething veteran who moonlights as a realtor, looking for the big score that will settle his troubled financial affairs.

En route to the denouement, there's a long chase scene that involves half of Hollywood proper, extreme mass destruction, fisticuffs with a rogue hip-hop kingpin and a veritable wrecking yard of auto demolition.

"He did so many stunts it was frightening," Shelton says. "This movie has no special effects and no computer graphics. It's all old-style stunt work and car crashes, real stuntmen doing real things. So even though we had a stunt double for Harrison, it was remarkable all the times he said, 'No I'm gonna do it!' When you see him jumping over the railing and crashing on a roof fan, when you see him jumping out of a moving car, it's all him. There were a few falls he didn't do, and that's about it."

One stunt he didn't take charge of had Hartnett at the wheel of their car as they plowed into a black-and-white LAPD cruiser. That one didn't make the final cut, since it went horribly awry, leaving Hartnett with a concussion and Ford with a groin injury. Ford and producer Lou Pitt laid the blame for the accident on Hartnett ("He missed his mark," Pitt says). Hartnett says it wasn't, and says the blame was part of a continuous macho testing Ford put him under, "like taking elbows in a basketball game."

Hartnett explains: "This stunt driver did something just totally dangerous and wrong. We did a rehearsal and this guy figured a better way, and did something completely different. I couldn't stop in time and Harrison was so pissed off at me. If we were going any faster, I'd be in a lot worse shape. I hit the top of the windshield with my face, and Harrison is like, 'Goddammit! I knew it!' He got up my nose so bad, I really thought it was my fault -- until I could think again.

"Harrison was an idol of mine, but we had kind of a tumultuous working experience," Hartnett says. "He's only worked with one other young actor. (Brad Pitt, with whom Ford famously did not get along in The Devil's Own). He's been The Man for so long, and he's still The Man. But to share the spotlight a little bit, well ...

"We get along a lot better now. Ultimately he just wanted me to prove myself, and I understand that."

For his part, Shelton says the oil-and-water mix was what he wanted. "The characters are two guys from different planets. Harrison and Josh are two guys from different planets. That's what I want. Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins (in Shelton's Bull Durham) are two guys from different planets. Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes (Money Train) are from different planets."

Ford concurs. Asked how he and Hartnett differ, planet-wise, he says, "He's first of all 23 years old, had a lot of success in his young life." (He's actually 25). The unspoken part of the sentence is that it took Ford 10 years of struggle before Star Wars launched his career.

"He's a very ... uh, he approaches the work in a very different way than I do. But he's a talented kid and he's got a lot of appeal."

Mention the overnight-success-vs.-decade-of-struggle comment, and Hartnett replies simply, "Poor guy."

Was it at all a paternal relationship? "I hope not," Hartnett says with a laugh, "I'd feel for his kids."

Speaking of kids, Ford -- who has four grown children from ex-wives Mary Marquart and Melissa Matheson -- allows that he's sharing the process again with current flame Calista Flockhart and her 2 1/2-year-old adopted son Liam. "It's great, I enjoy it," he says, reluctantly confirming a bedtime story or two. "Y'know, Jay Jay The Jet Plane, Bob The Builder, Thomas The Tank Engine."

Although Matheson -- the E.T. screenwriter -- was a Hollywood name, Ford admits his profile with the paparazzi has amped since taking up with Flockhart.

"Yeah, we're a target. I have no control over the proliferation of paparazzi journalism. I don't participate in it, and I don't enjoy it."

And is it our imagination, or are he and Calista showing up at more Hollywood openings and galas these days? "You don't see me attending openings and galas," he says, "unless it's an environmental cause or I'm selling a movie."

C'mon, I say, the MTV Movie Awards? "It's our target demographic. We open June 13, if I didn't mention that before. I think, 'Gee, what a good idea if Josh and I present together. That might help.' " They gave out best female performance. The winner was "Kirsten Dunst, for Spider-Man or Spiderwoman or whatever."

So no mid-life crisis. "It's the same old me."

We'll find out for certain when Ford shoots the long-awaited fourth Indiana Jones movie next summer. Although the star will be 63 when it wraps, it'll be set in the '50s -- a decade after the time period of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Indiana Jones And Temple Of Doom and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

Clearly it will have been a rough 10 years for Indy. Will he still be lassoing cars and hauling himself over gravel roads at 40 mph?

"We'll see. I haven't seen the script yet," he says.

Well, nice talkin' to ya.

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