Below the surface

2002-07-14
by Bob Strauss

Harrison Ford commands the crew of 'K-19,' an American film about the Russian navy

Harrison Ford turned 60 this weekend. Now he decides to make changes. The most successful movie star of all time by several measures, the iconic hero of the first "Star Wars" and "Indiana Jones" trilogies, as well as such all-American blockbusters as "Witness," "Blade Runner," "Patriot Games," "The Fugitive," "Clear and Present Danger" and "Air Force One" has ventured into comedy, romance and even less-than-upright territory throughout his career, usually without the kind of success his men of action roles have generated.

But in his last big screen appearance, the supernatural thriller "What Lies Beneath," Ford clicked as a very, very bad man. He's hoping his large but picky fan base will be equally accepting of his latest role as a hard- nosed Soviet submarine commander in "K-19: The Widowmaker" (opening Friday).

"It wasn't that I saw irony in it," Ford says of playing a dedicated Communist officer in the film, set during the height of the Cold War and based on a true incident. "I saw opportunity to do something different from what was expected, and I hope it will be fun for an audience to have a different experience with me as an actor. I wanted to disabuse them of their expectations and, yet, to serve them finally with an emotional expression.

"But I'm not actively trying to change my image," insists Ford, still remarkably fit, craggily handsome and wearing that signature gold hoop in his ear. "I thought 'What Lies Beneath' would be unexpected and interesting. But, having done that, I don't want to do that again for awhile. I want to do something else."

Down periscope
The story of the K-19 was something else, all right. Rushed into production to counterbalance America's edge in nuclear submarine technology in 1961, the Russian boat's reactor blew a cooling pipe on its maiden voyage deep in the North Atlantic. By cannibalizing piping from the torpedo tubes, crewmen were able to rig a new system that prevented a meltdown and explosion in NATO patrolled waters.

But only at the cost of sending 22 unprotected men into the reactor's chamber, where they were exposed to radiation that eventually killed them all. The surviving crewmen were grudgingly decorated, but sworn to silence about the incident until after the Soviet Union's collapse more than 30 years later.

Ford plays the ship's tough, Party-connected Captain Alexei Vostrikov, a thinly veiled fictionalization of the real K-19's late Captain Nikolai Zateyev. Liam Neeson is most prominent among the international cast portraying the sub's crew as the executive officer Mikhail Polenin, a humanist who often disagrees with Vostrikov's demanding treatment of their men.

"The themes include the moral responsibility that lie at the heart of military leadership," Ford says of what attracted him to the part. "The character Liam plays has devoted his life to protecting his men, and my character believes that his duty to the state may well depend on how wisely he uses the lives of the men who are at his disposal. What's interesting for me is seeing how these men learn from each other and come together to overcome the problems that they face.

"Another interesting thing to me is living in a world where nuclear annihilation is a real possibility and a constant concern. It's the Pandora's Box which was opened, and because both countries devoted themselves to a morally corrupt theory: that you obtain peace through a mutually assured destruction. And the fact that this is history past doesn't mean that these issues have passed with the times."

According to some younger members of the cast, Ford would have made a very effective Soviet officer of the period.

Commanding presence
"It can be very intimidating at first," Peter Sarsgaard ("Boys Don't Cry") says of working with his lifelong idol. "But it was right for this movie for it to be that way. I tried to preserve that feeling for as long as possible in this film because he is, y'know, Daddy comin' down, and I've messed up frequently. Just the feeling of it being Harrison coming down, and the amount of raw energy that he gets inside of him when he turns and focuses it on you ... he really got me going.

"And it helped that he could just throw me through a hatch with no regard for my body," adds Sarsgaard, who plays the boat's inexperienced and initially cowardly reactor engineer. "I got a big bruise on the side of my leg when Harrison comes and gets me and just throws me through the hole. When I landed on the other side, I just looked up at him and I was like, 'What the hell are you doing?' "

According to "K-19" director Kathryn Bigelow, Ford was doing his job, as she could always count on him to during the complex, logistically difficult production that ranged from gimbel-operated Toronto soundstages to frozen Canadian lakes and North Atlantic shorelines to various government buildings and other Moscow locations.

But beyond his legendary professionalism, it was Ford's commitment to his performance that impressed the director most.

"The wisdom, the experience and a kind of prescient, almost uncanny, ability to unlock a character and reveal that character in a way that, I felt, possessed absolute honesty, truth and accessibility," Bigelow gushes. "And yet, this is a difficult man in many respects. So the courage not to mitigate that difficult nature, I had enormous respect for."

All that, and a Russian accent, too.

"What accent?" Ford jokes about the somewhat controversial Slavic inflection he uses in the movie. "There were investors in the film, early on, who were very against the idea of using an accent. It was the usual stuff: movies in which actors use accents don't often make as much money, and so on and so forth. Anyway, the arguments did not prevail. I thought it was important for the audience to constantly be reminded that this was not a Harrison Ford movie. This was a movie about Russians."

Tough negotiations
Movie star weight may cut a lot of ice in Hollywood. But St. Petersburg is a different slice of tundra. Survivors of the K-19 disaster were understandably wary of a movie produced by capitalist propagandists ... especially after a rival group of producers reportedly approached some of them to back their own Widowmaker project.

Ford made several trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg to try to reach an understanding with the elderly veterans.

"Why should they trust us?" he reckons. "We're a bunch of Hollywood mockers, and I don't think there was any reason for them to trust us. They had also obtained a script which was a very early version and didn't represent, at all, what I was hoping would be the final product, and we all had committed ourselves to doing a lot more work on it.

"But also, they're submariners; they're not filmmakers," Ford notes. "They're Russians; they're not North Americans. They lead a much different life, and I think that their immediate reaction was that we should be telling their stories with their characters, as they understood them. And, y'know, that's really not the purpose of a theatrical motion picture. Besides, a submarine is compartmentalized; each section is sealed off from the next section. So no two stories from the men who were there were the same. And because this was immediately declared the stuff of secrets, and it wasn't discussed afterward, it was hard to even just figure out what really happened."

But, Ford continues, he and the crew "were absolutely committed to telling the story of their devotion to duty, their heroism, their selflessness."

These days, Ford is keeping his own code of silence when it comes to personal questions.

"I can save you the trouble by telling you that I don't talk about my personal life," says the actor, and it's easy to see why. Last year, he legally separated from his second wife, "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and has been seen in the company of several much-younger actresses -- "Ally McBeal" star Calista Flockhart most prominently -- ever since.

Ford still divides his time between New York City ("I'm building a new apartment for myself," the onetime Hollywood carpenter says. "My kids are both still in school there.") and the large rural property outside of Jackson, Wyo., that he has long called home.

"I'm getting along fine, thank you," Ford says. "We're all OK."

Coming up next on the professional front are two very different cop roles, one a buddy comedy and the other an existential psychodrama. And after that, probably, the fourth Indiana Jones adventure (see accompanying story).

Back to the hero mode so many know and love, then?

"There's no simple formulaic to represent heroism," Ford explains. "You just deal with the particular circumstances of each piece."

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