A Different Ford in Our Future

2002-07-14
Washington Post
by Jacqueline Trescott

Harrison Ford's Familiar Heroic Pose Is Notably Absent In 'K-19.' It's a Risk He's Happy to Take.

NEW YORK

When Harrison Ford stars, the audience expects a hero. The president will kick butt through every corner of his plane and vanquish the terrorists. That fugitive doctor will foil his pursuers and prove he didn't kill his wife. Indiana Jones will conquer the snakes and outwit the Nazis.

But "K-19: The Widowmaker" is different. Set aboard a Russian nuclear submarine on the verge of a meltdown, it's a true story from the Cold War that's driven by an unusual Ford role.

What Ford likes best about the movie, which opens Friday, is that you don't quite know what to make of the Russian captain he plays. You're not even sure he'll do what Harrison Ford always does -- get out alive.

"The character is not immediately sympathetic or easy," Ford says. "It is not a movie star role with all the usual supports. So it was a different kind of challenge."

When Harrison Ford is talking about movies, and his success, he leans back in an armchair and locks his questioner with milky green eyes. Very disarming. The eyes are almost the color of the tropical waters he dove into in "Six Days Seven Nights," that film being a comedy break for his fans.

Is it too early to use the word "hunk"?

But we are getting off track.

His films, including the "Star Wars," Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan movies, have made $5 billion at the box office. Six are among the 50 top-grossing films of all time.

He is consistently picked as one of the top stars in Hollywood. But promoting his new film is not a star moment. Ford, dressed in casual black from shirt collar to shoe tips, rubs his short hiking boots against the edge of the coffee table. "I enjoy the work," he says, his voice its familiar low-pitched rumble. "I enjoy the problem of sitting down and figuring out what to do and how to do it, what is the best expression in the moment of the character and to give that individual expression, emotion and tension."

That's the way he approached his latest film.

"I had an emotional reaction to the dilemma of the crew, as well as the captain, the box he found himself in. I understood the obligations he felt to one of the theories of military command. Not necessarily that I identified with but I identified and understood," says Ford. "Telling a story from a Russian perspective interested me as an exercise in discipline."

He stops, smiles briefly as he twists a water bottle around in his hands. "It is a pretty complicated dramatic construction," says Ford, who served as executive producer. The film is also the first commercial feature for the motion picture division of the National Geographic Society.

Ford knows this one may jar some of his fans.

The captain is not the American hero who frequently populates Ford's canon of three dozen films. It is not even clear he's a Russian hero. "It was critical to me to get the audience to understand this was no typical Harrison Ford summer fodder," he says.

Then there's the problem of accents. The idea of Russians speaking accented English is strange to start with, and an accent can be distracting if it's not perfect. But Ford wanted to do the Russian accent; it's part of working against type, the Harrison Ford type, he says.

"The twist here is normally you use an accent when you are speaking a second language, as a sort of dramatic device. We are speaking English, but we are Russians speaking with a Russian accent so that you know we are Russian."

How was the use of the accents decided? "To tell the truth, a few of us got together and decided that, for all the others . . . basically they had to talk like me," he says with a sheepish authority.

The movie co-stars Liam Neeson, the sub's captain until he is demoted because he is taking too long to get the boat out to sea. The script leaves plenty of room for macho tension.

In the pursuit of authenticity, Ford even tried to adopt a Russian walk. His normal stride is a glide. In this movie he moves slowly and clumsily, with a broader girth and jowls. He watched Russian film footage from the early 1960s -- the incident portrayed in the movie occurred in 1961 -- to catch that lumbering gait, and stopped working out. Hefty, but not Khrushchev.

Some of the tension involving the movie was real, not stagecraft. Survivors from the K-19, who were ordered to keep the incident a secret and did so for 30 years, feared that Hollywood would mangle their story. Then they saw an early draft of the script and were furious. Ford went to St. Petersburg and Moscow to meet with the Russian submariners.

"They had access to a copy of the script that I had no intention of approving and so I was much in sympathy with their reservations," he says, describing the emotional encounter. "It was clear that they had an expectation not easily served. This was a critical moment in all of their lives, and they had the expection that we were going to tell the story as they understood it."

In revising the script, Ford said, editorial comment was avoided and observations about some cultural behaviors were deleted. "To comment on the Soviet system or character would have been a mistake," Ford says. "There is no American jingoism involved in this. The film is very stringent and observes the Russian point of view."

With a departure like "K-19" is Ford signaling a turn toward more complex characters, less hyper-action, fewer sardonic asides? Will there be more of the playing against type like the creepy husband he portrayed opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in "What Lies Beneath"?

"No," he says quickly. "It is a role-by-role choice, movie-by-movie choice. There is no calculated plan. . . . I look for a story and the character that helps tell the story with an understandable job to do. I look for an emotional relationship to the dilemma of the character and an opportunity for emotional expression."

So in the works is a script for "Indiana Jones 4," which is scheduled for release in 2004. Ford, who turned 60 yesterday, has been hearing endlessly about how old he will be when it comes out.

"I still feel capable of jumping and falling down. That is not the issue," he says, his tone a little stern.

The Indy script, now being written by Oscar-nominated Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption," "The Green Mile") moves the plot to the 1950s. "In those cases when you play a character more than once, you have an obligation to bring something different to the audience," Ford says. "I always feel the character has to learn something. We have done that successfully in the past, through devices like the introduction of his father."

But does it bother him that the entertainment pundits are joking about the Social Security Indy?

"I'm only too old if Indy is too young," he says, his eyes twinkling a bit. "There is a movie about the young Abraham Lincoln, there is a movie about the older Abraham Lincoln. Why can't there be a movie about the older Indiana Jones?"

For a number of years, Ford managed to stay relatively clear of the gossip radar screen. He did the round of late-night shows when a movie was released, an hour with Oprah, a sit-down with Barbara Walters, a few magazine covers, including People's Sexiest Man Alive in 1998. It was noticed when he pierced his ear and when he reached that $25 million-a-picture plateau.

But he recently became the subject of tabloid and magazine articles after he and his wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, separated. And earlier this year, his relationship with actress-waif Calista Flockhart launched another round of stories.

"I think I finally understand celebrity as a matter of people's interest in others that have -- perhaps -- what they imagine to be more of an effect over their lives," says Ford. "People feel a lack of effect in their own lives and feel they are at the whim and mercy of other people. They wrongly suspect people who are successful and are celebrities are inured to that, and of course they are not."

A story in a recent issue of People (headline: "When Harry Met Ally") about his relationship with Flockhart clearly irritated him. "They write such rubbish, there is no longer any journalistic responsibility or test of truth. . . . Now it is the standard of our time. People [who write about celebrities] don't give a rat's ass about what they say about other people."

So he is a champion for privacy and the right to be normal. "It is my private life, and I have a desire to keep it private. I don't want to play in that yard," he says.

Another thing that is wearing a little thin is the gimmick of the late-night hosts who pull out a clip from his early work. On a recent evening, David Letterman showed a snippet from a 1970 episode of "Dan August," a short-lived TV series that starred Burt Reynolds.

"I have no idea what I am going to see," says Ford. "I don't remember that one at all. I always feel kind of silly. They do it on purpose to embarrass me. So I do them the favor of looking embarrassed. It's part of the deal."

Ford was born in Chicago and grew up in the nearby suburb of Des Plaines. He attended Ripon College in Wisconsin. He never finished but was attracted to acting and decided to go to Los Angeles. He signed with Columbia and then Universal and did some bit parts in television. Dissatisfied with the pace of his career, he taught himself carpentry and became a successful craftsman.

He dates his emergence as an actor to his first work with George Lucas in 1973. "I think [my career] began to make sense around 'American Graffiti,' " in which he played macho hot-rodder Bob Falfa. "It was the first time I had an understanding enough of storytelling to be able to make a contribution," he says. In talking about his career, there is only one television role he cites: a supporting role in "Judgment: The Court Martial of Lieutenant William Calley," directed by Stanley Kramer in 1975.

Then in 1977 the wave of blockbusters and international stardom started. "Star Wars" made $791 million, "The Empire Strikes Back" $533 million. But Ford did smaller films as well, including "Working Girl," "Presumed Innocent" and "Regarding Henry," that established him as someone who did nuanced work in comedy and drama. Sometimes the audiences were there; sometime they weren't. His role in "Sabrina," as the rich industrialist who falls for the driver's daughter (a remake of the Humphrey Bogart-Audrey Hepburn film) earned him a Golden Globe. "The Mosquito Coast," a Peter Weir film in which Ford plays an inventor who takes his family to the jungles of Central America to build an ideal life, and "The Fugitive" got the same nod.

Some of his early films, like the 1982 science fiction drama "Blade Runner," are now cult favorites. Ford prefers classic over cult.

"What is interesting is that it is not cult," he says. "Cult seems to be time-specific. What is interesting to me is the luck of my career. A lot of the films I did early on have become classics. Not because of me, but these films are seen by generation after generation after generation of filmgoers. I am delighted that those films have an appeal. The reason is that they were so outrageously original in their time."

The films are studies of strong, adventurous characters, usually spare in their dialogue, skeptical about what is going on around them, with a droll humor directed at colleagues and family. The hero usually finds a spectacular way to get out of an impossible situation. The last 10 minutes of "Patriot Games," with the lights out and the guns blazing and the boats cruising the inlets of the Chesapeake Bay, retain their hair-raising tension. And the movies have lines the audience roars at. In "Air Force One," when Ford's President Marshall yells, "Get off my plane," audiences cheered.

Citing "Air Force One" as well as "The Fugitive," Ford says, "What works finally in both of those films is for the audience to identify emotionally with those characters."

Only once has Ford been nominated for an Oscar. In 1985, he played a Philadelphia detective drawn into the world of the Amish in "Witness." That film also produced some of his most vivid romantic scenes, ranked among the American Film Institute's recent "100 Passions." In one scene he is fixing his car in a barn on an Amish farm and starts to dance with Kelly McGillis while the car radio is playing Sam Cooke. Ford hums, sings and guides her around the barn. Ford says the best romantic scenes are the ones that strongly suggest. "The worst thing you can do in a love story is make love because it spoils the tension," he says. "Witness," he recalls, "is almost like a silent movie. A lot of the love scenes in this film are without dialogue; they are composed of looks and moments."

On the table in the hotel suite is a copy of that day's USA Today detailing how six men and one woman rule the summer box office. Ford is joined by Eddie Murphy, Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts.

This responsibility of opening big and entertaining the escapists is one that Ford accepts. "It is my job. That is why I am here, to take advantage of the opportunity of reaching people. I do take the responsibility for the product," he says. "I do whatever I can to support the film and reach its audience. Making movies is about communicating with an audience, and if we fail to communicate with an audience I am disappointed."

Still, he finds the whole business about a great opening weekend unsettling. "Different films have different kinds of opportunity. People, the press especially, would characterize a film, a small film, as being unsuccessful because their expectations are of what a more commercial film would achieve," he says. Yet when "Air Force One" was set to be released on the same day as other big films, Ford called a studio head and said it was not good business. The schedule was changed. The Ford film then blew away the competition, eventually pulling in $312 million.

But nothing is guaranteed, especially when teenagers make up most of the audience and most of the actors are a lot younger than Ford. Is he looking over his shoulder? Ben Affleck is the latest Jack Ryan, in Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears." In his interviews, Affleck says he talked to Ford about the role. "He made a very generous and sweet call to me," Ford says. Ford notes that he was asked about reviving the role before the script was ready and he passed. And then there is Clancy's well-publicized view that Ford wasn't the Jack Ryan he had in mind. "I am not going to talk about Clancy," Ford says. "It is a whole other subject."

The next generation of actors has to understand something about movie heroes, Ford feels. "They are bringing life and energy to the characters, but they are not playing heroes. They are doing something else. You do not play a hero. People perceive things as heroic, but there is no way to play a hero," he says. When he was promoting "Air Force One," he said, the president appealed to the audience because "they want to see a guy with a determined moral point of view who prevails."

For his next projects, Ford is considering a biography of Fred Cuny, the maverick relief worker killed in Chechnya, and an adaptation of Lawrence Block's "A Walk Among the Tombstones," about an alcoholic private eye. He's even considering a cop drama about the rap music business.

Mostly he's looking for layered roles. He says he wants to play complicated motivation, not just people driven to violent action. "I never was in sympathy with films that depended on violence as their central value, pumping up the volume and the energy to an impossible stage and expect that that would serve the story. I am sick to death of revenge as motivation for characters. I was never able to embrace that."

But Ford doesn't try to force that idea on others. In fact, he says: "The only piece of advice that I ever offer young actors is not to imitate anyone else's success. I am only willing to say that because that is the advice I have followed. It makes you figure out your own way of doing things. You arrive with an understanding of your own experience, rather than trying to replicate somebody else's success.

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