Ford, explorer

June 25, 2002
Toronto Globe and mail
by Liam Lacey

TORONTO -- The most successful, and most quintessentially American Hollywood star of the past quarter-century, Harrison Ford, is not a man you expect to sport jowls, a bad haircut and a Russian accent. The sardonic, ruggedly handsome actor -- who braved the forces of darkness in Star Wars, snake pits in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, terrorists and drug dealers in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive -- does not back down from exotic challenges.

That's why his latest film, K-19: The Widowmaker, sees him as a patriotic Soviet sub commander, barking out orders in a Russian-flavoured English, on the other side in a historical Cold War drama.

The story, based on a real incident that was buried in deep Soviet secrecy for almost 30 years, concerns Russia's first nuclear ballistic submarine. Launched in the summer of 1961, on its maiden voyage, K-19 (nicknamed the Widowmaker for the 10 men who had died in its construction) came close to setting off a nuclear catastrophe. When a pipe carrying coolant burst, temperature and radiation levels soared in the submarine's reactor. The commander, Nikolai Zateyev, called for volunteers to work in short shifts to try to mend the leak and prevent a meltdown. Eight of those died promptly from radiation poisoning; another 14 died shortly after.

Had they failed, they might have spilled a radioactive soup into the Atlantic Ocean, or worse, set off the nuclear warheads onboard, causing a blast many times larger than Hiroshima, and potentially igniting a nuclear war.

The movie version -- shot in Toronto, near Winnipeg and in Halifax, as well as in Moscow -- changes names and many details from the historical facts.

The script depicts a brief mutiny (in real life, the captain ordered all weapons confined, in fear of the crew's rebellion). The movie also shows the Russians considering defecting to an American destroyer, which did not happen. The movie version becomes a classic naval drama about leadership, with Liam Neeson as the demoted captain and executive officer of the submarine who is beloved by his men, and Ford as the bureaucratically appointed new commander, who must win their respect. With distinct echoes of Apollo 13, it's the story of an apparently doomed mission that somehow succeeds thanks to resolving differences, teamwork and ingenuity.

The 58-year-old Ford, who assumed duty as an executive producer as well as the star of the film, has both a financial and personal reputation at stake in its success (reports have his salary at $25-million plus 20 per cent of the gross after the break-even point). Recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the world's richest movie star, Ford has wealth, but at his age, each role represents another test of his ability to stay on top. In a summer of too many blockbusters, he's anxious to give K-19 any extra help by going on the road to promote it.

Dressed in a dark polo shirt and jeans, looking a little sleepy but considerably more wiry than in his movie role, Ford saunters into the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto for his first interview of the day. The world's most successful movie star (seven of his 36 films have been in the all-time top-30 box-office grossers) is low-key but self-assured, candid yet careful, a mixture of "the world's highest-paid blue-collar worker," as George magazine once described him, and a cool-headed CEO.

Director Kathryn Bigelow (Strange Days, Point Break) had worked on the project for the past five years, travelling to Russia to interview survivors of the sub and interviewing Antonina Zateyev, widow of the captain on whom Ford's character is based.

Not long after the team of a half-dozen producers had been assembled (including the National Geographic Society, in its first feature-film venture) and the movie was about to shoot, there was a furor over the production rights. Screenwriter Inna Gotman and one of K-19's producers, Intermedia Films International, sued one another. Gotman claimed she had secured the rights to the sub crew's stories and had previously offered the idea to Intermedia; Intermedia claimed she was deliberately interfering with the production by threatening the former crew members if they co-operated with Bigelow's movie. In the midst of -- and perhaps incited by that controversy -- some former crew members and Zateyev's widow claimed they had seen an early draft of the script that portrayed the Soviets as drunken, disorganized "scum."

Ford says that "a number of factors excited that dissension. I was peripherally aware of some of the problems when I became involved. Some crew members had seen an earlier version of the script which had some elements of commentary on Russian sailors that they found disquieting, which I did as well.

"Those elements were eliminated, not because the crew wanted them changed, but because of the rewrites that I asked for. What was unique about our attempt, as I saw it, was that we were trying to do an American film from a Russian point of view without editorializing or applying a jingoistic American attitude, which I don't believe had ever been done before. I think we eventually achieved that."

Ford's description of the events underlines his own considerable clout in his movies. When asked what his credit as "executive producer" means, he answers:

"I assumed that position because there were a lot of decisions left to make and it was easier for me to make them from the role of a producer than trying to twist people to my point of view from the position of a 'movie star.' "

Such decisions apparently included bringing in Tom Stoppard as an uncredited screen doctor (Steven Spielberg and Ford are wooing the English playwright and Oscar-winning screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love to write the fourth Indiana Jones movie). Ford also made the decision to establish a common accent on the film -- essentially American, but spoken with a Russian flavour on certain words.

He cracks a grin when the accent question comes up; it was already the subject of mild mockery when he appeared on The David Letterman Show last week.

"Russian-flavoured? I recognize it for what it is. It's meant to be Russian-Lite. A heavy version of a Russian accent might inhibit understanding. I thought it was important for the audience to be reminded that this was not an American experience. . . . I wanted to remind them that this was a Russian experience."

One surprise is Ford's uncharacteristically stocky appearance in the movie. Was he wearing padding?

"Padding?" he says. "You're so kind. No, that was all me. I just felt that people didn't work out so much at that time and I just stopped working out. I also found a different way of moving from watching a lot of film footage of Russians from the early sixties: lumpier, slow, less graceful. Part of the rigour of my character is caught in his spine and that attitude causes him to move a certain way."

Even in Ford's body language, you can sense he's more comfortable talking about the tricks of the acting trade than showing his obvious head for business.

Is it always difficult to make audiences forget they're watching Harrison Ford?

"Not necessarily. In some roles, the baggage you carry as an actor can carry you, if you know what I mean. In other cases, you have to disabuse the audience of the expectations of who you are. My character in this movie isn't all that charming and the audience has to adjust to that. We certainly give them a movie though. Maybe just not quite the one they expected."

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