Ford Built Tough

October 03, 1999
New York Now
by Martin Booe

At 57 he's still a box-office draw, and the future, though not clear, is bright

BEVERLY HILLS

When Harrison Ford enters a room, you think of a lion. First, there's the balls-of-his-feet walk — shoulders forward, commanding of space, but guard up, always up. Then there are the penetrating green eyes, fierce but not humorless, that look straight through you. There's the short mane of tawny, silvering hair and the majestically battered face. And there's certainly the voice: a big cat's guttural purr that you sense could rapidly escalate to a snarl if the wrong question were to come up.

It would surely be premature to refer to Harrison as a Lion in Winter, for at 57, he continues to enjoy a lingering Indian summer. Of course, there have been some recent letdowns, like "Six Days, Seven Nights," his action-romance with the supremely mismatched Ann Hecht, and before that Sydney Pollack's poorly received attempt to revive the classic "Sabrina," in which Ford stepped into Humphrey Bogart's shoes. While Ford's appeal endures, you might expect him to take shelter in another handy Jack Ryan installment, the Tom Clancy character that's his franchise of the '90s. And to be sure, Ford nearly always produces work that's at the top of any given genre. But instead we find him reunited with Sydney Pollack in "Random Hearts," a riskily unconventional love story based on the novel by Warren Adler, who also wrote "War of the Roses."

Ford plays Dutch, a Washington, D.C., cop, opposite Kristen Scott Thomas' waspy New Hampshire congresswoman. The two meet after their respective spouses, sneaking off for an out-of-town tryst, are killed in a plane crash. As Dutch searches for clues to the nature of and inspiration for his dead wife's infidelity, a relationship blossoms between the widowed pair. "The dramatic form of this in itself made it a bit of a challenge," says Ford, leaning forward to pin his visitor with something between a gaze and a glare. "There's no plot, just character relationships, and that's very rare these days. "The movement of the film was incremental: little changes in the relationship, which move the film forward, and the precision with which those changes had to be observed. That was . . ." — he pauses and lets out a sigh — "demanding. And Sydney made it demanding because he was very clear about what he was looking for in each one. The precision was a challenge, and the pleasure was having somebody along to help meet the challenge."

You wonder if this latest turn might signal a retreat from those adrenalin-drenched, rib-crunching action pics that can't, no matter who you are, get any easier as you get closer to Geritol and Dr. Scholl's. But Ford's not buying any of that. His career is and has always been, he says, a work in progress, absent of grand design or master plan. "I've always tried to do a variety of things," he says, "and get my toe into whatever genre happens to be the most interesting project. I'll opportunistically eat anything that dies in front of me. That's what keeps it interesting." Okay, but what about in 10 years? He'll be pushing 70. What's an aging former intergalactic adventurer, whip-cracking anthropologist and dam-jumping fugitive to do? Villainy! it is suggested. Wouldn't Ford just love to play a full-blown, mustache-twirling villain? Somebody who engages in behavior hurtful to children and small animals and doesn't feel bad about it? The suggestion elicits a look of pure dubiousness. "I've never read a script where I thought the bad guy was as interesting as the good guy," he says. "But it depends on what might come my way." But what about Allie Fox, the massively obsessive father who frog-marched his family through the jungles of central America in "Mosquito Coast"? Ford was great in that role; he left no doubt in anyone's mind he could do the bad-guy thing. "I really don't think of Allie Fox as a villain," Ford says, with a hint of irritation, but then tacks on a sigh of concession: "But he was a less attractive character than others. I loved the language, and I loved what the film said."

It's just that you have to wonder if the day is coming when Harrison Ford will find himself standing at the crossroads of self-reinvention. Like Sean Connery. Sort of, anyway. With his shiny pate and frosty beard, Connery took the grizzled patriarch route. And he's still got babes galore swinging from the vines with him, though, for appearances' sake, it's high time he starts introducing them as his nieces. Anyway, Ford is asked the 10-year question. Where do you see yourself in 2009? He takes a breath and swallows. "I don't know. I've never really planned much ahead. I've sort of been very happy to have a career where you make it up as you go along. You can decide whether you feel like working that year or not, or whether there are some interesting things to do or whether you want to wait. In 10 years I might be out of the business or I might be [doing] just what I'm doing now. I have no really honest way of telling you which way it's going to go." On the other hand, it seems unlikely that the actor will start popping up in low-budget experimental indie films just for the fun of kicking out his acting slats. He chooses parts for the challenge and depth they offer, but he's a practical guy who doesn't throw concerns of commercial viability to the wind. (He's reportedly still in the $20 million-a-pop category.) "I want to make films that people go to see," he says. "I think it's an effort at communication, so you don't want to make a movie that no one's going to be interested in seeing. I don't expect every film to have the same degree of success, but I always think about the commercial viability because this is my business, this is a job for me. And I want our efforts to be successful, not just for myself but for the other couple hundred people involved. So you don't set out do something that takes so much time and money and not have an ambition for it to be seen."

Just as it's hard to draw out Ford on his distaste for heavies, it's similarly difficult to get him to assess how the image of the male hero may have changed over the arc of his career. "I don't know if I'm a very good person to ask about such things because I'm not a student of film and I'm not a consistent filmgoer," he says. "I think there have always been genres where there have been the more complicated male characters and other films that had obviously very simple male characters. But when I was growing up, just as there was John Wayne, there was Greg Peck in 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' and that was as admirable a character as you could come up with. That was not a hard man. That was not an excessively manly man, but a talking, feeling character. I think that's always been part of our film literature." Whether he intends to or not, Ford of course is describing himself in the movies. The heroes he plays are gruffly self-contained, but prick them and they bleed. They are mistrustful of words, as is Ford — who is famously outspoken in his dislike for publicity sorties like this one. Still, he comes off as decent. One who doesn't suffer fools gladly, but decent as long as his considerable intelligence is not insulted. You sometimes see a flash of a contrary streak, but mostly the guy won't let himself be lured into talking a lot of blather for the sake of publicity. All else being equal, given the chance, he would excise fame from his life. "Oh yeah, would I ever," he says, relishing the thought. "I think the loss of anonymity has got to be felt to understood. It's a very precious commodity, especially if your work requires that your understanding of human nature and that your interest in other people continue. "And it's a little harder to manage an interest in other people when they're coming at you so strong. I don't think I'm very good at talking about myself. I think I'm better doing my real job than this . . . but I think fame is very difficult, and my argument with it is not just in my own life. I just think it aberrates . . . things. "There's the adolescent belief that fame solves all problems, and people old enough to know better still have this obsession with celebrity and success. And in this culture, what counts for success and celebrity is a pretty grim study."

July 13, 1942, in Chicago

Education: Ripon College, Ripon, Wisc. Majored in English. Flunked out one month before graduation.

Other jobs: Carpenter.

Breakout movies: "American Graffiti," 1973, "Star Wars," 1977

First starring movie role: Dr. Indiana Jones in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," 1981

Awards: Best Actor Oscar nomination for "Witness"

Companions: Ex-wife, Mary Ford (two children); wed Melissa Mathison March 14, 1983 (two children)

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