An ordinary superstar

Nov 13 1999
Birmingham Post
by Tony Earnshaw

For someone who doesn't even like watching movies, Harrison Ford leaves a blazing trail..

Whatever you do, don't make the mistake of treating Harrison Ford like royalty. It's guaranteed to hack him off.

Sitting in Rome's palatial Hessler Hotel, overlooking the Spanish Steps and Cleopatra's Needle, Ford is inscrutable. Only his eyes - guarded, cautious - betray what may be going on inside his mind.

Ford is in the midst of a European publicity tour to promote his new movie Random Hearts, a romance/drama in which, perhaps for the first time, he is showing his age.

Now 57, he is a breath away from achieving the iconic status which has enveloped the likes of Clint and Jack - icons don't need surnames - and exudes an aura of quiet authority and no-nonsense star charisma.

Yet, before it is even mentioned, Ford effortlessly rids himself of the image of globetrotting movie superstar. In Rome only because he has a movie to sell - "a product to offer" - he deliberately makes the point that he hates the celebrity that comes with the territory.

When he speaks he looks you straight in the eye. It's unnerving. The words are measured and deliberate, each sentence constructed in minimalist fashion. Ford doesn't say a lot, but what he does say counts.

With over 30 years in the business - he made his screen debut in a 1967 James Coburn movie - he's made his share of classics and enjoyed some terrific collaborations, not least with Steven Spielberg and Star Wars guru George Lucas.

Yet Ford is in movies to make a living. He's a slogger - do the job, reap the rewards, get the hell out. He's definitely not in it for glamour and, from what he says, not even for movies themselves.

"I'm not a filmgoer," said Ford. "When I was a kid growing up, the films I went to were Saturday matinees, they were cowboys and Indians.

"I didn't grow up loving movies, which is not to say that I don't like movies, but I don't have a great store of knowledge about them.

"I still haven't seen Casablanca, and despite everyone's great amazement and confusion about that I haven't gone out and rented it. It's just not something that interests me. What interests me is taking a form of written screenplay and taking that through a process."

Given his pole position in the Hollywood firmament, doesn't that strike him as odd? "Very odd. Bizarre. I'm totally ignorant of it, from that point of view, but that is audiences, and I'm not audience.

"That's what it amounts to. I'm not audience, I work here - you see the distinction that I make? And the fact that I work there makes me a poor audience, many times. At the same time I am occasionally swept away.

"I can sit there and watch part of a movie on television and enjoy it very much and get up and walk away. If the phone rings and I get involved in something else, I won't go back and bother with it.

"That's a terrible admission to make, and it seems to indicate that I have not an appropriate respect for other people's talents, ambition and hard work.

"It's not that. It's not that at all. I do admire them; I just don't find that it's helpful to me."

In Random Hearts, Ford stars alongside rising British actress Kristin Scott-Thomas as a cop who discovers, on her death in an air crash, that his wife was having a long-term affair.

Stunned, grieving and unable to comprehend or accept the concept of his wife's infidelity, he throws himself into a personal investigation, which leads to Scott-Thomas - the unwitting widow of Ford's wife's lover.

After frothy fare like Sabrina, and the high-octane action of Air Force One, it's another change of pace for Ford and one which, he hopes, will help to dislodge the popular public consciousness which continues to link him with Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

"This is a strange kind of romance and I was intrigued by it. I was moved by the dilemma of the character. This is a terrible quandary to be placed in - to learn that your wife is dead, and at the same moment to learn that she was unfaithful, leaves you no place to go. No manner of relief.

"So this character, a policeman, chooses to investigate this situation as though it were a crime. And in fact to him it is a crime - a crime of betrayal, of infidelity, which transpired right under his nose, calling into question his manhood and his skill as a policeman. That to me was interesting, and very unconventional."

Unconventional or not, Random Hearts is unlikely to set the box office alight and, after a relatively barren period over the last five years, Ford may find himself drawn to a fourth Indiana Jones adventure.

Still, with a pay cheque topping $20 million per movie, Ford has little to worry about when it comes to money in the bank; he's set for life.

Yet, tackle him on the obscene salaries being demanded by him and other Hollywood stars, and his answer is brief and frank.

"I wasn't the first person to ask for that but as long as they were gonna pay somebody else, they can pay me."

Another Indiana Jones movie is definitely on the horizon, yet it may not emerge until 2005. By that time, Ford will be 63. Given his self-confessed fondness for action roles - "I like the sweat and the exercise of it" - hasn't he already reached a point where he's too old for all that nonsense?

Ford smiles - the brilliant, shiny white smile of a Hollywood superstar. "It's a condition. It's a question of what condition your condition is in.

"I have not yet seen the action film where the protagonist wields a cane or his crutches to win the day but as long as I'm fit enough to play tennis or run faster than Sean Connery, I think I can manage."

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