The Passions of Harrison

1999
by Paul Fischer

Harrison Ford has come a long way since achieving superstardom in both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogies. His heroic, ironic sense of character has made him a household name. But in his latest film, Sydney Pollack's character-driven story Random Hearts, Ford plays his most complex and flawed character to date. PAUL FISCHER reports from Los Angeles. Harrison Ford's onscreen Stoicism translates off the screen. Serious and business like, he remains ferociously guarded about his private life, and does interviews for no other reason than to promote a movie - not himself. This time round, Ford's passion about his latest project seems far more genuine. It's a shift in pace for an actor whose career is defined by what could be loosely defined as plot-driven entertainments. Random Hearts, a complex tale about trust, fidelity and the search for truth, doesn't fall into a typical Hollywood category. Ford denies, however, that his choices have been limited -and that this is the exception. "I think I do all kinds of films, and some of them are more entertainments than others, but I tend to always look for entertainment, even in a film like this. There is entertainment on a kinetic level, while this is entertainment on an emotional level," the casually attired actor says in a Los Angeles hotel room.

In Random Hearts, one of the most tragic plane crashes in Washington D.C finds two people (Ford, Kristin Scott Thomas), whose other halves were both killed in the crash, discovering something new in each other. Ford plays an Internal Affairs detective who sheds light on the situation when he discovers that the deceased were both travelling together under false names and each had in their possession an identical key to an unknown rendezvous. Overcome by anger and confusion at the affair, the couple, especially Ford, is determined to figure out the truth about their adulterous spouses and their own lives. His response to the script, in development for a number of years, was instinctive. "I responded emotionally and very directly to his dilemma, and that's what made me think I might want to do this." It's his most complex character to date, but the actor believes that it is the film as a whole that is complex. "It's a very complex story, the way it's built and the way it's told. It requires a certain definition and precision in this kind of story, that is fairly rare in filmmaking. You usual get by a more general expression."

The world of Random Hearts and Hollywood superstardom is a long way from the small-town background of the actor. Given the heroic attributes of Ford's best-known onscreen characters, there is no small irony in the events of his childhood, in suburban Des Plaines, Illinois: As a young runt, he had few friends and was a natural target for schoolyard bullies. He wasn't the best of students, where he earned C and D grades, hung out mostly with the girls, and served as one of those audiovisual assistants who push projectors from room to room. After high school, Ford attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he majored in English. A summer acting in stock theatre captured his interest, and while he was informed later on that he had failed too many of his classes to graduate, he headed for Los Angeles with his college sweetheart-wife, Mary Marquardt, and a dream of becoming an actor. It quickly became apparent that finding steady work in his chosen profession would be no easy feat. Even the perfectionist back then, Ford was ejected from talent stables at both Columbia and Universal for his refusal to cooperate with directors and producers who did not share his standards of excellence, and at age twenty-four, he took a carpenter's job building a new recording studio for Brazilian composer Sergio Mendes. Before long the trainee builder was earning a respectable living as a carpenter, and occasionally supplemented his income with small television and film roles whenever he could land them. Perhaps the most fateful casting of his career was for a role that Ford very nearly passed up. A promising young director named George Lucas offered him a supporting part in his film American Graffiti, but Ford walked off the set in disgust when he learned that he would be paid only $485 a week - less than half what he was earning as a carpenter. Luckily, he changed his mind when the studio offered him an extra fifteen dollars a week. The film was a surprise hit, and, more importantly, it marked the beginning of a lasting friendship between director and actor.

When Lucas was unable to cast the role of Star Wars' cynical space adventurer Han Solo, he asked Ford to read for the part and, at the age of thirty-four, the actor was a star in one of the most phenomenal blockbusters in the history of cinema. Although Star Wars made Ford a minor star, he had no luck replicating its box-office magic until Lucas's The Empire Strikes Back welcomed Han Solo back to the silver screen. The following year, as Lucas and Steven Spielberg were unable to schedule filming around Tom Selleck's commitment to Magnum P.I. on their first collaborative effort, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ford stumbled onto the role he was born to play: Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Ark. The film was an unqualified critical and commercial smash, and made Ford both a household name and an international sex symbol. Accordingly, his career flourished; and scored consistently good reviews in Ridley Scott's cult classic Blade Runner, and in Peter Weir's police thriller Witness. His presence also helped make huge hits out of Presumed Innocent, Patriot Games, The Fugitive, Working Girl, Clear and Present Danger, The Devil's Own, Air Force One and the recent Six Days. Seven Nights.

Ford has two adult sons from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1979, and four years later Ford married screenwriter Melissa Mathison. The couple has since boasted one of Hollywood's most stable marriages, and they have two children of their own, including a recent daughter. "I never realised that this was a completely different animal; it explains everything," Ford says about dealing with his daughter. Comparing her to his sons, "they respond differently to different things. It was a revelation to me that women were so different to men as an animal unit."

One of the two subplots of Ford's Random Hearts involves the political system. One of his many passions is the working of politics, or more precisely, government. "What interests me is the philosophy of government, the nature of government and its effect on the body politic, or vice versa. How we get to be the country we are, why we have the kind of representation we have, who we elect and how we elect them?"

Fans of the actor will be surprised at the level of depth he conveys to his latest screen character, yet when asked how he goes about searching for a character such as this, he remains fairly non-committal on the subject. After all, he's an instinctive actor, not one who believes in the Method of arduous preparation. "You certainly think about what options are available to you. I think this is particularly very well written stuff; you do part of the work, the story does part of the work, other characters do part of the work, and it's really a matter of making yourself useful to the overall. I don't think consciously of physical expression, unless there's something like at the point where my character is trying to find out about my wife. There was a moment where I was rubbing on the telephone, and I argued for Sydney [Pollack, director] to stay in that angle, just a little bit longer, so that you could feel the frustration that was attended to that expression."

Unlike many actors, Ford didn't need to search within himself to find that sense of emotional truth. "No, I just see and feel myself do it, and I know, whether or not, that feels right, or is the right thing to do. Then if I think that it's the right thing to do, I might push it a little harder or something." In an industry dominated by the youth market, at nearly 60, Ford is still appealing to a broad audience, though whether mainstream audiences are ready to embrace a film of such emotive complexity, complete with a somewhat difficult ending, remains to be seen. "You don't make a film like this and expect everyone's going to love it," Ford explains. "Certainly there's an audience for it. The question remains as to how broad that audience is, and whether or not young people will be drawn into this story about older people, because they have some common interest with the characters. Younger people usually don't find themselves interested in such things, but they are emotionally involved in their lives, and if we can reach them through the process of emotional affinity, they might begin to have some interest in and develop some thoughts about this, and the issues the film raises."

Ford is currently living in New York while his children attend school, and tolerates it, before returning to his farm in Wyoming. "I'm not a great fan of the city, but it's ok", he says. It's hard to believe that one of Hollywood's major players has been around in the business for 30 years, and the tanned, slightly silver-haired performer, still loves to do it. His only major ambition after 3 decades, he tells me, is continued "day to day satisfaction". And like many of his characters, Ford readily admits that he continues to have a passion "and belief in justice, humanity and goodness."  As for that age-old question: Will Ford return to the screen as Indiana Jones? "I hope there'll be one that comes up fairly soon. I'd love to do another. It just depends on the availability of Steven, George and the script. I'll be very interested to see what we come up with, script wise." Won't we all!

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