Just a heroic human being

27/07/2000
The Sydney Morning Herald

Harrison Ford has never thought of himself as a hero. Not even when he fought the evil Nazis as Indiana Jones or captained his pirate spaceship through enemy galaxies as Han Solo. "You cannot, as an actor, set out to play a hero," he says. "You have to play a person, a human being. And whatever the script requires you to do, you do that, and let the reference of heroism come from somebody else."  Though he refuses the laurels, that reference sits well on Ford - who'd rather be at home in Wyoming with his family than talking about himself in a frenzy of Hollywood publicity. But Ford is a practical man. There are two important aspects in his life: his work and his family. "One pays for the other," he says. "I don't like to go to work unless I'll be able to work hard enough to be able to take some time off." By design Ford usually works once a year. "When I go out of the barn," he says, resting his wrists on the edge of the table in front of him, "I go out for five months to do the biggest movie I can, to make the biggest pile I can - to be frank - so I can go back and do the other thing I enjoy doing as well."

His big movie this time around, What Lies Beneath, displays a new Harrison Ford. Not the hero here, Ford plays a pivotal role in what is really a ghost story. As a meticulous genetic scientist, he begins to see his world fall apart when his wife's sanity seems imperilled. If Ford underestimates his filmic characters, he also underestimates himself. He's not a spiritual man, he says, though there is a certain unpretentious veracity about him, in his soft-spoken voice, the way his eyes make contact after a sideways glance. "I believe in fairness and morality and responsibility. But I don't have an absolute spiritual reference. I believe it's important to do good work and to be nice to people. What I believe in is that we are morally responsible," he says. The 58-year-old Ford learned those lessons by not becoming an overnight sensation. He remembers the first time he was on stage in college at Ripon in Wisconsin. "My first reaction was that this was the first thing that had ever scared me that badly. So all my first efforts were overcoming the fear that it generated. Once I got past that part of it, I was intrigued by the storytelling aspect of it. And also the freedom that it brought to me. In the guise of another personality, I was able to explore things in myself that I wasn't able to deal with in real life," Ford said. He has been exploring ever since in roles as diverse as the cop-on-the-lam in Witness, the obsessed father in Mosquito Coast, the brain-damaged attorney in Regarding Henry, as well as those surreal heroes in three Star Wars adventures and three Indiana Jones sagas.

Ford is at the point now where he contributes more to a film than just acting. He approves the script and the director and often has input into the course the film will take. But it wasn't always that way. He started as a contract player nabbing small roles in television Westerns. In the early '70s he began working as a carpenter, though he never really quit acting, he says. "I became a carpenter so that I could have an alternate income and could feed my family and begin to take some control over my career. Until I had an alternate income I had to take every acting job that came along and wasn't able to make creative choices," Ford said.

Once he had another job to fall back on, Ford began to discriminate, calculating the advantage of each opportunity. Though he was just one of the new faces in George Lucas' American Graffiti in 1973, Lucas remembered him four years later when he cast Ford as the wise-cracking Han Solo in the blockbuster Star Wars. Since then Ford has been able to hang up his carpenter's square - at least as a tool of his trade. Ford is married to screenwriter Melissa Mathison (ET, the Extra-Terrestrial). They are the parents of a boy and a girl. Ford has two older sons by a previous marriage. He has learned a lot since he felt his stomach churn that first time on stage.

Says Ford: "The one thing my research has always led me to understand - whether I was researching doctors or lawyers or policemen or anything else - is that, what you finally discover, is that they are just like we are, only they do a different job ... What finally helps you as an actor is not what you have as differences between you, but your common humanity.

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