Speak Softly and Carry a Big Script

Indiana Jones is really up against it this time. If only it were something simple, like dodging poisonous blow-darts, escaping from a snake-infested tomb or ducking the Luftwaffe. But standing in a banquet hall delivering a public speech--one that requires not only that he revisit his past but also, God forbid, show some level of profundity . . . no, it’s too horrible to contemplate. Indy, you’re doomed.

Harrison Ford has a pained expression on his face, one as dark as the winter storm clouds that have rolled in from the Pacific this weekday morning, dampening his hillside home and the nearby streets of West Los Angeles, where pedestrians scurry for cover.

He has had weeks now to digest the flattering news that the American Film Institute has chosen him to receive its Life Achievement Award--one of the great honors Hollywood bestows on men and women whose careers have had a lasting impact on motion pictures. Among the previous recipients are such acting legends as Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, not to mention esteemed directors ranging from John Ford to Martin Scorsese.

It’s not that Ford isn’t humbled and gratified by the AFI’s choice. He is. “I’m very grateful,” Ford says, momentarily brightening. “I recognize the fact that I’m in great company.”

But, he adds with a worried look, “the greatest fear in my life is public speaking.”

Ironic, isn’t it? The actor whose ruggedly handsome face is so familiar in every corner of the globe through such cinematic blockbusters as the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” trilogies, “The Fugitive,” “Air Force One” and “Patriot Games” confesses that there’s something about standing up and giving a formal speech that always unnerves him. Nothing else does. Why, just last October he crash-landed a Bell helicopter near Lake Piru and apparently never even felt an adrenaline rush.

Furthermore, the man who has given countless media interviews over the years to help the studios hype their films has no desire to hype himself.

“When I have a movie to promote or to sell, which is the occasion in which I usually meet with the press, I have a very clear agenda,” Ford explains. “Here, I have no [expletive] idea what to do because I’ve got nothing to say. I refuse to sell myself. That’s not what I’m about.”

That the AFI would choose Ford to honor this coming Thursday night with a Life Achievement Award is a no-brainer. If ever there was a screen hero who symbolized American pop culture in the last quarter-century, it is Harrison Ford, either as the cocky, sarcastic Han Solo of “Star Wars” fame or as the stubble-faced, fedora-topped Indiana Jones, first introduced to moviegoers in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

But those are just images flickering on a screen. The real Harrison Ford is more difficult to bring into focus--and he likes it that way.

He is a movie star of the highest order, an actor who seems to transcend his era the way Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy did. He has worked under some of the leading directors of his time, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Mike Nichols, Sydney Pollack, Peter Weir, Roman Polanski, Robert Zemeckis and the late Alan J. Pakula. His films have grossed more than $3 billion in North America alone--10 of them climbing above $100 million each at the box office.

Yet, when it comes to assessing his legacy of more than three decades in light of the AFI honor, Ford has no glib sound bites to impart. In fact, he admits, he is neither capable of nor interested in reflecting on his life or trying to make sense of his career for other people. He simply makes movies the way a carpenter--an occupation that paid the bills during his early, lean years of acting--makes houses. He’s a craftsman, not an architect.

“I have never tried to develop a unified field theory about all of this,” Ford says.

Still, the question of his legacy hangs in the air, so Ford grudgingly tackles it as best he can.

“I don’t know. I just see myself as one part of these films, one of the elements involved in a collaborative enterprise--sometimes not even a collaborative enterprise. . . . It’s a director’s medium. We really are part of his process.”

There is something refreshing about a movie star without a galloping ego on display. This is, after all, an actor who shuns naming his favorite Harrison Ford movies and rarely revisits them once they’re in the can.

“I don’t think I’ve seen a single one of the films I’ve been in all the way through after their first screening,” he says. “It makes me too uncomfortable. I always want it to be better, but there is nothing I can do to change it now.”

Pollack, who directed him in “Random Hearts” and a remake of “Sabrina,” says that what he finds so appealing about Ford is his “healthy ego.”

“Harrison is not looking to figure out who he is, and he’s not looking to prove anything,” the director says. “He is very comfortable in his own skin and with what he is doing.”

What makes Ford so popular with audiences as an action star, Pollack notes, is that he embodies the qualities of an Everyman. He is a hero who is not afraid to be uncool, Pollack says, “So, oddly enough, he becomes more cool.”

“He’s not an aristocratic action hero like James Bond,” Pollack adds. “He is a proletarian action hero. As a result, he punches [buttons] with everyone, men and women. We feel, when we watch Harrison, that he is as frightened as we would be, but he is heroic anyway.”

Lucas credits Ford’s charisma with enabling him to carry a movie all by himself.

“I think that he’s our modern-day Clark Gable,” Lucas says. “And, like Gable, he’s a hero, but he’s the Everyman hero with chinks and vulnerabilities and faults, so that he’s not bigger than us--he is us.”

Zemeckis, who recently directed Ford in “What Lies Beneath,” a supernatural thriller co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer scheduled for release later this year, believes that Ford’s stardom rests on the fact that women find him physically attractive while men see him as nonthreatening and accessible.

As Zemeckis puts it: “He’s somebody a guy wants to have a beer with.”

But ticking underneath that star image, Zemeckis says, is a “meticulous” actor who immerses himself in every role. When they began shooting “What Lies Beneath” in Vermont, the director recalls, Ford showed up a week before his appearance was required so he could “see the set and feel the set.”

When asked how Ford was to work with, Zemeckis replies: “I can only speak for the experience I had, but in this case, there was never a situation where it was ‘Whose movie is this anyway?’ He was always there to serve.”

*

The funny thing about Ford’s acting career is that it might never have materialized the way it did, had he not stopped in a men’s room one day at Columbia Pictures.

As he tells it, he was doing a play in Laguna Beach in the mid-1960s and went to the studio to interview with a casting director, who took out a 3-by-5 card and asked the Chicago native the usual questions put to would-be movie actors: “What’s your height? What’s your weight? Do you speak Spanish? Can you ride a horse? Thanks very much. Goodbye.”

Ford walked down the hall and was about to hit the elevator button when the urge to visit the urinal came over him.

“When I came out, this guy’s assistant was running down the hall saying, ‘Come on back! He wants to talk to you!’ He said, ‘Do you want to be under contract?’ I said, ‘What does it pay?’ He said, ‘$150 a week.’ I said, ‘Sure.’

“I have no idea why the guy sent that guy after me,” Ford now reflects on that fateful moment long ago, “but I do know if I had gone down that elevator, I wouldn’t have been worth chasing to the street. There was that much difference.”

It would be 15 years before he actually made a decent living at acting.

Ford had never seriously considered acting as a profession until his third year of college, when a “very uncertain academic future” prompted him to devise another career plan.

“I really almost chose to try acting out of a lack of available options and because I thought it sounded like a kind of neat thing--you work for some finite period on one idea with one group of people, you have an intense and engaging period of time, and then that’s done and you move on to another group of people and another idea and you’re someplace else,” Ford says. “This, to me, sounded like a great adventure, a great way to jam many lives into one lifetime.

“So, in my ignorance, without recognizing what the odds were, I just went out to do it and I really didn’t ever have the ambition to aspire to be in the place where I’m sitting now,” he says. “All I ever wanted to do was make a living as an actor. I thought I was a character actor. I didn’t even know there was something like a leading man. All I knew was that in college, I was playing parts with a pillow in my pants and talcum powder in my hair, so I didn’t really think about being a leading man.”

By the early 1970s, he had already been under contract to Columbia and Universal, had worked in episodic television and, he says, “became a carpenter so I wouldn’t have to do episodic television. It was not a straight shot.”

A producer named Fred Roos believed in him, Ford recalls, and forced him on Lucas, who was casting a 1973 coming-of-age film called “American Graffiti.” Lucas would later cast the tall, lean actor as Han Solo in a 1977 film called “Star Wars,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

When asked what Ford brought to the role of Solo, Lucas replies:

“He has this great sense of spontaneity, as if every reading is his first.”

As to why Solo’s character remains so enduring, Lucas observes, “Everybody loves the rogue, especially if he gets the princess in the end.”

When fame hit--and it hit with a wallop--Ford managed to distance himself from the insanity by burying himself in his work.

“I was concerned about being typed,” Ford says, “so I went away almost immediately to do a couple of films nearly back to back . . . to get my name above the title and to get my price at an adequate level.”

It was as Indiana Jones, under Spielberg’s direction in the 1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” that Ford admits, “I had the most fun I had ever had with a character and with a director.”

Ford remains grateful to Lucas and Spielberg for what they have meant to his career. “George Lucas has provided me with my validity,” Ford says, and he credits Spielberg, who directed all three “Indiana Jones” movies, with being “a critical part of my career and an enormous help to me.”

But it was Australian director Weir who provided Ford with what the actor believes was one of the most important movies of his career--the 1985 suspense thriller “Witness,” in which he played a Philadelphia cop on the lam hiding out in Amish country. The role earned him an Oscar nomination, the only one of his career.

“I had been so closely associated with Steven and George, I think it was a question in the industry whether I was useful outside of that box,” Ford says. “[Weir’s] film received enough attention to allow me to separate myself from their success--their righteously acknowledged success.”

Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Ford’s name on a film usually meant brisk box office, either as ex-CIA agent Jack Ryan in two films based on best-selling Tom Clancy novels, “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger”; as a wrongly accused doctor in pursuit of a one-armed man in the big-screen treatment of “The Fugitive”; or as the president of the United States battling terrorists at 35,000 feet in “Air Force One.” The worldwide box-office success of such films vaulted Ford into the top tier of movie actors along with Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, Jim Carrey and John Travolta, who earn between $20 million and $25 million per picture.

Audiences, however, have not embraced him as forcefully when he ventures into non-action roles. “Six Days, Seven Nights,” for example, grossed a respectable $74.3 million domestically; “Working Girl,” $62.2 million; “Sabrina,” $53.7 million; and last year’s “Random Hearts,” only $31 million.

Ford bristles when asked why these films haven’t performed as well as, say, “The Fugitive.”

“One wouldn’t expect [“Six Days, Seven Nights”] to be a blockbuster,” he says. “That’s where there comes the rub. I do not expect every film that I do to be as successful as ‘The Fugitive.’ Why would you have that expectation? I think a film like ‘Six Days, Seven Nights’ has its own level for success.”

As a matter of fact, Ford says he would love to do more comedies.

“The reason I did ‘Six Days, Seven Nights’ was because I wanted the taste of that stuff again,” he says. “I like that kind of work, the challenge of it, the fun of it. I like to laugh and see people laugh. I like to make the point through humor.”

He then jokes: “Maybe I’ll start doing some of those scripts that Walter Matthau’s not doing, some of his leavings.”

Ford realizes that for a star to remain on top, he has to adapt to the times. For that reason, he recently aligned himself with United Talent Agency after going 15 years without a major agency. UTA will work with Pat McQueeney, Ford’s principal agent and manager for the past 30 years, to come up with new projects, with an eye toward younger, cutting-edge filmmakers. Why the change?

“It’s very simple,” Ford says. “The studios used to be the source of most of our material. The studios used to develop a lot of scripts, and that process is no longer the way the business works. I want to get closer to material at an earlier stage and look for material that is a little edgier and more appropriate to the audience who we now see developing.”

Ford notes that movie audiences are “becoming younger and becoming more sophisticated. The kind of films that are now enjoying success and attention are edgier than the typical studio product.”

Ford says he particularly admires how Bruce Willis has succeeded in crossing over from action star to more serious genres, as he did in last year’s blockbuster “The Sixth Sense.”

“I really admire his choices and his instincts,” Ford says of Willis. “He took a chance on a first-time director, which I have really not done at all.”

Ford would love to reprise his role as Indiana Jones, but although he is still fit for the demanding role, he realizes he can’t wait too many years.

“Sean [Connery] may have to play my grandfather in the next movie,” Fords jokes. “I’m not worried about me, I’m worried about Sean.”

*

At 57, Harrison Ford remains fit and trim. The flannel shirt, the jeans, the clunky watch--all bespeak a manly presence more comfortable on a ranch or in the cockpit of a plane banking toward the horizon than fielding questions about his film legacy.

It’s no wonder, then, that the man who can afford to have “four or five” small planes and a new helicopter on order takes to the sky whenever he can. It’s a hobby he took up after being goaded into it by Pollack, who also got Tom Cruise interested in flying.

Between his family, his passion for flying, his work on behalf of the environment (he is on the board of Washington-based Conservation International), and his behind-the-scenes interest in politics and even Tibet, Ford readily admits that he leads a compartmentalized life, one in which the movie business is quite distinct from his avocations.

Seated in his West Los Angeles home savoring a cup of morning brew, Ford notes that while he maintains a home near the Hollywood film industry, his real homes are far away at his ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and in New York City, where he and his wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison, reside while their children, 12-year-old Malcolm and 9-year-old Georgia, attend school. He also has two grown sons, Ben and Will, from his first marriage, and a 6-year-old grandchild.

When asked why one rarely sees photos of his children in the media, Ford replies: “I want my kids to enjoy their privacy. There is no reason why they should be dragged into this fishbowl with me.”

Although he is among the highest-paid actors in Hollywood (“Tell you what I don’t do, is discuss business in public”), he is not tempted like other major stars to produce or direct movies.

“I don’t want to do that because I want some time away from the business,” he says. “The way it is now, I do one film a year usually. And it leaves me just enough time to be with my family and to pursue the other interests that I have.”

Asked why he doesn’t want to direct, Ford has a ready answer: “I really don’t want to be a boss.”

As a star, Ford knows full well that no matter who directs the film, people will ultimately judge him on whether the movie is a success or failure.

“I feel responsible for my work and I also feel responsible, to a certain extent where it’s reasonable, for the film,” Ford says, “because people are going to be induced to attend it on the basis of my participation and I’m going to have to [expletive] face the music.

“It’s my face that they are familiar with,” he says. “They don’t know what the director looks like . . . unless it’s Steven Spielberg.”