Harrison Ford: Still Sane After All These Years

Q: Candy Clark, one of your co-stars in American Graffiti, recalled in a Movieline interview that you and another co-star, Paul LeMat, drank together and ended up doing things like putting beer cans on top of the Holiday Inn sign. Did you indeed raise a lot of hell?

A: I raised a lot of hell because I had a lot of time on my hands. It was all shot at night, so everybody was up all night whether they were shooting or not. I was a bit of a carouser in those days. And I was in the company of other hell-raisers. If I' d been in the company of priests I would have behaved differently.

Q: After Star Wars you seem to have mellowed considerably. Were you, so to speak, in the company of priests then?

A: Rather, yeah.

Q: Alec Guinness must have been the first great actor you came in contact with, right?

A: Yeah. He was very charming and warm, and of course I was scared to death of appearing in the same frame with him. But the day we met he spent a couple of hours on the phone trying to find me an apartment in London. He was delightfully down-to-earth and absolutely did not insist on deference. Although you couldn't [help] but grant it.

Q: A few different stories about you have referred to your "inner rage." Is the word "rage" really necessary? Wouldn't "anger" do? Where are these comments coming from?

A: It' s coming from hyperbole. And it' s coming from a period of time when I wasn't encouraged or allowed to influence the situations I was in. It was born of frustration, and frustration led to anxiety. And anxiety led to inappropriate expression often. But it was almost always confined to: "Fuck me? Fuck you."

Q: Meaning?

A: "You don' t care what I have to say? Fuck you" "You think I' m a dip? Fuck you" "You think I' m stupid and can' t take advantage of this opportunity? Fuck you" That' s what it comes from. It doesn't come from any judgment about my superiority. Still, I think it' s been overstated.

Q: You' re known for having a lot of creative input on your films without going so far as to actually direct, as other actors with your level of power have done.

A: I don' t want to be the boss, I don' t believe I've developed the skills to be a director.

Q: Other actors seem to think they have to direct, whereas you seem to be able to get what you need done without directing.

A: I like to go away and have another life. When you gel involved in directing you lose whatever time you've tried to set aside for your personal life. I like to work intensely for a period of time and then finish and go back to something resembling real life. If you direct, you' re looking at two years instead of five or six months. Enough is enough. I watch directors, and know this to be the hardest job in the world. The hardest job in the world.

Q: Most directors seem to have just so many movies in them. Do you feet that way about yourself?

A: Sometimes I feel that way. Then I read a piece of material that engages me emotionally and I realize that' s the coin of the realm, emotion, and it never actually leaves you. Invention is not as important as investment. You don' t really have to be all that good, all that smart. You just have to be there and give of yourself, and take.

Q: How did you deal with failure as a young actor?

A: My feeling was that you could succeed simply on the basis of attrition. I came in on that mythical bus to Hollywood with a full busload, and in two years half of them had gone back to Omaha. After three years, another third had left. After five or six years, you' re the only one left from that bus. Attrition diminished the competition. I never gave up. I had a limited ambition: to make a living as an actor. But I always knew that if I worked at it long enough I would reach that limited ambition. So my way of dealing with failure was lo choose something I could succeed at to put food on the table. I became a carpenter. I always knew that taking the wrong job was failure before you even showed up. I was terribly frustrated, though, and some of the anger that people attribute to me came out of that frustration.

Q: What were your feelings after the failure of The Mosquito Coast?

A: I adored that movie. If people didn't want to sec me be mean to kids, I understood that. But I was thrilled to have made that movie, to have worked with Peter Weir, to have been in Belize for five months, to have worked with River and Helen Mirren. That was a success for me.

Q: One story written about you quoted "close friends" as being of the opinion that your character in The Mosquito Coast was so much like you the film could have been called The Harrison Ford Story. What did they mean?

A: I don't know who [said it] and I don't know what they mean, except that I have the capacity for the kind of indignation and ire that [Coast character] Allie Fox showed at the injustice and wrongness of the world--I don' t pin it on the Japanese or whoever else Allie used as excuses for his own failure but...

Q: You also don' t seem to have his propensity for going off the deep end.

A: No. I don't.

Q: What about Frantic, which also failed at the box office?

A: I like that film. It' s not a perfect film, but it' s good.

Q: What was the idea in that film?

A: Fish out of water.

Q: Where did it fail?

A: Fish out of water sometimes die from luck of something to breathe. If it is a failure. What I' m describing to you is my separation from commercial success or failure. I've always looked at success as giving me the opportunity to fail. The circumstances that create the success or failure of a film are so complicated, I simply value the experience.

Q: You are not all that happy with Blade Runner, even in its restored version, are you?

A: It really is Ridley Scott's expression. It' s what he wanted to make. My dissatisfaction with it was in the communication between Ridley and myself about what it was he wanted to do. I felt more a pawn than a partner. We engaged in a process for several weeks at my dining room table and then very little, of that seemed to make its way into the film. The film is not my style. It depends on surfaces. It' s intellectual as opposed to visceral. I understand its attraction for others, but 1 like a more emotionally engaging kind of film.

Q: Which movie of yours are you most proud of?

A: I just don' t think that way. It' s like saying, which is your favorite child?

Q: Is your home in Wyoming the most beautiful place you've ever been?

A: For pure physical beauty. I think we all get something set in our heads early on, and the first time I saw Jackson Hole I said, this is the place that' s been in my mind all the time. It was about water, streams, trees, animals, a grand expression of nature--the Tetons rising sharply from a flat, high mountain plateau. There' s nothing to compare with it. When I need to relax and change my head, I can mentally go on a walk through my woods and remember what you see looking left as you cross the first bridge. I can remember the day I saw the moose down there. I' ve been all over the world and I come back to that and I' m refreshed and reinvigorated by that beauty, without exception.

Q: One last question. How's your tennis game?

A: Various. I never did any physical exercise till I was 45 and then I realized I was getting kind of creaky. So I started skiing and playing tennis. I really love tennis and I play it all over the world with different pros. I never play socially because it seems like a waste of time. I like to get out there and work on skills and run around and sweat. So I play with pros, I don' t mean, like Agassi, but tennis coaches who can tell me how to improve.

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Virginia Campbell is one of the executive editors of Movieline.

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