Harrison Ford: Off the Beaten Path

Harrison Ford discusses Air Force One, and then talks about the Dalai Lama, happiness, the legalization of marijuana, the best way to die, and the one question he'd ask God.

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If you know anyone who knows Harrison Ford personally what he's like, they'll tell you he's playful and funny, among other things. If you are a journalist and you ask Ford what he's like, he says, "I have very little interest in The Subject. I haven't thought about The Subject."

As statements from gigantically successful movie stars go, this one is unhelpful on the one hand, and understandable on the other. Either way, it's the attitude Ford protects himself with in public. He considers interviews to be part of his job, something he must do when he has a film to promote--the film in this case being Air Force One, in which the president of the United States is held hostage with his wife and child by terrorists aboard the presidential plane. But if you ask Ford some of the offbeat questions he thinks he's no good at answering, he can surprise you, and even hint at some of the lesser-known parts of The Subject.

LAWRENCE GROBEL: Did it ever occur to you at a certain age that you were old enough to be the president?

HARRISON FORD: It occurred to me when I played the president at 54 that I was probably a little old for it.

Q: Are you the hero in the end of Air Force One?

A: I'm a hero in the beginning. You'll just have to pay your money and find out about the end. [Pause] Yeah, of course I am. He does save the day.

Q: How was it working with Gary Oldman as the bad guy? Do actors like Oldman raise the level of your own performance?

A: I don't know if you can say that it raised the level, as though some greater quality exists, but it's fun to work with, an actor to whom it comes easily, who's able to be spontaneous and take advantage of what's going on.

Q: Do you like to improvise?

A: I rarely improvise. I'd rather discuss the idea and get collaborative agreement on it before I do it. Pure improvisation doesn't often work.

Q: Are there things you've seen in past characters which you'd like to do differently now?

A: I'm not satisfied, but I can't imagine actively thinking about changing anything. I don't have that kind of abstract head.

Q: Did things go more smoothly on Air Force One than on The Devil's Own?

A: It was a piece of cake. We all called it Air Force Fun.

Q: Is that usually the case with your films?

A: It normally is. Every once in a while there's a bump in the road.

Q: Have you ever bad-mouthed one of your movies?

A: No.

Q: What was your reaction when you heard that Brad Pitt called The Devil's Own an "irresponsible bit of filmmaking" in Newsweek?

A: First of all, I recognized the thoughts. They could have been my own. There was a point when everybody thought we should bag this stuff if it wasn't going to work. But we kept pushing and then it started to work. So I couldn't argue with what he said. I think it was simply a matter of forgetting that the person he was talking to was being paid to write this shit down. I wasn't terribly upset by it.

Q: Do you think Pitt will come as far as you have over the years?

A: He's already come as far--and further. I've been around for a long time, but I have never been as singularly popular as he is.

Q: Were they great leaps in characters for you--playing a cop in Devil's and the president in Air Force?

A: In The Devil's Own I played a New York City uniformed police sergeant, which I can easily imagine being. Imagining myself as the president is less easy because I couldn't imagine an ambition to be the president. But the job is always the same. And the cop and the president both share the same head, which is my head.

Q: Did you spend time riding around with New York cops?

A: Yeah. They let me hang with them and do what they did. It's a very tough job. Impossible job. I felt bad for them and bad for the people they were dealing with on the streets.

Q: What about the physical toll some of your movies take on you?

A: They're frequently accidents, not the result of trying to do something outrageous. I tore a rotator cuff in my shoulder on Air Force One so I'm waiting for that to heal. I hurt my shoulder over the years a number of times--you have a side you favor when you have to hit the ground and I generally land on my right shoulder. On The Fugitive I tore my ACL [a knee ligament] because I was running towards the camera. When we rehearsed it there had been a hole next to the camera I could run through; when we shot it somebody set a century stand in that hole and I put all my weight on my right leg to cut left to avoid it. I've given up skiing when I have a picture in the spring because I don't have an ACL in my left knee. That was run over by the flying wing in one of the Indiana Jones movies.

Q: Do you ever get nervous when you're acting?

A: Not really anymore. There's one thing that makes me nervous in life and that's public speaking. Though it might seem to have some similarity to what I do, it's completely different. Even when I act it, it makes me nervous.

Q: Did you expect the rerelease of the Star Wars trilogy to do the kind of business it did?

A: It's just amazing that a 20-year-old movie can be released this way. I'm delighted it's still of interest. And that's about as much as I think about it.

Q: Did you make any more money?

A: There probably will be some small amount of money, but I was not in a position to negotiate for a back-end when I did Star Wars. I was paid $1,000 a week and $1,000 a week for expenses.

Q: Has George Lucas sent you any presents since the rerelease?

A: He did give Alec Guinness, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and myself a small percentage of the net. He didn't have to do that. He did the same thing on American Grafitti--I got a tenth of a point on that.

Q: Did you know that Al Pacino turned down the Han Solo role in Star Wars?

A: Really? I think a lot of people were up for it, but frankly I don't think anybody was offered the part. My understanding was that George had two different groups of three that he had narrowed it down to. The only one I know he'd seriously entertained playing Han Solo was Chris Walken.

Q: It's hard to imagine your being any more famous with the Star Wars rerelease than you already were. Is it true that you and Sydney Pollack tried to drive away from your fans after seeing The English Patient, but they followed you for miles until you stopped and signed autographs?

A: They were driving dangerously, so I decided if I signed autographs they wouldn't do that.

Q: Do you understand such behavior?

A: No. I don't understand it.

Q: Is it ever scary?

A: It's not been scary ... yet.

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