HARRISON FORD ON WHY HE REVISITS HIS MOST FAMOUS ROLES,
HARRISON FORD ON WHY HE CAN’T RESIST RETURNING TO ROLES THAT MADE HIM A STAR
Two and a half years ago, Harrison Ford was flying a two-seater, Second World War-era aeroplane near his Los Angeles home when its engine cut out, and he crash- landed on a suburban golf course. A year before that, on the set of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the Millennium Falcon’s hydraulic doors went haywire and shunted into him with the force of a small car, breaking his left leg in two places.
Earlier this year, when the actor was piloting another light aircraft, he almost flew into the side of a Boeing 737 during touchdown, after confusing a taxiway for a runway. And at some point in the midst of this, cinema goers worldwide watched him tumble to his doom down an iron abyss, after his estranged son impaled him on a lightsaber. So when he saunters over to my table in a London hotel, dressed in dark blue blazer and jeans and jauntily, demonstrably all in one piece, I feel a sense of palpable relief.
If meeting Ford in person is like an encounter with an endangered species, it’s not just because of his recent close shaves. Over the past 10 years, the 75- year- old actor has been revisiting the three roles — Indiana Jones, Han Solo, and now Rick Deckard, in Blade Runner 2049 — which made him arguably the defining star of the dawning blockbuster age. Ford’s ultra-charismatic brand of tetchy heroism on the hoof connected those mushrooming mega-films to the vintage adventure serials and hard-boiled noirs of the Thirties and Forties that their ambitious young directors — Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott — wanted to revive and turbo-charge. For instance, the role in Blade Runner of Deckard — a private investigator who tracks down “replicants,” or ultra-lifelike androids, in a neonlit, fog- cloaked near- future Los Angeles — was originally written with noir icon Robert Mitchum in mind. And Ford could do that — just as he could do Humphrey Bogart with a blaster for Star Wars, or a swashbuckling Clark Gable- Alan Ladd hybrid for Raiders of the Lost Ark.
These days he’s the Hollywood elder statesman, although the way he tells it, the glittering adoration at soirees is in short supply. “I don’t see much of anybody socially,” he grumbles, when I suggest he must be enjoying his return to the limelight.
“With five kids I can hardly find time to see my accountant.”
That Ford roll-call in full: two sons from his first marriage to a high-school sweetheart, Mary Marquardt (with whom he’s still on good terms), a son and daughter with his second wife, the late screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and a 16-year-old son he adopted with his third, the Ally McBeal actress Calista Flockhart. Does he suspect his children idolized his characters growing up? And, given they’re aged between 16 and 51 — arguably the exact span of the target market for his recent work — were they looking forward to their return?
“They have an appropriate distance from what I do at the office,” he says. “My 16-year-old said he was going to watch the original Blade Runner, but I’m not sure he has. Let’s say they don’t want to sit down and watch Daddy’s history that way, at this point.”
Ford was 22 when he moved to Hollywood from Chicago in the mid-1960s, arriving just as the star system of old was in its death throes. He signed as a contract player with Columbia and Universal, but neither studio knew quite what to do with him — so he supplemented his meagre income with carpentry until he was 30, when he vied with hundreds of unknowns to win a role in Lucas’s American Graffiti. Ford was such a natural fit for the film’s nostalgic ’60s setting: back then, as now, his one-of-akind screen presence purred OK, kid, let me show you how it used to be done.
Right now, he’s in town to talk about Blade Runner 2049. Except he can’t — not really — because even though the 35-yearson sequel to Ridley Scott’s epochmaking opus arrives in cinemas next week, much like The Force Awakens before it, it’s being kept behind an adamantine wall of secrecy.
For Ford, that’s half the fun of it. “We’re going back to old movie rules,” he grins, between sips of coffee. “On the theory that maximum pleasure for the audi- ence will be derived from knowing nothing when they go in.” As soon as the film opens, spoilers will abound — he acknowledges that’s unavoidable — “but at least this way, you have the option to stop up your ears for a while and say ‘shut the f---k up’.”
Here, then, is what we know so far. The year, per the title, is 2049: exactly three decades on from the original, in which Ford’s Deckard “retired” four replicant insurgents, while wondering if he, too, might be an android beneath his hard-bitten skin, and if the difference even counted for much.
These days, Deckard is a hermit in the ruins of Las Vegas, but he’s unearthed by Ryan Gosling’s LAPD Officer K in the hope he can shed light on the nefarious goings- on at a replicant- manufacturing corporation run by a not-exactly- unmegalomaniacal Jared Leto. The opening sequence, which takes place in a cabin on a misty protein farm, was originally devised for the first film by returning screenwriter Hampton Fancher: the only difference is that Gosling’s character takes Deckard’s place. So for those 10 minutes, at the very least, it’s going to be as faithful to the original as the most zealous fan could hope.
I wonder aloud if Ford’s determination to retread familiar paths gives him the same kick of nostalgia so many of us get from watching him do it. “Oh no,” he says, with a flinch of distaste. “I’m not nostalgic. I’m a little sentimental from time to time, but that’s not enough to get me to do something. It’s just, you know, my job. Most of the time I just feed opportunistically on things that look like they might be a good idea.”
The idea in this instance came from Fancher and Ridley Scott, who thrashed out the storyline for a sequel a few years ago from which they hoped a screenplay might germinate. “Ridley asked me, ‘ Would you in theory want to play Deckard again?’,” Ford recalls. “And I said” — affecting classic Fordian befuddlement — “’ Well, maybe. Do you have a story?’ And it turned out he had a whole novella.”
Like Scott, Ford has long been at peace with the original Blade Runner’s rocky reception. Released two weeks after Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial in an unflattering, compromised cut, the pessimistic, ambiguous film left audiences cold. There was an awkward happy ending, tacked on at the studio’s insistence, and an expository voiceover, the recording of which Ford recalls with a grimace. “We weren’t allowing the audience to come into the story voluntarily, but telling them what we wanted them to know,” he says. “It sucked.” Seven distinct versions of the original Blade Runner exist, and the voice- over wasn’t removed until the sixth, in 1992. Scott’s definitive Final Cut, which cemented its masterpiece status, was only completed in 2007.
The shoot was mythically fraught: 50 consecutive nights on a Warner Bros backlot with the rain and smoke machines cranked to full pelt, the moneymen gnashing their teeth on the sidelines, and a director and star who didn’t even see eye to eye on whether the lead character was an android or not.
Looking back, he thinks that fundamental tension is one of Blade Runner’s greatest assets: “The unsettled nature of it is a subtlety in the film itself,” he suggests, before adding, slightly mind-bendingly: “But if we had settled it, I wouldn’t have played the character any different.”
He does, however, acknowledge that Scott gave him the latitude to shape Deckard in other ways — as did Denis Villeneuve, who directed the forthcoming sequel immediately after another work of cerebral sci-fi, Arrival. It’s how Ford likes to work — “if I couldn’t, I wouldn’t do it” — and it’s notable just how many of his defining screen moments have been the result of an on-set brainwave.
Take the unceremonious end to the sword fight in Raiders of the Lost Ark: laid low on location in Tunisia with dysentery, Ford didn’t dare risk any leaps and thrusts, so simply pulled out a gun instead.
And his unforgettable response to Carrie Fisher’s “I love you” in The Empire Strikes Back — “I know” — was concocted in the moment, but caught the entire appeal of Star Wars in a two-syllable snapshot. He’s still proud of that one. “It’s not like you’re on set and you say, ‘Stop, hey, look, I’m being great!’” he says. “But you may be insistent about it, in the face of opposition. And I was about ‘I know’, because it was the essence of the character. It meant even when I came back to Star Wars recently, the relationship I had with Carrie still had a powerful core.”
Fisher’s death late last year hit him hard — perhaps especially so because the actress had recently disclosed in a book details of their romance on the set of the original Star Wars, shortly before Ford’s first divorce. At the time he described her as “one-ofa-kind... brilliant, original. Funny and emotionally fearless.”
His one hope f rom t his interview — which he tells me straight — is that it’ ll persuade people to experience Blade Runner 2049 in a cinema, rather than on the screen of their smartphone.
“The isolation of these personal devices is robbing people of one of the most important features of these movies,” he says.
“Because that group storytelling tradition goes all the way back to cave paintings. When you’re all sitting in the dark with all of this stimulation — visual, aural, intellectual, emotional — it’s like you’re attending to your common humanity. It’s like going to church: you don’t want to be the only one around when they ask you to stand and start singing.”
He rubs his chin, his eyes crinkle. “You want to know there are other believers out there.”
IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE ON SET AND YOU SAY, ‘STOP, HEY, LOOK, I’M BEING GREAT!