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Harrison Ford: In His Own Words
From: American Film Institute
| By:
Rochelle Levy Lazar |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Prior to Harrison Ford's phenomenal success in film, he became a self-taught carpenter and worked as a craftsman while searching scripts for ideal roles. His patience paid off, and Ford quickly became one of the most successful actors at the box office through such well-known roles as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Yet, Ford still attributes much of his good fortune as an actor to the work ethic he developed through such skills as carpentry, applying a logic to the craft of acting that he considers the source of his success. In this feature edited by AFI's Rochelle Levy Lazar, a series of published interviews with Harrison Ford are drawn together to provide insight into the actor's career in film, as well as his life off the set. |
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| The young Harrison Ford got his first break into film with his role as a bellhop in the 1966 film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. | |
 t a fairly early stage, I knew I didn't want to work in an office. When I was four or five, my dad would come home from his job and talk about how unhappy everyone was there. My first childhood ambition was to be the guy who carried the coal from our house to the coal chute in a wheelbarrow. I liked the rhythm of his work. It was a job, and you could see it getting done. |
I was kind of a runty thing. And I liked to hang out with the girls. That annoyed the boys. So every day after school, they would throw me over the edge of the parking lot and roll me into the weeds. They weren't so much beatings as exercises in ritual humiliation. I knew the ritual had a form and a shape to it, and that it was far more efficient just to tumble down the hill in a satisfying way and then make my way up, rather than have to fight those guys to get back into the parking lot. Maybe they did it because they wanted a fight they could win. And my way of winning was to just hang in there. |
Choosing to act
I had performed in a couple of plays in college, and all it did was scare the bejesus out of me. It was the need to deal with that fear which compelled me to do it again. All my friends were going off to be professionals, and I said I wanted to be an actor because I wanted to live a different life. I didn't want to go to the same place every day and see the same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges. I wanted to be in different places geographically. I didn't really calculate how difficult that was to achieve. |
In my first film, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, all I had to do was deliver a lousy telegram. I was always the bank-robbing brother or the business brother or the sensitive brother, any kind of brother. Or the guy who didn't do it--the guy they think, at the beginning, did it, but who really didn't. Right from the beginning I believed that staying on course was what counted. The sheer process of attrition would wear others down. Them that stuck it out was them that won. |
The craft of acting
I've never considered myself to be an artist. I've always considered myself a craftsperson. I'm a technical actor. For me, acting is part intellectual, part mechanical. It's being in control of your mind and body at the same time. The emotions you show may be spontaneous, but the bricks have to be carefully laid to fit with the other pieces. You don't fool around with the work. Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live forever and they're 40 feet wide and 20 feet high. What I learned from carpentry, above all, was a work ethic. I didn't know anything about it, but I got books out of the library, got the tools, and for about eight years, just did it, making cabinets and furniture. I submitted myself totally to the logic of it. It was a wonderful thing to learn--and I could see my accomplishments. |
I intentionally keep my interpretation simple. I don't make up a character who could have a life without benefit of the specific story. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard--they wear different clothes and they live in different times. I'm not being glib when I say it's as simple as that. Star Wars was simply straightforward, a clear human story. I didn't have to act science fiction. I wasn't at all sure how the film would do. I thought either it would reach a big audience who saw it as a fun, space-aged western, or it would be so silly that my two kids, who nicknamed me "Harrison Force," would have been embarrassed for me to leave the house. |
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| Harrison Ford, after receiving the 28th AFI Live Achievement Award, alongside his director from the Star Wars films, George Lucas. | |
You'd expect development of the characters in a second act. I wasn't surprised when I saw a different version of Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back script. We get to know him better. It's a little known fact, but I wanted Han Solo to die at the end of Return of the Jedi. I thought it would give the movie weight and resonance. I thought it would give the myth some body, that Han Solo, in fact, really had no place to go--he's got no momma, he's got no poppa. He's got no story. He would have best served the situation by giving it the weight of sacrifice, but that was the one thing I was unable to convince George of. George has a predisposition to happy endings. |
Getting into character
In Mosquito Coast I played a real swine. A father who dragged his family off to the heart of the jungle and imposed upon them his dreams of a return to nature. A person who was the antithesis of what I am. For me, family is definitely the most sacred thing in the world. Not a lot of people wanted to see me play that part, but I didn't make the choice for them, I made it for myself, thinking that enough of them would enjoy him for the same reason I did. His innate intelligence, his skill with words. |
The role of an actor is to serve as a mirror. My job is not to show you that the character and I have something in common. My job is to show you that you and the character--even one who may seem a little crazy--have something in common. If people know too much about me, it's me they see up there instead of the character that I'm paid to represent. |
While researching my part in Frantic, I discovered that heart surgeons are among the elite of the doctor world. I also found a certain elegance or vanity of gesture that was common to these guys. Lots of hand movements. I already gesture enough with my hands, so that wasn't a challenge. My wife often found me in the same frustrated mood as my character, a mood I thought I'd been able to drop. It was more of a strain than I'd anticipated. |
I wasn't much interested in the courtroom behavior of Rusty Sabich in Presumed Innocent, but I wanted to observe the more banal aspects--the little details such as the handling of files or how attorneys interact with each other at the coffee machine. If you're playing a lawyer who wears wingtip Oxfords, you don't go to work in tennis shoes because they're shooting that day only from the waist up, because suddenly you're not walking the same. To play The Fugitive's Dr. Richard Kimble, I wanted to know the minutiae. I wanted to know how a surgeon would turn toward a nurse to put on his gown, not as if he'd done it once but as if he'd done it a thousand times. That's the truth of a part. |
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. |
I liked the plane my character flies in Six Days Seven Nights well enough to buy one myself. Flying is so important to this character that one of my ambitions was to give an audience an inkling of what attracted this guy to that life, to that skill--and to do it without dialogue. And that's more easily demonstrated in an actual environment than it is on a blue screen. |
I don't regret those choices that I didn't make that went on to be big successes for someone else. The reason that I didn't take the job was that I didn't know how to do it, or it was too close to something I'd already done, or I didn't like the idea. If you can't do it, you can't do it. There's no sense regretting it. |
Choice and opportunity
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| From his first roles in the 1960s to the present, Harrison Ford's career in film has been going strong for five decades. | |
I would like to do what I'm doing for as long as I can make a living at it and not go entirely bats--that's my ambition. But I need balance. I need to be in a situation where my every whim is not attended to, where I have to fetch my own nails, do my own shopping and wash my own dishes. Being normal is a kind of victory. The pleasure of my life is that, however long it takes to make a movie, when it's over, I'm back to reality. Back to the banal tasks where I belong. |
To me, success is choice and opportunity. Today, without departing totally from a certain heroism which is my trademark, I try to play roles which are more human, with stories anchored in daily life. I have an ambition to give a good performance in whatever I do. Whether it's accepted, or how it's accepted, is beyond my control and comprehension. But I'm grateful for the support I've generally enjoyed. Really and truly grateful. |
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