“The Ford in Our Future,” by Vicki Woods, was originally published in the March 1997 issue of Vogue.
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Harrison Ford walks toward me in a $3,000 Cerruti suit, across the length of a crowded soundstage in Culver City, Los Angeles. It is a purposeful walk, and swift. His eyes glitter. He is covered in blood; his hair is matted with sweat and dirt; there’s a knuckle graze on his cheekbone and a dangerous gash oozing over one eyebrow. Loads of people are covered in blood this morning. Less heroic-looking people than Harrison Ford: swarthy guys in flak jackets, executive types in business suits, all spattered with gore. A pilot is munching his breakfast doughnut with half his chest shot away. (“Killed yesterday.”) The general effect of a recent riot, coupled with the Cerruti suit, the seniority of long-term stardom, and the appealing aura that a $20 million paycheck always lends a man, is pretty thrilling.
He wears the suit with careless grace, being not only lean and athletically built but also—at five feet eleven—tall enough. (Call me heightist, but I’ve always believed that a hero should come up higher than your armpit.) His face expresses a wary mix of candor, cussed determination, and controlled impatience. Part of this expression is a reflection of the character he’s playing (he was in front of the camera only a minute ago); part seems to be engendered by the slightly irritating sight of a Vogue writer hopping about the soundstage in unsuitable Manolo spikes. Heroes, especially reluctant heroes, don’t relish lengthy spans of introspection and self-analysis at the behest of journalists. Heroes are can-do guys. Modest. Wary. Laconic. Harrison Ford’s clippings file is thin, and I could only find one biography in the stores: a fairly awestruck filmography. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, and right now, what he’s gotta do is publicity.
Still walking, he sticks out his hand, whirls me toward the exit door before I’ve caught a breath, and into a little white golf cart. Instantly, he slams it into reverse before spinning it, one-handed, 90 degrees around a corner. Carrie Fisher famously said of Harrison Ford that “he looks as if he’s carrying a gun, even if he isn’t.” He isn’t carrying a gun (though there are bullet holes through his sleeve); he’s carrying a neat little PowerBook, which he thrusts at me and I cling to manfully as we speed through the narrow studio canyons, skimming a location truck by a finger’s breadth. In a voice like Atlantic breakers dragging on gravel, he says, “We’re going to my trailer.” Without looking at me, he adds, “That OK?”
Well, I can’t think of a woman in the world for whom it wouldn’t be OK to be clinging to a runaway golf cart driven by Harrison Ford in a $3,000 suit covered in blood. You’d follow him anywhere, wouldn’t you? To the Temple of Doom and back? Into a small plane with engine trouble? I open my mouth to say so, but only a wimpy little squeak issues forth as a gang of technicians in hard hats leap for their lives. Ford hurls the golf cart into a six-inch parking space beside his trailer, and a Spanish guy suddenly jumps out from nowhere, brandishing a thick stick and yelling, “Forr you, Meester President!” I can feel another little bleat bubbling up in the face of clear and present danger (this is Los Angeles, after all). But Harrison Ford, wary, alert, cool, commanding, is ready for anything life might hurl his way. Big sticks, bleating women—whatever. He accepts the proffered stick and sniffs it. Rolls it gently between finger and thumb. And says, “Nice cigar. Thanks. I’ll smoke it later.” Boom! go the strings of my heart.
They keep on booming all day. We reprise this runaway-golf-cart scene over and over, speeding from the set, where he acts, to the trailer, where he talks, and back again. Sometimes he gives me his PowerBook to nurse, sometimes his corn chowder or some other damn spilling thing. Filming is the nuttiest occupation because it repeats and repeats: 28-second bursts of ferocious activity, followed by hours of yawning and flicking over the pages of last week’s Variety. He carries a two-way radio, which bursts out to interrupt us: “COWBOY!” says a crackling female voice. “COWBOY!” Harrison Ford picks it up and growls, “Cowboy!” back. She says, “Five-minute warning!” and he says, “Walkin’,” and hurls me back in the golf cart for the race back to the set. (Don’t laugh! It was so cool!)
Harrison Ford is the Star of the Century, the only actor to appear in more than one of the top-ten biggest-grossing movies of all time (Han Solo and Indiana Jones were his Gary Cooper/Jimmy Stewart/John Wayne roles, with a bit of Bogart thrown in.) I liked his Cary Grant roles, too: Witness and Working Girl. He’s had a slightly fallow period lately (nobody I know liked Regarding Henry much—or Sabrina at all), but 1997 looks to be a vintage year for him. Star Wars is back. Worldwide, a whole generation of little girls fell in love with Han Solo, even though they knew that should the great day ever dawn when they could somehow get to tell him “I love you!” he’d only say, “I know.” They are 20 years older now, but they’re flooding into the theaters to revisit Star Wars, with all its expensive new digital re-enhancement and all its old magic.
This year will also see The Devil’s Own, which took Ford and Brad Pitt a very long time to shoot, and the director, Alan J. Pakula, a very long time to cut (it opens at the end of this month), and Air Force One, where I am on the set, is due this summer. He says he likes to alternate “rolling around in the mud” roles with “suit-and-tie jobs.” Though for Harrison Ford, rolling around in the mud comes pretty easily even in a suit and tie, even now, in his 50s. I wanted to know if he still did his own stunts, and he bristled. “I never do stunts,” he says, basso profundo. “Stuntmen do stunts. I do acting. Hard, physical acting, as far as you can take it before it becomes a stunt. I don’t do my own stunts. I do my own acting. And I do my own hair.”
His trailer smells of air freshener, like a cheap taxi. He spends all the available time telling me things I already know, like how he chooses scripts (“story”) and how he plays his parts (“Help to tell the story.”). He doesn’t expand. He doesn’t dish. He doesn’t explain why The Devil’s Own (young dog Brad Pitt as an IRA operative on the run from Belfast, old lion Harrison Ford as a New York Irish cop who befriends him) was so hard to shoot. Movies about the IRA are hard to place inside the simple universal theme of Good Guys Win, Bad Guys Lose. Their moral center is slippery and ambiguous: As the bodies hit the floor, is it heroism or terrorism? Rumors flew about rewrites, walkouts, bruised egos, and hissy fits on set. (People from Air Force One kept asking, “Are you getting all the dirt on Devil’s Own?” Me: “No. What is the dirt on Devil’s Own?” Bright Hollywood-type laugh: “Ha! Ha! You won’t get that from me!”) I didn’t get that from Ford, either. In his slowed-down, rumbling, deeply gravelly voice, he said it had interested him greatly to work with Brad. That he’d thought it would be an interesting and dynamic combination. That the story had interested him. “But I thought that if I were to play this part it would have to go through a certain transformation.” He says, “We had, uh, some delays in pulling the script together. Um. They were resolved. Midstream.” He adds, somewhat obliquely, “Most movies take 50 days to shoot. Fifty working days. This movie we’re doing here will take 40 days to shoot. The Devil’s Own took over one… hundred… days to shoot.” So it was kind of a wearisome process? Wry smile: “Your words.” So, is Brad Pitt a bad guy or a good guy? Savage grin: “I think you’d best ask Brad that.” After a short pause, while I ponder the differences between an actor and a role, I say, “I mean, in the movie.” Harrison Ford gives a big laugh, a real laugh, and his eyes glitter. But then he returns smoothly (and at length) to the only thing he’s prepared to discuss: character, motivation, story line.
The story line of Air Force One seems to be perfect for Harrison Ford, its motivation clear and unambiguous. It’s about the president’s jet being hijacked by a bunch of Kazakhstani terrorists. Most of the action takes place inside the jet, which has been reconstructed all down one side of the vast soundstage. You have to climb metal steps to get into it. One side is a passenger lounge; the other is the lower deck, where the space is pretty tight, especially now, when all the hostages who aren’t dead are crammed up in the nose cone. “For the first week, we could stroll around in the lounge, which is quite roomy,” says Wendy Crewson, who plays the First Lady. “But the nose cone is, like, this wide. And I’m in a cashmere sweater! Under these lights!” “Well, at least it’s real cashmere,” says a dialogue coach. “Yep. You know you’re in a good movie when the costumes are cashmere.”
Wolfgang Petersen is the director. He likes Big Action: He made In the Line of Fire. He seems to like tight, claustrophobic sets lined with bulkheads, too. “Wolfgang did Das Boot,” somebody says. “This is Das Plane.”
Petersen is an immensely jovial man, who works a double act in heavy German humor with his cinematographer Michael Ballhaus. When Harrison Ford introduces me, Petersen says, “Put in your article that this film is brilliantly directed. Forget the acting! The direction is fabulously good and excellent—that’s all you need to write.” Ballhaus: “Ja, forget the eckting.” Harrison Ford, who received a reputed $20 million for his “eckting” in The Devil’s Own and a similar sum for this movie, smiles. Petersen was watching a take of Ford in long shot, edging round a bulkhead, on a tiny black-and-white video screen that taps directly into the on-set camera. “Now we are going to shoot the close-up,” Petersen says, “and that means very good acting. Harrison!” Ford looks at him levelly. “You hear me, uh? Very good acting, this bit.” Harrison Ford says, “Well, I’ll give it my best shot,” and they both clanked across a metal walkway and crowded into the lower deck. I watched the screen with Michael Ballhaus. Edging into view, in black-and-white, is Harrison Ford. Back to the wall. Wary. Heroic. Nerves screaming. He mutters to himself in his basso profundo growl: “Gotta get the plane… on the ground.” His eyes glitter.
His eyes glitter because a special little spotlight beams into each eye, having been specifically set up for that purpose at the behest of Michael Ballhaus. Part of Harrison Ford’s job is to make his eyes hit this special little spotlight over and over again, while simultaneously raking the room for possible mantraps, worrying about the First Lady, keeping his balance in a bucking airplane, and muttering, “Gotta get the plane… on the ground.” Time after time, his eyes glitter exactly on cue, even though he’s shrinking the scene from 28 seconds to 24, then eighteen. “Ach! That’s eckting!” shouts Michael Ballhaus, pointing to the glittering eyes and slapping his thigh. “See that twinkle? Every single time, he hits.”
At this point, the passenger lounge fills up with a lot more people, one of whom is a slight young man with a goatee who’s looking good in a fancy vest and combat pants; he speaks in a flat London accent and slaps hands with people in a friendly manner. After about five minutes, I realize it’s Gary Oldman, the second lead, and his fancy vest is a flak jacket. Since he’s English, Oldman obviously plays the bad guy, Korshunov, even though the bad guy’s from Kazakhstan. He has two voice coaches: one for when he’s speaking Russian and one for when he’s speaking luridly accented English. He does both with immense brio, at one point laughing pretty luridly as well. “Where does that laugh come from?” somebody asks, and Gary Oldman ponders his reply. “It’s my laugh,” he says. He amends that to “It’s Korshunov’s laugh.” He goes on, “It’s the laugh I always use.” By now, everyone in the room is listening in, carefully expressionless. Sassily, he snaps, “It worked in Dracula,” and gets a laugh. Oldman is a young dog, though not as young as Brad Pitt, and I watch carefully for signs of tension and ego clashes between him and Harrison Ford, not to mention hissy fits.
Next is a particularly exciting scene. It involves not only thrilling shouts of “Action… Action!… Rolling!” but also loud cries of “Fire in the hole!” from a second assistant director, so we can all put our earplugs on to protect us from gunshot noise. I am glued to the video screen. Gary Oldman has the First Lady on-camera in an energetic stranglehold, with his arm over her mouth and a gun at her temple. She struggles manfully. Harrison Ford thunders, “Let her go!” off-camera. “Mmmmergh! Jim! Oof! Eargh!” shouts the First Lady, through mouthfuls of Gary Oldman’s sleeve. “Not onteel Radek eez safely away!” yells Gary Oldman. They do it over and over, then they file back in to watch themselves on the video. “Now was that maybe very, very good and brilliant?” asks Wolfgang Petersen. It is, so he tells them to do it again, this time from the opposite angle.
“Come on, people! Let’s go!” he says. “We’re ready!” they shout back. “We’re coming through!” “Already there!” says Gary Oldman. “Already acting!” says Harrison Ford. This time Harrison is on-camera, leaping about, dodging bullets (“Fire in the hole!”), eyes glittering on cue, and Gary Oldman and the First Lady are both off-camera, though still eckting away like mad. “Let her go!” thunders Harrison. Gary Oldman takes the opportunity to go as Kazakhstani as it gets around the L and R areas, shouting, “Not onteel RRRRRRRadek eez safely away!” His two voice coaches exchange glances and both underline furiously in their scripts. When the actors troop back in to watch the repeat, there’s a silent moment of stock-taking. Broken by Harrison Ford, who growls, “Great R.” Oldman smirks. “Yeah, well, I fought so,” he says. “Best R in the scene, I fought.” “The R of the movie,” growls Harrison Ford, and throws me a look that has me scurrying for my next white-knuckle ride to his trailer.
Despite the fact that at the end of a day with Harrison Ford my tape recorder has little in it but depressingly formal and controlled stage management (mostly about The Actor as Storyteller), I thought he was really cool. He’s continually witty. But the wit’s so dry and deadpan that you have to gaze back into the glittering eyes to check whether he’s trying to get a rise out of you or not. He usually is. I said it was difficult to be English in Hollywood these days because the English always have to be the bad guys. He said, “It was always difficult to be English.” (I’m English myself.) He said he lived in Teton County. I misheard him and said, “Peeton?” He said, “T-E-T-O-N,” and watched me write it down, then said, “I’m sure your French is up to it.” (The Tetons are shaped exactly like breasts.) I said I’d been told that Air Force One was a really happy set: The director’s great, the actors are happy, everything works brilliantly, the lunches are nice. He said, “The publicist told you that?”
He excuses himself at lunchtime: He has some notes to write on his PowerBook, so I join a big, mixed table with cast and crew. (“This is a nice movie,” said a makeup girl. “They give great lunch.”) Opposite me, Wendy Crewson is polishing off a plate of fried scallops. She is hungry after spending the morning with Gary Oldman’s elbow jammed against her throat, while saying, “Jim! Ergh! Ugh!” through a mouthful of sleeve. She’s enjoying herself, and her scallops, hugely: “It’s easier fighting off Kazakhstani terrorists than the crowds in Toys ‘R’ Us.” She says that Harrison Ford’s great virtue as an actor is that “he makes everything easy because he whirls you along with him. Harrison has no inhibitions at all as an actor. None. He just flings himself straight into the middle of the action—flat on the floor, slammed against the wall—whatever. Action! Zap! Zap! Zap!” Fork whirling, imitating Ford, she punches out three terrorists and shoots another couple with her other hand—“Peeyoww! Peeyoww!”—before falling dead into her plate. It’s a bravura performance. She says, “Exactly like my four-year-old, really.”
He runs his own life, does Harrison Ford, and it’s a great life to run. He’s never wanted to be a director (“I’ve got the best job in the world”), and he says he doesn’t ever waste time thinking about roles he might have had or movies he might have made. “The minute somebody else decides to do it, it becomes something else. No regrets.” Doesn’t he ever hate acting? “Only when it ain’t great.” I asked him which of his movies was his favorite. “That’s a bit like asking, ‘Who’s your favorite kid?’” Well, excuse me, I said, but it wasn’t anything like asking who was his favorite kid. He said yes it was. He’s punctiliously polite and displays no starry manners or Hollywoodesque grandeur. He isn’t hung about with legions of PR managers and flak catchers. You ring his number and he answers. But he knows what he’s doing: Nobody ever gets anything private on Harrison Ford, not even the English tabloids, so it isn’t just me. Great dad. Long-staying husband. Expert carpenter. Perfect professional actor. Team player. Friend of the earth. Friend of the elk. Nice guy. You might wonder about what his life is really like behind closed doors. Might he be a savage-tempered, alcohol-fueled, sex-addicted egomaniac whose marriage is permanently on the ropes? I suppose he might, but he ain’t telling.