The Esquire Interview: Harrison Ford

For someone who made $67 million last year and is the most successful movie star ever, you don't hear much about Harrison Ford. We talk to the star untouched by Hollywood bullshit

It's been a good year for Harrison Ford. He's had four films out, and between them they've made more than $600 million. But then most years are good for Ford. They tend to be that way when you are, in box-office terms - and those are the only terms that Hollywood cares about - the most successful movie star on earth…ever.

If that seems like an outrageous piece of hyperbole, just do the calculations. In his incomparable 1983 book about the movie business, Adventures in the Screen Trade, the scriptwriter William Goldman lists the top 10 US box-office stars for 1976 and 1981. In '76, the biggest stars, in descending order, were Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, Mel Brooks, Burt Reynolds, Al Pacino, Tatum O'Neal, Woody Allen and Charles Bronson. In '81, they were Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, Dudley Moore, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Harrison Ford, Alan Alda, Bo Derek, Goldie Hawn and Bill Murray.

Only two stars - Eastwood and Reynolds - made both lists, which was Goldman's point: no matter how big a star may seem, their stay at the top is inevitably a short one. In 1981, Dudley Moore - fresh from 10 and Arthur - was a megastar. This autumn, he is preparing to play Buttons in Southampton's pantomime Cinderella when hit by a heart attack. In the year of Cannonball Run and Sharkey's Machine, Burt Reynolds was box-office dynamite. Today he makes ads for opticians. Sure, Pacino, Hoffman and Redford are still big names, and De Niro remains a hero to Brit film buffs. But - Heat excepted, he, Al and Dustin don't mean pit at the box office any more, and Bob Redford only makes one film every five years.

But check the man at No 6 in the 1981 list, a then 39-year-old former-carpenter called Harrison Ford. He'd had his first leading movie role in 1977, when he played Han Solo in Star Wars. No one had expected much of either the film or the actor: he'd been paid $4,500 for the part. When Star Wars became a box-office phenomenon, Ford had tried to cash in by playing lead roles in films that didn't involve spaceships or Wookies, but he hadn't had much luck. Force 10 From Navarone and Hanover Street are hardly milestones in movie history.

But then Ford got a second break. Having seen what George Lucas had achieved by basing a movie on old, Saturday-morning space serials, Steven Spielberg concocted an equally derivative adventure, with a swashbuckling archaeologist, a sassy dame and wild fights against the Nazis. His first choice as leading man was Tom Selleck, a former Marlboro man who'd become a top telly hunk as Magnum, PI. But Selleck was too busy flashing his moustache on the small screen to make it to the big one. So Ford got the gig as Indiana Jones. He never looked back.

Between 1980-85, he appeared in The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Blade Runner, Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Witness. Allowing for re-releases and directors' cuts, that's a billion dollars of business at the US box office alone, leaving aside all the overseas sales, videos, and merchandising - and Ford got a slice of all of it. Then, in 1992, after a few years in which his only monster hit was the third Indiana Jones outing, he made his first appearance as Tom Clancy's thriller hero Jack Ryan, in Patriot Games.

Once again, Ford was filling in for someone else - Alec Baldwin had played Ryan in The Hunt for Red October, but was engaged in a Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire. And the supersub came up trumps. Patriot Games was huge, as was its sequel, Clear and Present Danger. In between, Ford made what is arguably his best-ever movie, The Fugitive. He surfed into the Nineties on a tidal wave of cash. In 1993-4, according to the definitive Forbes magazine list of showbiz earnings, Ford earned $44 million. In '95-'96, he made $67 million.

His '97 figures are, as yet, unknown, but it should be a banner year. The re-released Star Wars trilogy did phenomenal business, and Ford's deals for episodes two and three (V and VI if you're a Star Wars anorak) will have included a percentage of the takings. It would be surprising if George Lucas or 20th-Century Fox did not hand over an ex-gratia slice of Star Wars, too. Then there's his star vehicle, Airforce One. Ford's current reported fee is $20 million (almost certainly payable on the first day of principal photography and thus included in his 1996 income), plus 15 per cent of the studio's gross income, which is worth roughly 5 per cent of total box office. Airforce One took over $160 million in its US run and should do close to $300 million with worldwide sales, so that's another $15 million to Ford before a single video has been rented or sold.

All of which explains why Harrison Ford can claim to be the biggest star of all, not that he would - it wouldn't be his style. He believes in keeping his head down. He will not show us around his apartment in New York, nor introduce us to his second wife, scriptwriter Melissa Matthieson, nor their two children. Stars who invite intrusion into their private lives are selling their souls to the media devil and, as he points out, “I've never had to made that deal. Part of the luck of my career has been that I was never so chic, so ‘it’ that I would soon be replaced by someone else who was more fashionable. I've never asked for the attention of the public, except on those occasions when I had some product to offer. I don't misunderstand the cultural utility of an actor in America.”

Even if he is not prepared to gush on his own behalf, others are. In 1990, Carrie Fisher ascribed his appeal to raw masculinity. She saw him at the auditions for Star Wars and, “I knew he was going to be a star - someone of the order of Bogart and Tracy. You know that saying, ‘An actress is a little bit more than a woman. An actor is a little bit less than a man’? Well, that's except if it's Harrison Ford. He's this incredibly attractive male animal, in every sense of the word. This carpenter stud.”

Seven years on, Ford's machismo is compromised by the gold earring he bought himself soon after his 55th birthday. That aside, he looks exactly as he does on screen. Dressed with elegant restraint in a dark-blue suit, shirt, grey-blue tie, he is not a big man, not extravagantly muscled nor wildly handsome, but self-contained, intimidating even. He says that the only common denominator between the parts he plays and the man who plays them is that, “They have the same face. Aside from the face, you use those parts of yourself that are appropriate to the character and skate around the ones that aren't.”

Maybe so, but if you look at his films and you look at the man, several obvious similarities come to mind. The classic Harrison Ford character - and Ford himself knows exactly what that is, “as much as I attempt to bend, and extend and fool with it” - is grudging in his heroism. He wants a quiet life with his family. He has no pretensions to being a ladykiller. But if there's a job to be done, he'll do it as efficiently as possible, his face scowling with indignant determination.

That man on screen is not so far from the man who gives his interview. Ford makes it clear that he has no need of your approval: that is one of his most obviously manly characteristics. He will neither try to charm you, nor will he be petulant. He will sit in his chair, look directly at you with his icy blue eyes and answer questions in a voice so quiet and deep he sounds like Leonard Cohen's long-lost twin. That's not an entirely fanciful notion, incidentally: though he seems like the most WASPish, even puritanical of stars, Ford is, strictly speaking, Jewish by birth - the son of a Russian-Jewish housewife, and an Irish-Catholic ad-man.

Like Cohen, Ford hides a Martini-dry wit behind his morose façade. A couple of times, I saw a wry smile flickering around his lips. If that came as a surprise, it was only because everything else sounded as though it was designed to remove the emotion, the neurosis, the playfulness, even, from a situation: all the things, in other words, that most actors desperately try to shove in.

So forget Cohen, Ford is the Kenny Dalglish of interviews. Ask him, for example, which of his films he remembers with the greatest affection, and he replies that, “I don't look at it that way. I love the work and I'm excited that I have the opportunity to do it” - he sounds, I need hardly add, about as excited as an undertaker - “but it's not for me to judge it in any way, to say that this one is better than that one. It's just work.”

But some must be more fun to make than others. Apparently not: “That has nothing to do with the movie. Two or three years on, the fun is forgotten. The film remains.”

A film like Blade Runner, for example, had a famously bitter on-set atmosphere (the full story would be a libel lawyer's paradise - suffice it to say that Ford and director Ridley Scott were not bosom buddies, and that the Teamsters, the Mafia and at least one Class A drug all make walk-on appearances), but it enjoys an enduring reputation. “That was an example of no fun at all,” remarks Ford. “It was also an example where artistically [things went wrong] - the imposition of a narration which I was contractually obliged to provide, and which I felt was badly done.”

Note “contractually obliged”. Harrison Ford is fearsomely professional. A film producer who hires him gets what he's paid for: an actor who knows exactly what is required, from the first script read-through to the last promotional interview, and will never sell you short. Stars like Sly or Arnie may appear in spectacular turkeys, but there is no such thing as an embarrassing Harrison Ford movie. Once the job is done, though, that's it. “I'm afraid I'm not much of a film buff. I try to stay away from the business when I'm free of contractual obligations. If I didn't, there might not be time for other interests.”

Which leads me to carpentry. Ford is, after all, “this carpenter stud”. In the late Sixties, married with two small children, he was playing “sensitive younger brother” parts on TV shows - parts that were never going to lead to the movies. To free himself from the economic need to accept bad work, he took up carpentry, teaching himself the job from books borrowed from a public library, and set up as a contractor.

The business flourished. He built a sundeck for Sally Kellerman (then fresh from playing Hotlips in the movie M*A*S*H) and a recording studio for Latino jazzman Sergio Mendes. But from time to time, he'd go back into the movies. In 1973, he played a drag-racer in George Lucas's first major film, American Graffiti. “They offered me scale - $485 a week - for the part,” Ford told Vanity Fair. “I said, ‘Come on, guys. I got a wife and two kids to support.’ I was doing better than that as a carpenter. I hung up on them. They called back and told me they'd gone through the whole budget and they could offer me $500 a week.”

A few years later, Ford was building an entrance to Francis Ford Coppola's office, tool belt slung round his hips, when he bumped into George Lucas again. Lucas was casting for Star Wars. Soon, Ford was wearing Han Solo's gun belt where his screwdrivers had been. It's a great story, and the notion of Ford as a hard-working guy doing his best to support his family cuts right to the heart of his appeal. He could be you up there on the screen. He couldn't, however, give a fuck about woodwork.

“I haven't done carpentry in 20 years. It's one of those pieces of myth that persist well beyond their useful, appropriate life, because it seems like such a nice idea to have this blue-collar worker become a fairy-tale prince. Carpentry is something I entertained briefly when I needed to earn a living.”

I am puzzled by this. I have read an article about him which contains a glowing description of the workshop he has at his 800-acre estate. “I have a workshop in Wyoming and I'm still interested in it,” says Ford, “but I've lost a lot of the tool skills that once gave me pleasure.”

Now there's a remark that could be taken out of context. But not, perhaps, with Ford. However much he tries to downplay the fact, this must be a man who is seriously driven. You cannot stay at the top for 20 years without focused, relentless determination. Not that he lists that among the reasons for his longevity. “There's great good luck, there's a degree of industry and a capacity in filmmaking, which is not necessarily what people see. There's an element of choice, which is very important - the films I've chosen, and the reason I've chosen them.”

Take Airforce One. “When I was given the script by the producers, it was not in its final form, but it obviously had the armature and plan for a spectacular entertainment. The reason I choose to make films is because I think they will interest an audience. I don't choose them for myself, to broaden my dramatic library. I identify with the type of thing that people will pay to see. This is my chosen business and I want my business to be successful. I'm not trying to cash in and get out. I want to build my trade and keep the customers to whom I've been of service.”

That work ethic is matched by an acceptance of the rewards on offer. At the time of The Lost World's opening, Spielberg claimed movie-making was being damaged by the up-front fees demanded by stars: with costs rocketing, creative risk-taking was becoming impossible. Everyone, said Spielberg, should work for a percentage of takings alone. Ford is not convinced that people like him are putting Hollywood out of business. “There's no actuarial reality to that theory. The people who pay money to buy what you could call cast insurance have not suffered losses that make it impossible for them to continue in business.” And besides, he adds, “I wasn't the one who started it.”

Fearful that a superstar tantrum may be in the offing, I try to change the subject. Ford smiles at my panic: “No, no, I'm just going on record here. I wasn't the one who started it, but as long as people feel free to pay other people to that extent, I'll be happy to take it as well. Without arguing too much with my friend Steven, it's easy for him to talk. He is one of the highest-paid men in the world, in any business…ever.”

Spielberg, I say, takes his money off the back-end of the deal. Ford looks at me, cool as ever: “It comes in every which way for someone in Steven's situation.”

In Hollywood, that is a statement as outrageous as an admission of drug-taking or perverted sexual practice. An actor has just gone on the record arguing with a man who is not only the most successful director of all time, but co-owner of a major studio. You have to be very powerful to contemplate such a course of action. And though he never raises his voice, though he never stamps his superstar foot, you can rest assured that Harrison Ford knows how powerful he really is.

- By Bill Penrose
And the kick-ass photos in the text are by Timothy White.