Tough Guy

Talking to the star of ''Firewall'' -- After a career spent dodging boulders, saving the galaxy, and chasing a one-armed man, Harrison Ford still isn't ready to act his age

In 1993, when word first leaked that Indiana Jones 4 was in the works,Harrison Ford was 51 years old. Thirteen years later — as Firewall, a thriller casting him as a head of security who must rob his own bank to save his family from kidnappers, arrives in theaters — the Indy sequel is still gestating. Meanwhile, Ford's now older than Sean Connery was when he played Indiana's dad in 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Is that too old? Will part 4 ever really happen?

''Oh, it'll come together, no doubt about it,'' promises Ford, manfully straddling a backless bench outside an L.A. photo studio late last month, a few gray hairs on his robust chest poking out through the open neck of his button-down while his mini-pirate hoop dangles in one earlobe. ''We're closer than we've ever been. There's a script upon which there's pretty general agreement. Steven [Spielberg]'s doing some work.''

But we've been waiting 13 years for it! ''Yeah, I'd like to get it over with so I don't have to answer the goddamned questions [about it]anymore,'' Ford cracks calmly. Today he is at once gruff and soft-spoken, his shortest answers sometimes no louder than a rumble. ''George [Lucas]has been a bit busy making these sci-fi films he likes. And Steven has had a film or two, in turn. So it really is not that easy to pull the pieces together, but I think everybody feels it's a worthy ambition. I know in my heart it's gonna happen.''

And he is undeterred by age. ''Some mysterious number appears attached to my name, and all of a sudden I'm not supposed to be able to do [action scenes]?'' huffs Ford, who's 63. ''It doesn't make much sense.'' On a movie, he says quietly, ''it feels good to do a little physical exercise and work up a sweat. It's better'n sitting around for eight months.'' Shooting action sequences, Ford insists, ''is a sport for me. It's my sport. And yeah, it's fun.''

Yet can the sportsman still convincingly complete the plays? (Critics may say no.) Not since 2000's What Lies Beneath has the megastar who's banked $3.25 billion in career ticket sales had a hit, and not since 1997's Air Force One has he scored as an action hero. Ford's last two films, 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker and 2003's Hollywood Homicide, earned only a miserable $66 million combined. So last June, hoping to see Indiana Jones in action mode, EW traveled to Kamloops, a chilly city of glimmering hills and valleys several hours north of Vancouver, where the crew of Firewall was filming the movie's slam-bang finale in a gutted cabin perched on a little peninsula overlooking a river. Most of the film is a cat-and-mouse thriller involving a bank and a battle of wits between Ford's Jack Stanfield and a bad guy played by Master and Commander's Paul Bettany, but by this point in the movie, Stanfield is finally sounding a yawp and storming the cabin, Harrison Ford-style, taking on Bettany head-to-head in a ferocious attempt to rescue his family, including Virginia Madsen (in her first big post-Sideways role) as his wife.

On camera, in Jack's rumpled gray business suit and red tie, Ford throws himself all over the place. He bruises his coccyx (for real) when he accidentally stumbles backward onto the root of a large tree. Inside the cabin, he crashes spectacularly through wooden boards mounted on sawhorses. At one point, Bettany smashes him so violently against the wall that a trapezoidal chunk of it breaks off. Honestly, it's hard not to be impressed. The old guy is still in amazing shape. ''There's no other actor I know of who, besides Jackie Chan, you'd even think about letting do this stuff,'' says Terry Leonard, a Firewall fight coordinator who famously stunt-doubled for Ford when Indiana Jones slid under the Nazi truck in Raiders of the Lost Ark. ''And he likes it. You wouldn't keep doing this to yourself if you didn't like it. It gets the adrenaline pumping.''

Ford's adrenaline must be surging when he steps over to the lapping waters of the river for an interview after a day's roughhousing, because he's a different, more outrageous animal than the (by his own description) ''not naturally gregarious'' star who would field Indy 4 questions many months later. As a freight train chugs along directly across the river, Ford's first asked why he does all this tough stuff himself, when stunt guys might seamlessly take over for some of it.

''If the audience has spent 80 minutes hopefully getting emotionally related to my character, I want 'em to feel his exhaustion and his pain,'' he says emphatically. ''I want them to be there in a moment of triumph, and they can't if they're on the back of some stuntman's head. They can't if they're not seeing the OOOOH!'' — he smashes himself in the cheek with a slow, sloppy palm and contorts his face into something ugly — ''...that smoosh in your face, with the spit falling out, and all that kind of s---. But there are ways of doing it that are technical. I'm not being a cowboy idiot here. I'm working very precisely.''

Tell him that Terry Leonard insists Ford knows more about stunts than most of the stunt guys in Hollywood, and Ford will go off.

''I don't do stunts!'' he protests, fake blood congealed around his ear. ''I do physical acting! That's a big f---ing difference. A stunt is a fall, a car crash, a roll. That's a stunt! Like a fire gag — you won't ever see me on fire. Well,'' he halts himself mischievously, ''a little bit, maybe.'' He chuckles briefly. ''But it is a difference. For me, I have no ambition to do stunts. I have an ambition to tell a story with physical action.''

Watch him for a while, and it's soon obvious that Ford not only knows how to perform ''physical action'' — he knows how to shoot it, too. During setups, he's a whirling funnel cloud of peculiar energy, very vocal with his ideas on where the camera, his co-star, and the edits should be. He must be at the point by now, we suggest to him when he's still wired, where he can plot out action sequences like these all in his head.

''Yeah,'' he replies. ''What else is there to do? I can't talk to girls, we haven't got any girls on this set!'' (''This movie is man city,'' confirms Madsen cheerfully. Although Ford's joking, of course. He has been dating Ally McBeal's Calista Flockhart for four years and speaks of her very fondly. He'd love to do a romantic comedy with her someday, he says, except that he knows he would ''take a lot of s---'' for being so much older than her. She's 41.)

On the shoot, Ford consults incessantly and clashes occasionally with his director, Wimbledon's Richard Loncraine. ''What's it like between Harrison and me?'' asks Loncraine, a genial, almost boyish 59-year-old with salt-and-pepper hair. '' Harrison says what he wants and I do it!'' He laughs heartily. ''No, not quite. Harrison's a handful, but he's a very, very good handful. He knows what he wants and what he thinks should be done. But he's very polite, and he has a sense of humor. I like him very much, and I think he's not entirely unhappy with me. I think you'd know if he didn't like you.''

On the subject of Loncraine, Ford is more succinct: ''I don't know whether to f---ing kill him or to marry him!''

He elaborates. ''Richard's been working with me really hard on this movie for five or six months. We've gone through a lot of disagreement and a lot of agreement,'' Ford insists. ''It's like being married. Sometimes it's bumptious, sometimes it's charm, and if it can't be charm, then it's gonna be'' — and suddenly he looks really angry, as if he's growling at Gary Oldman in Air Force One — ''f---ing you do the dishes! You clean up this s---! You made it!''

If he sounds scary, he is (slightly), but at the same time, Ford's kind of hilarious, too, in his own gonzo way. ''He's a very funny man,'' agrees Bettany. ''And incredibly cruel. His humor is just — he's relentless with it. I love it! We've had a ball. We're endlessly mocking each other. I call him 'Walter Matthau' when he's grumpy.''

But anyone excited for another Indiana Jones movie should take heart: This Grumpy Old Man's not a geezer yet. Just before lunch one day in Kamloops, Bettany has Ford by the lapels for a difficult scene. They're about to shoot a bit where Bettany throws Ford through a cabin window. ''Good luck,'' Bettany says to him just before action. ''Thank you,'' Ford replies. ''Richard!'' Ford calls out to his director. ''We're going to count our own time.'' Bettany says, ''One...'' ''Let me count,'' Ford insists. So he counts, cameras rolling, and on three, Bettany heaves him through the window headfirst. Ford's legs disappear; he lands on the porch off camera with a thud. After the cut, Bettany pokes his head through the smashed window and peers down. Is Ford okay? He is. The crew claps. Then something wonderful happens. The window is adjacent to a door. The door is ajar. But instead, Ford stands up, sticks one leg through the window, then the other, and pulls himself back into the room through the window — even though there's an open door right there. There's nothing on Ford's face to suggest that he's aware this is unusual. He's only wondering about the shot. Ford coolly addresses the room: ''Did it look okay?''

- By Gregory Kirschling