Harrison Ford
by David Chute
An interview originally published in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, June, 1981.
To many of us, acting is the most opaque and mysterious of all the major elements of moviemaking, the one that yields most tortured and twisted attempts at description. Of course, there's a lot of obscurantism in the way some actors talk about their work. They refuse to offer more than oblique, rule-of-thumb hints on how they transform themselves into semblances of other human beings. One senses that the truth they're concealing isn't ineffable in the least, but embarrassingly mundane.
Harrison Ford is refreshingly straightforward about what he does for a living. "What an actor does is help tell the story: your first responsibility is to understand the idea, what the whole pictures is up to, and then in your role to help convery that. An actor; really is an assistant storyteller," he said last week on a stop at Paramount studios.
Best known for the laconic man-of-action roles he's played in George Lucas' American Graffiti (as the hot rodder Bob Falfa) and Star Wars (Han Solo, of course), he will be on the screen again this Friday as the firebrand archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark - the epic thriller that marks the first creative collaboration of Lucas, who co-wrote and produced, and Steven (Jaws) Spielberg, who directed.
Jones is easily the bease assignment this often underrated performer has ever had, a likably gruff non-hero who is goaded into swashbuckling action by the force of a burning fixed idea: to get his mitts on the sacred Ark of the Covenent before a pack of sadistic Nazi meanies can fetch it for Der Fuhrer's personal collection.
Ford is the sort of performer who rarely draws attention to himself. If he was, at best, a smoothly functioning cog in the entertainment machines that were American Graffiti, Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back, it was probably because he wanted it that way. And if he seemed a shrunken screen presence in clunkers like Hanover Street, and Force 10 From Navarone, it could be because he instinctively balks at doing anything that would be out of scale with a picture as a whole - even when the picture is patently puny.
Ford, 39, has been an actor in Hollywood since 1965, essaying numberless small roles in movies and TV. For a period of seven years, however, he put his acting career on the back burner and earned his living as a carpenter, sanding cabinets and hanging doors. Today, he insists that acting is for him not an art but a craft. "Steven (Spielberg) and I were aware of each other as craftsmen," Ford declares, "rather than as some sort of conference of artists. There's a level of efficiency in storytelling that comes from the pooling of our resources that is greater than what either of us could provide alone."
"Efficency" is a key word where Raiders is concerned, since this lavish, globe-trotting saga had to be shot in 73 days. "Steven is so sure of his craft," Ford says, "that he can turn a movie on a dime, and still preserve a sense of fun. There's an immediacy to his images, you're thereright away. And then it's BAM, you're there and what's the point and where do we go next? Because that's it; to get right to the point of a scene."
Thinking of Raiders of the Lost Ark as the result of an assemblage of complementary talents is almost certainly the right way to look at it. And for Ford, the analogy extends even to the gestation of the fabled Raiders idea in some poolside conversations Lucas had with Spielberg in 1977. Ford's description of the film is "a bringing together of common elements that other people can feel they might have thought of - that in a real sense they almost didthink of. But no one thought of bringing them together now, in just this way. For both George and Steven, it's a matter of getting something out of movies that they didn't get from anything else, and of giving some of that back."
Indvitably, however, all this talk of "assembling" the movie and of craftsmanship as opposed to art makes the process sound rather mechanical. But tha'ts not the sense of "craftsmanship" Ford has in mind. "It's not mechanical at all," he insists. "It's craft informed by instinct and experience and dedicated to a result. Craft is the basis of freedom, the logical bones that ou work with. All I can say is that people who set out to do good work learn their craft differently."
To phrase it in a way that Ford himmself might reject as immodes, doing good work as a movie actor means working unselfishly tomake the movie good. But in Ford's terms this can't be done unless there's some clarity in the initial concept of a film. In his view "70 percent of the scripts you see have no coherent idea, and without understanding that, an actor runs the risk of conveying something tangential, irrelevant." That is, he runs the risk of inefficency.
There is, however, the vexing question of the difference between craft, as Ford understands it, and art. For him, "art is not as result-oriented. It's more singular, there's something indefinable about it. I don't think there's any need to call a movie I'm in a work of art." Dimissing the common, Method-spawned view of acting as a process by which an actor all but becomesthe character, Ford declares that his own approach is "almost totally technical." But he also endorses as "brilliant" an oft-quoted declaration of Robert De Niro to the effect that an actor's responsibility to an audience is not to become someone else, but to create the illusionof transformation. Looked at this way, the difference between craft and art, in terms of acting, seems little more than a matter of terminology.
But Ford's is still a view of the profession that runs counters to the usual notions of movie stardom: creating a distinct, recognizable persona from film to film, with which audiences can grow familiar. In fact, Ford contends that his career planning is built on a pattern of contrasts, of doing something each time that's as different as possible from anything he's done before. He wants to keep himself interested, be he also wants to keep audiences guessing.
In his most recent project, Blade Runner, a science-fiction thriller by Alien's Ridley Scott, Ford portrays a man who, he says, "is always bothered by and of tow mids about what he's doing. Which is exactly the opposite of what Indiana Jones is. Jones is totally committed; he doesn't have any special prowess, but he just jumps for things. If you didn't have that in the character, many parts of the moview would be much harder to believe. Which is the whole point. You have to do things as an actor that will alllow the audience to be there when it happens, with you, with the story, feeling things as the character does. Or at lease that's the intention."
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