Harrison Ford is one actor who can make every guy feel like Indiana Jones and every woman like Cinderella. There’s little that is flamboyant or expansive about him and in person. He’s reticent, slow-talking, uneasy.
But the secret to his ability, says Ford — whether playing the daring Indiana Jones or the world-weary cop of the new “Hollywood Homicide” — is empathy.
“Once you understand how a character might feel under certain circumstances,” he says, “then there’s the secondary task of being able to replicate that behavior that would attend that feeling.
“. . . If you don’t understand how people feel, if you don’t feel close enough to people of all walks of life and all levels of society and all imaginable personalities, then you’re pretty much out of luck for ideas.”
Being one of the most famous names in the world can keep you away from your fellow man. And Ford’s longtime campaigns to keep his face out of the newspapers have pretty much failed.
“I hate them,” he says, of the stalking paparazzi. But, still, he manages to keep his common touch.
“In a sense it (fame) does turn you from the observer of human nature into the observed,” he says. “But there are still places where, amongst my fellow workers, I get to meet all kinds of people and spend time and hear their stories — people I work with on the set and people I meet in the area of conservation and people I meet when I’m flying.
“I have friends in little airports all across the country that I used to see a couple times a year when I flew back and forth all the time.” In fact, for the star of such mega-hit movies as “Blade Runner,” “Patriot Games,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” his passion for flying has softened the glare of the limelight. Flying for him “is about focus and planning and awareness,” he says. “There’s a kind of Zen exercise to it.”
For Ford it isn’t a matter of calculation and engineering.
“There are certain kinds of flying that really do depend more on that sort of thing,” he says, “but I like the kind of flying, that touchy-feely (kind) — flying little airplanes, little grass strips, helicopters.
“That’s a different kind of flying. Some airplanes you just punch in the buttons and make sure all the machines are working. But that’s sort of like an office job.”
He started his hobby eight years ago.
“I was really anxious to learn to do something that was a bit of a challenge and I hadn’t learned anything since I learned how to be a carpenter,” he says. “And I was really not sure I had what it takes to sit down and learn a whole new discipline.
“But I was delighted to find it was not just a new discipline but an alternative identity — for me it is. I can easily think of myself as a pilot. I’m up in the air and talking to air traffic control and I am just another pilot.”
At 60, Ford is one of the few actors who has managed to maintain a robust career in spite of regime shifts, fickle tastes and the worship of the teen market. “I never wanted to quit,” he says.
“The fact of my eventual success or luck has to do with tenacity, deciding not to give up.
“. . . I got myself into a lot of situations which were awkward and uncomfortable and not to my liking, but you get through that and get on with something else.”
Ford credits his mother and late father for lending him the fiber that turned a failing student into a determined would-be thespian.
“I was raised in the mid-West,” he says. “My father and mother went through the Depression and they had a certain work ethic which I think was instilled in me. “My dad was fairly successful. We grew up in a comfortable middle-class existence. They were certainly not extravagant but they traveled and enjoyed their life.”
Ford’s father was a radio actor and later produced and directed TV commercials, returning to voice-over work later in life.
Divorced twice, the father of two grown children by his first wife and two teen-agers by his second, Ford is in a relationship with actress Calista Flockhart, 22 years his junior. He says he has no plans to work with her. “I have a little reservation about mixing business and pleasure, about working with somebody you live with,” he says. :”I’m not so sure how that would work out.” It’s his children he thinks of when he measures his life, he says.
“I’ve had kids and families since I was 22 years old and that’s a big part of my life,” he says. “My kids and their history and those relationships. And I do think about my work.
“Work has been the bones on which I’ve hung my life. And it’s taken me interesting places and changed my life. And I’ve had a pretty full life,” he says, almost smiling.
- Arab News Features 19 June 2003