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.