10 Things We Learnt From Harrison Ford About Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny, Filming The New Captain America And More

Still The Unlikely Hollywood Star

Over at Esquire, they just spoke to Harrison Ford about the new Indiana Jones, filming Captain America: New World Order and more and here’s 10 things we learnt…

1. Ford seems quite sanguine about working on a Marvel movie: ” there are tough days and easy days and fun days and all kinds of days. It’s a tough schedule and, yeah, it’s fun. But it’s not a walk in the park. It’s not fun fun. It’s work.”
2. He recalls how he got the part of Han Solo in Star Wars: “I was asked by the producer to help them read lines with candidates for all the parts. Don’t know whether I read with people who were reading for Han Solo—can’t remember. I read with quite a few princesses. But there was no indication or forewarning that I might be considered for this part. It was just a favor. And then of course they offered me the part.”
3. For him, working on things like Indiana Jones serve a very definite purpose: “We look for ourselves, and we look for useful information to help us navigate our fucking lives and the world that we’re living in,” he says. “We don’t realize we’re looking for that. But we’re looking to pull out of a fantasy something that’s useful to us. And what’s useful to us is to emotionally participate in things outside of our own lives.”
4. And he wanted to achieve something very specific returning one more time to Indy: “I wanted an ambitious movie to be the last one,” he says. “And I don’t mean that we didn’t make ambitious movies before—they were ambitious in many different ways. But not necessarily as ambitious with the character as I wanted the last one to be.”
5. Ford is now a man who is eighty and so the film company’s treatment of him is different now to when he made Indiana Jones as a much younger man, he reveals when talking about hands all over him in one scene where he rides a horse on the subway in Manhattan: “I thought, What the fuck? Like I was being attacked by gropers. I look down and there’s three stunt guys there making sure I didn’t fall off the stirrup. They said, Oh, we were just afraid because we thought, you know, and bah bah bah bah. And I said, Leave me the fuck alone, I’m an old man—”…“Leave me alone, I’m an old man getting off a horse and…I want it to look like that!”
6. Ford admits that he isn’t a movie lover per se but an admirer of the people who work in the industry: “It’s not about the movies; it’s about my personal experience. I’m fascinated by how much talent there is out there in all aspects of this business, but I just can’t keep up with the amount of product. I find myself not sitting down to watch a movie every night. We love when we do it, but we do it as a family, so we’re as likely to be watching Poirot the detective as we are to be watching Everything Everywhere All at Once. I’ve got big holes in the fabric, and I don’t consider that to be a positive. I should be watching more, just out of respect for what the business has given me. I love being transported by a movie. A great story. [Drums.] But I do other stuff. I do the dishes instead of watching the movie.”
7. He offers a little bit of insight into making TV show Shrinking: “It is a bit of a shock to discover that there are things that a writer can bring to a script that you recognize as a shadow of your own experience. You don’t necessarily actively draw on some specific thing that happened to you—but it’s in the bank, and you want to spend it.” His voice intensifies, and he’s drumming now. “I mean, you don’t want to take your kid’s life and make that the currency, so you try and separate that. But I’ve got a daughter in Shrinking whose mother said I had spent all my time working, and then when the daughter says she’s going to split for the East Coast, my character says, ‘Well, I’ve got responsibilities here. I have a life!’ And I don’t go with her. That’s the shit that happens, and somewhere there’s a reference in my life and I think, Are they stealing, fucking, my life here?”
8. He wanted to make the fifth Indy film so we could see how his story ends, he reveals: “I wanted to know what happened to him and how he handled it. [Director James] Mangold and I worked closely together, on that scene especially. Waking up in my underwear with the empty glass in my hand was my idea. I wanted to see Indiana Jones at a nadir point and rebuild him from the ground up.”
9. Despite decades of making films, Ford is still very modest and self-effacing: “I actually love this. I hate it and I love it. Because I get a chance to meet people who do what you do. I have total respect for the process. I just don’t have that much respect for me when I’m doing it, because I’m editor-in-charge of my life. And there are things that are just dumb for me to talk about, that are going to make it less interesting to go see my new movie. Our new movie—Jim’s new movie, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s new movie, Mads’s new movie, Disney’s new movie.”
10. He doesn’t have much time for more fannish questions from Star Wars fans, he bluntly responds: “Well, they usually ask me, ‘If there was a fight between Han Solo and Indiana Jones, who would fuckin’ win?’ And I say …, ‘Me, asshole! I don’t want to fucking make shit up like that. I mean, what are you asking me that crap for?’

Read the whole interview here