Re: Micah this MAY interest you

Posted by Nick from lab41.complabs.aurora.edu on April 10, 2000 at 23:43:05:

In Reply to: Micah this MAY interest you posted by K. Allard on April 10, 2000 at 21:34:07:

Here is some info Ken,

http://cbs.com/network/tvshows/specials/

Showtime: April 12, 8 pm et, CBS

The American Film
Institute honors
Harrison Ford with
the esteemed Life
Achievement Award
which will be
presented to him by
George Lucas and
Stephen Spielberg.
Take a look back on
the 35 motion
pictures that have marked our lives, including
the most successful movies of all time which
comprise Harrison Ford's body of work. Join the
star-packed guest list, by tuning into the AFI
Tribute to Harrison Ford, Wednesday, April
12 at 8:00pm et/pt. See what the hoopla is
about at the AFI website.

http://www.afionline.org/
http://www.afionline.org/harrisonford/

IN HIS OWN WORDS
"TO ME, SUCCESS IS CHOICE AND OPPORTUNITY"

This article has been
adapted from published interviews
with Harrison Ford from 1978 to 1999
edited by Rochelle Levy Lazar

At a fairly early stage, I knew I didn’t want to work in an office. When I was four or five, my
dad would come home from his job and talk about how unhappy everyone was there. My
first childhood ambition was to be the guy who
carried the coal from our house to the coal
chute in a wheelbarrow. I liked the rhythm of his
work. It was a job, and you could see it getting
done.

I was kind of a runty thing. And I liked to hang
out with the girls. That annoyed the boys. So
every day after school, they would throw me
over the edge of the parking lot and roll me into
the weeds. They weren’t so much beatings as
exercises in ritual humiliation. I knew the ritual
had a form and a shape to it, and that it was far
more efficient just to tumble down the hill in a
satisfying way and then make my way up, rather
than have to fight those guys to get back into the parking lot. Maybe they did it because
they wanted a fight they could win. And my way of winning was to just hang in there.

I had performed in a couple of plays in college, and all it did was scare the bejesus out
of me. It was the need to deal with that fear which compelled me to do it again. All my
friends were going off to be professionals, and I said I wanted to be an actor because I
wanted to live a different life. I didn’t want to go to the same place every day and see the
same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges. I wanted to be in
different places geographically. I didn’t really calculate how difficult that was to achieve.

In my first film, DEAD HEAT ON A
MERRY-GO-ROUND, all I had to do was
deliver a lousy telegram. I was always the
bank robbing brother or the business
brother or the sensitive brother, any kind of
brother. Or the guy who didn’t do it–the guy
they think, at the beginning, did it, but who
really didn’t. Right from the beginning I
believed that staying on course was what
counted. The sheer process of attrition
would wear others down. Them that stuck it
out was them that won.

I’ve never considered myself to be an
artist. I’ve always considered myself a
craftsperson. I’m a technical actor. For me,
acting is part intellectual, part mechanical.
It’s being in control of your mind and body
at the same time. The emotions you show
may be spontaneous, but the bricks have
to be carefully laid to fit with the other pieces. You don’t fool around with the work.
Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live forever and they’re 40 feet wide and
20 feet high. What I learned from carpentry, above all, was a work ethic. I didn’t know
anything about it, but I got books out of the library, got the tools, and for about eight
years, just did it, making cabinets and furniture. I submitted myself totally to the logic of it.
It was a wonderful thing to learn–and I could see my accomplishments.

I intentionally keep my interpretation simple. I don’t make up a character who could have
a life without benefit of the specific story. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard–they
wear different clothes and they live in different times. I’m not being glib when I say it’s as
simple as that. STAR WARS was simply straightforward, a clear human story. I didn’t have
to act science fiction. I wasn’t at all sure how the film would do. I thought either it would
reach a big audience who saw it as a fun, space-aged western, or it would be so silly that
my two kids, who nicknamed me "Harrison Force," would have been embarrassed for
me to leave the house.

You’d expect development of the characters in
a second act. I wasn’t surprised when I saw a
different version of Han Solo in THE EMPIRE
STRIKES BACK script. We get to know him
better. It’s a little known fact, but I wanted Han
Solo to die at the end of RETURN OF THE
JEDI. I thought it would give the movie weight
and resonance. I thought it would give the myth
some body, that Han Solo, in fact, really had
no place to go–he’s got no momma, he’s got
no poppa. He’s got no story. He would have
best served the situation by giving it the weight
of sacrifice, but that was the one thing I was
unable to convince George of. George has a
predisposition to happy endings.

In MOSQUITO COAST I played a real swine. A father who dragged his family off to the
heart of the jungle and imposed upon them his dreams of a return to nature. A person
who was the antithesis of what I am. For me, family is definitely the most sacred thing in
the world. Not a lot of people wanted to see me play that part, but I didn’t make the
choice for them, I made it for myself, thinking that enough of them would enjoy him for the
same reason I did. His innate intelligence, his skill with words.

The role of an actor is to serve as a mirror. My job is not to show you that the character
and I have something in common. My job is to show you that you and the character–even
one who may seem a little crazy–have something in common. If people know too much
about me, it’s me they see up there instead of the character that I’m paid to represent.

While researching my part in FRANTIC, I
discovered that heart surgeons are among the
elite of the doctor world. I also found a certain
elegance or vanity of gesture that was
common to these guys. Lots of hand
movements. I already gesture enough with my
hands, so that wasn’t a challenge. My wife
often found me in the same frustrated mood
as my character, a mood I thought I’d been
able to drop. It was more of a strain than I’d
anticipated.

I wasn’t much interested in the courtroom
behavior of Rusty Sabich in PRESUMED
INNOCENT, but I wanted to observe the more
banal aspects–the little details such as the
handling of files or how attorneys interact with each other at the coffee machine. If you’re
playing a lawyer who wears wingtip Oxfords, you don’t go to work in tennis shoes
because they’re shooting that day only from the waist up, because suddenly you’re not
walking the same. To play THE FUGITIVE’s Dr. Richard Kimble, I wanted to know the
minutiae. I wanted to know how a surgeon would turn toward a nurse to put on his gown,
not as if he’d done it once but as if he’d done it a thousand times. That’s the truth of a
part.

In THE DEVIL’S OWN, I played a New York City uniformed police sergeant, which I can
easily imagine being. Imagining myself as the president is less easy because I couldn’t
imagine an ambition to be the president. But the job is always the same. And the cop
and the president both share the same head, which is my head.

I liked the plane my character flies in SIX DAYS SEVEN NIGHTS well enough to buy one
myself. Flying is so important to this character that one of my ambitions was to give an
audience an inkling of what attracted this guy to that life, to that skill–and to do it without
dialogue. And that’s more easily demonstrated in an actual environment than it is on a
blue screen.

I don’t regret those choices that I didn’t make that
went on to be big successes for someone else.
The reason that I didn’t take the job was that I didn’t
know how to do it, or it was too close to something
I’d already done, or I didn’t like the idea. If you can’t
do it, you can’t do it. There’s no sense regretting it.

I would like to do what I’m doing for as long as I can
make a living at it and not go entirely bats–that’s my ambition. But I need balance. I need
to be in a situation where my every whim is not attended to, where I have to fetch my own
nails, do my own shopping and wash my own dishes. Being normal is a kind of victory.
The pleasure of my life is that, however long it takes to make a movie, when it’s over, I’m
back to reality. Back to the banal tasks where I belong.

To me, success is choice and opportunity. Today, without departing totally from a certain
heroism which is my trademark, I try to play roles which are more human, with stories
anchored in daily life. I have an ambition to give a good performance in whatever I do.
Whether it’s accepted, or how it’s accepted, is beyond my control and comprehension.
But I’m grateful for the support I’ve generally enjoyed. Really and truly grateful.

Nick

: Ok ASI is giving a salute to Harrison Ford on Wednesday at 7:00 cst. The Stars are gathering with famous faces like Steven Speilberg and George Lucas Bradd Pitt to name a few... Um I dont know much about these sort of things but my TV guide says WREG for channel station. I'll look for more help... I heard this after Everybody Loves Raman maybe that helps a little

• http://www.afionline.org/harrisonford/

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