The directors who drove Harrison Ford crazy: “Let me figure it out!”
The first time that Harrison Ford stood in front of the camera, he did so as an uncredited actor with a non-speaking role. In the 1966 film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, the budding actor got his first sniff of Hollywood as he played a bellhop. There isn’t a great deal of recordings available of his performance, but they’re not really necessary, as since then, it’s hard to find a type of character that Harrison Ford hasn’t played.
While Ford might be renowned as being a bit of a grump on the interview circuit, his characters aren’t as easy to define as that. Throughout his career, whether starring in a blockbuster or something much more closed off and personal, Ford has stepped fully into his characters, understanding their ins and outs, what makes them tick, and the rationale behind their motives.
He doesn’t ask for a lot when it comes to figuring out a character; all he wants is the chance to work them out himself. When assessing which direction a character will walk when they enter a room, what words they will enunciate in a sentence, and how they will respond to the characters around them, he takes a moment and allows himself to fully consume the role he is playing.
While the 2011 film Cowboys & Aliens might not have been the biggest success, it was a film that Ford enjoyed being a part of because of the way the director, Jon Favreau, worked. Favreau is an actor as well as a director, and Ford commented that that can sometimes be an advantage and sometimes a hindrance. It’s an advantage because the director understands more about acting, but it can become a problem when they want to tell you how they would be the character. Favreau very much fits into the category of a helpful director in this instance.
“Jon has a particularly apt way of dealing with actors,” said Ford when discussing the process of making the movie, “He casts guys who know their craft, then he has the wisdom not to talk to them about acting.”
Ford said that he likes his directors to have “clarity of purpose”, and that there are some people he has worked with who fall short of the mark in this regard. Given that a lot of them have acted before, they insist on themselves, telling Ford how they would play the character, to the extent that Ford doesn’t feel like he is playing the role and instead is doing an impression of how someone else would play the role. The two directors he has worked with who drove him crazy in this regard were Sidney Pollack and Roman Polanski.
“Sidney Pollack, for example, was always talking about acting. I loved him dearly and thought he was an incredible director, but he did sometimes drive me mad!” said Ford, “Roman Polanski, too, had done some acting in the past. He would say, ‘Harrison, you enter the room like this, you do this, you go over here…’ and finally I said, ‘Roman, I’m not going to do a bad Roman Polanski imitation. Or a good one. Let me figure it out!’”
