Harrison Ford explains why his worst-performing movie was “unfairly treated”
As one of the most celebrated actors this side of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Harrison Ford has been lucky enough to work alongside some of the most esteemed filmmakers of all time, including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Peter Weir, Roman Polanski and Mike Nichols.
With central roles in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, Ford secured his immortal status as a cultural icon and a hefty pay packet over the 1970s and ’80s. Over the years, his movies have grossed over $5.4billion in North America and more than $9.3billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest-grossing actor ever.
Just over half of Ford’s career box office earnings from a total of 52 movies came from the eight Star Wars and Indiana Jones releases he appeared in. While these movies raked in Ford’s money and gave him status, he has generally been more enthusiastic about his smaller projects outside of franchises.
“It’s always been my ambition to be a -quote- serious actor,” Ford told William Wolf of Gannett News in 1986. In the interview, Ford discussed his enthusiasm for his work with Peter Weir. At the time, Ford had just appeared in Weir’s hit movie Witness, which earned eight Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’ for Ford.
This came as a career high-point for Ford because, although he didn’t win the Oscar, it remains his one and only Oscar nomination. Encouraged by this success, Weir and Ford linked up again, almost immediately, to work on 1986’s The Mosquito Coast. In the adaption of Paul Theroux’s novel, Ford plays the central role of Allie Fox, an obsessive and paranoid inventor, alongside Helen Mirren and Indiana Jones co-star River Phoenix.
In a deviation from the plot of Witness, Fox is a man who worries about the world falling apart and persuades his family to take a dangerous trip into the jungle, where he believes they can survive in a new life away from the pressures of modern civilisation.
In his interview with Wolf, Ford revealed that he was really excited about his role as Fox, describing Paul Schrader’s script as one of the best he’d read in a long time. “Both Peter Weir and I thought we shouldn’t be slavish to the book,” Ford added. “We needed a different Allie Fox. In the book, Fox is crazy from the beginning. If audiences thought that he was crazy, they’d give up on him.”
“It’s mostly about love,” he opined. “Fox is a love junkie of one kind or another. He requires respect and admiration from his family and everyone he meets, and he bullies his family into going along with everything. He carries the seeds of destruction within him.”
At the time, Ford had two sons, Benjamin and Willard. Wolf asked Ford how his parental relationship related to that of his character, Fox. “I wouldn’t think of discussing my relationship with my sons in a newspaper,” Ford retorted. But added that he tries to set a good example for his children. “That’s the only way to teach – by example.”
When The Mosquito Coast arrived in late 1986, the movie was broadly panned by critics and was a commercial disappointment, despite a solid performance from Ford.
“There have been mixed reviews, and I think the film has been very unfairly treated in some quarters,” Ford told The Hollywood Reporter in 1986 following the film’s premiere. “I have never seen a serious film treated so badly by the critics. And I think they’re wrong. I don’t mind saying I’m here trying to counter those negative reviews…. I’m not defensive about the picture, but I want the public to hear another point of view. Critics see a film and then rush to review it. This is the sort of movie that really doesn’t sink home for about three days. It is disturbing and makes you think. It stays with you.”
“It’s the only film I have done that hasn’t made its money back,” he added in 1992, in a conversation with Entertainment Weekly. “I’m still glad I did it. If there was a fault with the film, it was that it didn’t fully enough embrace the language of the book [by Paul Theroux]. It may have more properly been a literary rather than a cinematic exercise. But I think it’s full of powerful emotions.”
Watch the trailer for The Mosquito Coast below.
