“I threw it across the room”: Harrison Ford on why he should have rejected ‘Cowboys and Aliens’
Harrison Ford has famously never been a fan of press tours and discussions about his ‘process’, with the actor remaining as mysterious as his characters with his sturdy stoicism and disinterest in discussing himself. After starring in the 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens, Ford seemed to have met his match after working with Daniel Craig, another man who has played equally iconic characters but rather reluctantly talks about his work.
However, during the press tour of the film, Ford had a lot to say about his initial reaction to the project and his concerns about the story, which, regretfully, ended up being true.
Cowboys and Aliens feels like a union between two forces that never needed to be together, with director Jon Favreau coming up with the genius idea to merge the western with the presence of aliens. The result is an unmotivated and thoughtless story that vaguely stumbles through a plot by relying on the combined star quality of shoving Indiana Jones and James Bond into the same picture, who singlehandedly carry the entire project on their backs.
When initially presented with the script, Ford had reservations about how it would work, saying, “Well, I read 30 pages, and then I threw it across the room, and I called my agent, and I said, ‘I don’t get it. There’s nothing in this for me. Why are you asking me to do this?”
After directing Iron Man, Favreau had shown a knack for blending comedy with action, something that was perhaps the project’s selling point and something that producers thought would translate into this new action thriller with a supernatural twist. However, none of these elements quite merged together, despite Ford’s initial belief that the director would elevate the project.
Ford expanded on this, saying, “Frankly didn’t get it at all. But then I talked to Jon about the concept and the visual stuff, and I sort of figured out how it might work. What I liked about it was that these people in the 1870s in New Mexico had no concept of outer space, no concept of life on other planets. That’s why I bought it completely. It just made perfect sense that these people would react this way. It wasn’t unthinkable. It didn’t seem that artificial.”
While this reasoning is understandable, and the presence of aliens in such a tried-and-tested genre is an intriguing concept, it wasn’t well-executed, and the script did very little to flesh out the idea. The result is a convoluted and messy film that merges too many ideas together yet somehow forgets to be entertaining.
The existence of this film is a strange instalment in Ford’s career, but after playing Han Solo and Indiana Jones, it seems only fitting that he would be the man to merge both story worlds. The actor has built an entire career playing characters who thrive in the supernatural world and defeat all kinds of creatures, and it only seems right that he would combine the force of both, despite his reservations about whether it would pay off.
