When Harrison Ford flagrantly broke the on-set rules of ‘Air Force One’: “He was doing all three”
There was a period in the 1990s when Harrison Ford couldn’t catch a break. In movie after movie, he was getting shot at, framed for murder, attacked in the dead of night, and realising that everything he thought he knew about his employer or the government or his government employer was wrong. It wasn’t just those Jack Ryan movies, either. Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive, The Devil’s Own, and Air Force One were all outside the Tom Clancy universe, and he was just as in danger and reluctantly heroic there, too.
All of these films might have had audiences forgetting that, at his core, Ford is a very funny man. By American standards, that dry sense of humour might not have been quite as detectable, but it’s always been there. He even managed to make George Lucas’s questionable Star Wars dialogue funny. It is, therefore, quite nice to know that, at least on the sets of these extremely serious thrillers, Mr Ford stayed cheeky.
We have cold, hard evidence of this fact in relation to the 1997 movie Air Force One. If you have not yet had the pleasure of watching this quasi-masterpiece, allow me to spoil the set-up for you. Ford stars as the president who has to defend his family against a bunch of Communist terrorists led by the decade’s favourite bad guy, Gary Oldman, after they hijack Air Force One. In the ’90s, it was vaguely plausible that the Hollywood version of the American president could be an action hero.
Anyway, like all film sets, Air Force One had some pedantic rules – nothing too onerous, just what you’d expect on a small, enclosed soundstage meant to look like an aeroplane. When you’re working in a tiny space for months on end, you need to have some clear guidelines to avoid chaos and bitterness between colleagues. At one point, though, Oldman got to witness Ford breaking them all simultaneously.
“There were signs everywhere. There was no drinking, no smoking, no eating on the set,” the actor recalled in an interview. “And there was one day when I looked around, and Harrison was standing in the doorway beneath the sign that said ‘no smoking, no drinking, no eating,’ and he was drinking a coffee, eating a burrito, while smoking a cigar, and he was doing all three.”
At first blush, this seems kind of badass. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan, or wherever you like to identify him as, was flouting the rules with abandon, giving a middle finger to The Man (aka, whoever was in charge of health, safety, and cleanliness). He was even doing it all with just two hands, apparently, which, again, is badass.
And yet… a burrito with a cigar? Is this man John Goodman in The Big Lebowski? Does he have no regard for decency? Even the cheapest cigar deserves better than this. Delicate, woody notes mixed with red onion and jalapeño? Have we lost our minds? Obviously, the person involved with laying down the law on that particular fake aeroplane did not know the evils they were up against. If they did, they would have had four bullet points – ‘no smoking, no drinking, no eating, and for the love of God, Harrison, leave the burrito at home.’
