The legendary director Harrison Ford was never a fan of: “I never really psychologically believed”
Despite rapidly closing in on his 50th anniversary as one of Hollywood’s most popular stars, Harrison Ford hasn’t worked with a massive number of auteurs throughout his career.
Of course, the industry’s most well-known and highest-paid names don’t need to seek out its most celebrated and distinctive filmmakers to succeed, but it’s curious that Ford hasn’t felt compelled to collaborate with the top-tier filmmakers of the multiple generations he’s bypassed during his lengthy stint at the pinnacle of the A-list.
Then again, the term ‘auteur’ has been the subject of endless debate. One person’s maestro is another’s hack, but if Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are eliminated from the equation, the list of names Ford worked with who’ve been instrumental in reshaping the landscape of cinema or helming some of the greatest movies of all time remains conspicuously thin on the ground.
Ford made two films with Francis Ford Coppola, the last in 1979. His Blade Runner bosses, Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve, Witness and The Mosquito Coast‘s Peter Weir, Frantic‘s Roman Polanski, and Regarding Henry‘s Mike Nichols all fit the profile, but there aren’t too many beyond that.
Some of the directors Ford has partnered with in recent years include Jon Favreau, JJ Abrams, Gavin Hood, and Robert Luketic, and it’s stretching the bounds of credulity to call any of them auteurs. The legend has always been disdainful of playing politics and navigating Hollywood’s machinations, which might explain why he’s always been drawn more to character than the person wielding the megaphone.
Ironically, when he teamed up with Robert Zemeckis – who definitely earns the auteur label for Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, never mind his career-long obsession with pushing the limits of visual effects and filmmaking technology – for What Lies Beneath, the film being slapped with the Hitchcockian label led the star to reveal he could never buy into the ‘Master of Suspense’.
“I don’t see it as homage to Hitchcock,” he clarified to Ross Anthony. “I, frankly, was never scared by Hitchcock films. I never really psychologically believed his characters that much.” If there’s one thing Alfred Hitchcock knew how to do, it was manipulate an audience and bend them to his whims, but it turns out that Ford was completely immune to his powers.
What Lies Beneath was inevitably compared with Hitchcock’s back catalogue due to its themes of manipulation, lashings of suspense, and liberal use of red herrings, but Zemeckis probably didn’t invoke his name when he was persuading his leading man to sign on. One of cinema’s foundational elements is convincing an audience to buy into the characters and invest in their journey, arc, and fates, an effect that one of the all-time greats never had on Ford.
The ‘Master of Suspense’ typically let his plots do the talking and admitted that character development wasn’t the most potent weapon in his arsenal, but that doesn’t stop him from becoming one of the best to ever do it. Nonetheless, Ford has never been able to get on board with the very things that made Hitchcock who he was as an auteur.
