Han Solo never wants you to tell him the odds, but Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a sure thing to break box-office records, due in no small part to Harrison Ford. Here, in an exclusive interview, he tells GQ of his doubts over Disney's takeover, why he has never had heroes and what it's like to play the most beloved film character of modern times. May the Ford be with you...
I don't want all this to take all f*ing day." The words Harrison Ford, 73, not so much spoke as snarled at me yesterday afternoon while discussing our lunch plans are still, 24 hours later, smarting like refined sugar hitting an exposed tooth cavity.
Walking up the steep drive that leads to the actor's Los Angeles seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom, $12.6 million new build, found sunk among the coyote-patrolled LA foothills just north of Santa Monica, in a bid to clear the fug caused by a combination of jet lag and last night's ill-advised three-Negroni supper, I go over the main points of what I know of the legendary actor one last time.
Accrued ticket sales of $3.9 billion (£2.5bn). A career that spans six decades. One of Hollywood's most successful leading men. A staunch environmentalist. Flies his own Cessna Citation private jet. Also owns one vintage yellow-and-chrome Ryan PT-22 Recruit two-seater training plane - a little scratched on the nose. He's something of a curmudgeon who has an alleged penchant for Seth Rogen-sized doobies. A man who enjoys woodwork, he once built a sun deck for Sally Kellerman from MASH* and a $100,000 recording studio for Brazilian musician Sérgio Mendes. He actually likes snakes. A spider has been named after him: Calponia harrisonfordi.
Oh, one more thing: this month he will appear as Han Solo in Disney's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which, you may have heard, could easily be described as the most highly anticipated post-prequel sequel of all time. (Luckily for JJ Abrams, Frozen 2 isn't slated until 2017.)
As I press the polished silver buzzer, and the large double wooden gates to Ford's property silently glide open like electric sails, I can't help but feel like a wookiee-sized rabbit caught in the glare of Ford's intimidating fame beams.
Listen, I grew up with the guy - we all did. He's ground zero for heroes. He's my Marlon. He's Steve McQueen for boys who grew up on Monster Munch and The A-Team. Ford, in all his guises, is the man I pretended to be in my back garden between the ages of seven and 13. He's the reason I took my dressing-gown cord into school and told everyone it was a bullwhip. Yes, really. The man, quite simply, is the figure on the front of my schoolboy lunchbox come to life.
I have, however, been issued a warning. Off-the-record asides from publicists (not his own, I hasten to add) and by those he's worked with previously. Ford does not suffer fools. Journalists tend to give the man the heebie-jeebies. It's not about a fear of revealing too much - about a plot line or a personal matter; no, he can handle himself just fine - but it is a hoop through which he would rather not have to jump at this stage in his career.
Promotion? Interviews? Chat shows? Ford, quite rightly, feels he needs none of it. And nor, one might argue, do his current crop of cinematic announcements (some rumoured, some confirmed), many of them reboots or sequels of earlier successes - *Star Wars:
The Force Awakens*, Indiana Jones 5 and Blade Runner 2. Yet he likes, as he will keep insisting throughout our day together, "being useful". Just as much in life as on set. So he yields. He says, "OK. Fine. Sure. Where do I stand?"
Yet this doesn't stop Ford having a belligerent streak. He is not a man of corny platitudes. He doesn't want to be Mr Nice Guy Movie Star who smiles and signs old VHS boxes of Sabrina for a kid at the farmer's market on a Sunday morning. He doesn't mind keeping his distance, even if that means having to scowl every now and again.
"Nice walk?" Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and Rick Deckard are standing on the stoop tapping into an iPhone 6 Plus, dressed as Harrison Ford. The actor looks up, walks down his well-swept brick steps and greets me convivially, yet coolly. The house is on the top of a path that allows it to loom over all those who arrive.
It's a sizeable crib, no doubt, but pretty modest for a man who, if you think about it, can afford to run his own fleet of private aircraft.
From the outside the property looks like it belongs on Cape Cod, clad in clapperboard and painted a mute grey or what Farrow & Ball call "Elephant's Breath". One thing this house is not is ostentatious. It is not a monument to Ford's extraordinary career nor to his ego.
We walk inside. "You want a coffee or something?" No one I know or, in fact, have ever known keeps their house as spotless as Ford and his wife Calista Flockhart. Maybe the cleanliness is Flockhart's thing? Or an LA thing? Or maybe they tidied for me especially? Something by the way each ornament, each artefact on display glints like the Queen's silver, tells me there are standards to be kept in this house, and these standards are met with or without the added impetus of a snooping journalist.
The interior is a combination of gleaming whitewashed walls and dark-stained wooden floors, the latter so rich with polish I half expect the actor to insist that I kick off my Burberry Chelsea boots and don a pair of slippers. His housekeeper offers a warm hello and then goes off to get us drinks. Coffee. Black. No sugar.
Ford is dressed casually in a pair of stonewashed blue Carhartt jeans and a navy T-shirt. He tucks the T-shirt in. The T-shirt is slightly faded and frayed at the edges, which seems incongruous as surely Ford can afford the odd new T-shirt. Perhaps he's thrifty?
His belt is pulled tight and he is impressively lean. His arms are tanned and well-defined and his shoulders are broad and square. His handshake is one level above firm and one level below purposeful intimidation. On his feet he wears trainers, not running shoes nor fashion trainers but somewhere in between - the sort of trainers you'd wear to go trail running in Colorado.
We take our seats on modern sofas perpendicular to one another, both sitting on the corners with our legs crossed. Directly in front of me is a large fireplace, above which is a painting that looks like one of Turner's tempest scenes. The mantelpiece and surrounding surfaces are lined with African masks and bronze idols on plinths and polished boxes. But no sacred Sankara Stones. No bullwhip in a glass cabinet. The final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant is not Beverly Hills.
Behind Ford's sofa, facing out towards a large lush garden, is an enormous six-fold Japanese screen, gilt decorated with black lacquered panels. It looks old. And very expensive. Outside, I catch sight of a swimming pool and to the far left a second building, which I later learn is a vast screening room. (Last night he screened Ridley Scott's The Martian for friends and family - "An excellent adaptation.") In the middle of the garden is what looks like a full-size professional volleyball net.
Coffee arrives with a caveat. "Listen," starts Ford, trying to relax but looking somewhat uneasy. "I haven't done this in a long time. I might be a little rusty. One warms to the task usually, but until then it's going to be all uphill. You're the first [interview] I've done thus far. Good luck."
Within the still of the house that last utterance resonates through the bright, light room more like a threat than with empathy. Ford picks up a black clay bowl, lifts the lid and takes out a fistful of roasted almonds, the gourmet variety, dusted heavily in black pepper. The actor cracks one between his molars and chews, slowly. "Nut?"
As dumb as a stump." This is the sort of thing that Harrison Ford used to say about the Han Solo character before a new adventure in a galaxy far, far away was officially announced by Disney in 2013, after the studio had bought LucasFilm for a whopping $4bn (£2.5bn). However, when Ford walked out on stage in front of 7,000 hard-core Star Warssuperfans, mostly dressed as Chewbacca, at ComicCon this past summer to watch the new trailer - with JJ Abrams, the new cast members (including British actors John Boyega and Daisy Ridley as the next-gen Jedi) and the old (Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher) - Ford seemed to be toeing the company line. He seemed, well, almost dewy-eyed to be back. "I wasn't so sure it would be, but the company was the right company, the director was the right director," he remarked. "Larry [Kasdan - who also worked on the Raiders script] wrote us a wonderful story and I was proud and grateful to once again be involved. The original Star Wars that I was a part of really was the beginning of my working life and I was very, very grateful for the opportunity that I had in that film and for the success of that film."
The room, somewhat predictably, went bat-shit crazy. So after four decades of being totally uninterested in the franchise, why the sudden change of heart? Was the number of zeroes at the end of Disney's cheque so many that he couldn't say "no" this time around? "Well..." he says, chuckling, not squirming so much as aware of his own reverse ferret on the issue of donning Solo's waistcoat once more, at least publicly. "I think this is somewhat misunderstood. I had agreed with George on returning before the sale. And I never disliked the opportunity to play Solo, the character, but I just didn't think he was very deep. I recognise that within all this, within the context, Solo had a unique ability to remain outside of the mythology and to be identified as a rogue and maybe a malcontent. That suited me then and it suits me now. I would have been pretty uncomfortable at the time peddling the notion of The Force. So I was happy enough with the character but I thought there ought to be... more. As we did a sequel [The Empire Strikes Back (1980)], there was the romance with Leia and the tensions with Luke that I thought was fine and in the third one [Return Of The Jedi (1983)], I thought let's have Solo..." Ford swipes his thumb across his own neck and makes the sound of a cat being strangled. "I thought let's get some bottom in this, add some bass notes to this thing. To me [killing off the Solo character] seemed like the obvious utility, to have him whacked and create some drama. That didn't happen. And thank God no one listened to me!"
How did it feel for Ford stepping back onto a Star Wars set for the first time in years? "Well, it should have felt damn silly going back and putting on tight pants and high boots and messing around with a guy in a dog suit. But it became very interesting to work out the layers and levels of the emotional complications [of Solo] and some very interesting thematics are introduced..." he glances at my Dictaphone, warily, "of which I am unwilling at this moment to share with you. But they did find some complications, shall we say, and some deeper emotional context this time around."
Ford is superbly, precisely, yet almost villainously vague on any script details surrounding The Force Awakens.
What of these "interesting thematics"? Has Han Solo, between getting slammed on Jedi juice in the Ewok village at the end of Return Of The Jedi, shagging Leia and saving the universe from a baddie with the voice of a severe asthmatic, had something of a midlife crisis in the intervening years? Death? Marriage? Divorce? Kids? "I think all the elements of Solo are somewhat preserved in the next movie. The fallibility remains, if we're to call it that, although we don't pretend that he is the same person or the same age as he was then. He has been changed inside and out." He's been through a lot, then? "Same old shit every man goes through. Disappointment. His disappointments and the disappointments he's produced in other people." I presume Leia and Solo are no longer together? "You can presume all you want. I'm not here to straighten you out on that."
Whatever Solo's "emotional context" in The Force Awakens - is Daisy Ridley Solo's daughter? Is new bad guy and Darth Vader superfan Kylo Ren, Solo's wayward son? Does Solo himself get struck down at the end of this next instalment? Will Chewbacca come out as gender neutral? - it's clear from the footage released of the film thus far that Ford is here to bridge a gap. "There were stories about what happened," says Rey, Ridley's character, in the latest trailer, with Ford replying emphatically, "It's true. All of it." Solo is, of course, saying this not only to the characters in the film but out of the screen and into the hearts of all the younger Star Wars fans who perhaps have yet to see the earlier instalments.
Solo's re-emergence works on multiple levels. He allows the nostalgia hunters to get all juiced up - find me a man or woman over the age of 30 whose hairs didn't stand on end on hearing, "Chewie... We're home," and I'll eat my original vinyl-caped Jawa figurine - and he confirms JJ Abrams' film as 100 per cent legit.
It's precisely what Hollywood now believes the modern sequel should be to score maximum points at the box office, a line that Daniel Craig and Sam Mendes attempted to walk with Spectre: a new explosive story in an old familiar world.
Rather than seeing these next films as some sort of moneymaking nostalgia trip, however, Ford believes the baton-handing element of Star Wars to be of great significance. "There is certainly an element of nostalgia, yes. But what was and is still shocking and interesting to me was that these films hit notes that make it useful, in people's minds, to pass it on from generation to generation. That fathers and mothers, although usually fathers, pass it on to their kids at a time they deem appropriate. Star Wars has achieved a kind of currency that is pretty rare. It's an old movie. But still young kids know about it. That has been the luck of my career so far as I can work out."
Did Ford have any sense of this at the time, back in '77? "F*** no! It was a bizarre film. Very bizarre. Listen, I was never a science-fiction fan. But what I felt about Star Wars was that it was a sort of morality tale, a fairy tale that often touches people's hearts. And that's where I thought, if people did go for it, that is where people would be captured. This is what would hold their interest. I think the success of these films also comes from being attached to the recognition of human archetypes and emotional relationships, albeit in a galaxy far, far away and in a time beyond our comprehension."
Is Ford a fan of Han Solo now? "Yes. But it's less important that I like [Solo] than that I recognise the things in my life which we have in common. I think it's really important that [as an actor] you make an emotional investment in the work that you do.
That emotion is the language of film. And it's achieved in many different ways. It's emotionally bolstered by the visual element, by the music, by the director... But if you're not thinking about emotion then you're just walking through it. "I am interested in the lives of all people. And how the telling of their story adds to the general understanding of how the world works. This is storytelling and that is where the strength is. In terms of my career, I've found people really do need stories to help them interpret the difficult terrain of life. This is a powerful experience to realise, to feel you are mining that vein that is common to all men. Whether that be playing the good guy or the bad guy, positive or negative. I want to have my hands on the glue."
Ford glances over at the stack of paper, my questions, of which we've hardly dented. "Wanna go for lunch?"
This thing is all torque." As Ford pushes his foot down on the accelerator of his gunmetal Tesla Model S - Elon Musk's four-wheeled version of the X-Wing - the car jumps, silently, eerily, into hyperspace. Aside from planes, on which more later, Ford isn't really one for expensive boy's toys. Ten minutes earlier, however, while I was waiting in Ford's garage - the most organised garage in the world, by the way, with nails and screws in individually labelled specimen jars lined up along one wall like some sort of giant, OCD-satisfying spice cabinet - I noticed a small vintage car under a dustsheet on a raised lift. "Yeah, I got a bug to get one of those things years ago," he admits as we park up outside a huddle of shops and restaurants a mile or two from his house. "I bought a 1953 Jaguar XK. Beautiful thing. Racing green. Cost me a f***ing fortune to get overhauled."
Over lunch we talk broadly. Fame. Kids. His peace with director Ridley Scott. (Rumours abounded over a feud the pair had about whether or not Rick Deckard in Blade Runnerwas a replicant or not: "It didn't require a kiss - a simple handshake was all it took. We were on the same page shortly after the movie was out. This great contest people talk about was just a bit of fun.") We briefly discuss his leg injury on the set of The Force Awakens: "It's -complicated. Health and safety was not being followed. We weren't even shooting."
Ford is passionate about nature. Tomorrow he flies to Washington DC as a board member of a conservation body to try and -strong-arm more aid money. The actor very rarely -discusses politics publicly and what he thinks about Donald Trump must, sadly, stay off the record, although to say he's not a fan of the Republican presidential hopeful is to underplay his views by several terse expletives and a fist slam to the table. "My views on politics," he explains, "are a little like playing film studios off against each other. You can split the power and get more control over the issues. Or that was the theory. Now we need a third party."
Despite being impressed by his younger -co-stars in The Force Awakens, his views on directionless millennials take -doom-mongering to new levels of pessimism. "Do I think our youth can make a difference in the world? No, not really. Too self-obsessed. They have no desire to seek the truth." I ask whether he's ever taken a selfie, a question that I immediately regret. "No. No! It's ridiculous. What is a culture that obsesses over a number of 'likes', or the number of followers one has on social media? It's a disaster. Self-obsession is devouring our need to find answers."
Much has been made of Solo's swagger, his wry asides and cockiness that appeals to so many in the original Star Wars films. If Mark Hamill as young Luke Skywalker -represented the naive virgin, Ford as Solo came with a scepticism that gave his character a little more sex appeal, a certain cachet of cool. Much of this came from Ford himself, as both Ford and George Lucas have since confirmed. The famous line, "I know," for example, when Leia declares, "I love you!" to Solo before his carbon-freeze in Empire, came because Ford thought the originally scripted "I love you too" sounded "too much on the nose".
Since the start of his career, Ford has enjoyed being an outsider. He grew up in the Midwest, Chicago, his father being an advertising executive who occasionally did radio plays in vaudeville. Ford took to acting because basically he was flunking out of every other course. "I was a philosophy and English major and I was not a good student. Not an attentive student. I was looking for -something I could get a good grade in and I saw a description in the catalogue for 'drama' and I -presumed we'd be studying plays. "The first role I played was Mr Antrobus in The Skin Of Our Teeth, with a pillow stuck in my trousers and a moustache.
I remember my knees shaking and that sort of pissed me off. I wanted to overcome that. I mean, back then I had no idea of the kind of actor I wanted to be. I didn't even know there were kinds of actors. I certainly hadn't figured out how to be me, which it turns out is probably around 75 per cent of the leading man's obligation. I never thought I was going to be anything spectacular. I guess I thought it would be nice if my parents thought I wasn't a total f*** up."
After a little summer soc in Wisconsin, he decided to head for a coast. "That's when I first considered being an actor for money. I knew I had to go to LA or New York, and quick, as it had begun to snow. So I flipped a coin. It came up New York, so I flipped it again so I could go to LA. I wasn't going to starve and freeze."
It was 1965 and Ford, aged 23, was already married to his first wife and was soon to have young mouths to feed. Ford and his family headed west "until they could see the sea". He got work at the Laguna Playhouse where his ex-drama teacher from college had set up camp for the summer. He got odd jobs, first washing boats then in a department store by telling his employers he wanted a career in retail sales. "It wasn't hard to get a job," Ford explains, "just hard to sustain interest in one."
Eventually, Ford was fortunate enough to land a seven-year contract with Columbia, in their new-talent division. Again, working within a rigorous institution didn't seem to suit. "I did a year and a half and got kicked out for being too difficult," he says. "I was very unhappy with the process they were engaged with, which was to re-create stars the way it had been done in the Fifties. They sent me to get my hair pompadoured like Elvis Presley, photo in hand, all that shit for $150 a week."
Getting a haircut under duress seems to have been an issue for Ford more than once in his life. As we take our seats in a restaurant called Farmshop (think Daylesford by way of Big Sur) lunch is ordered - pastrami on rye for him, salmon medallions for me - and I bring up his earlier comment where he described being uncomfortable with the notion of "The Force" back in his younger days. Was Ford a hippie? "Oh, I was definitely a hippie. I was thrown out of the ROTC [the Reserve Officers' Training Corps] in college because I refused to cut my hair. Meaning: I wanted to get thrown out of the Corps because I didn't want to -graduate second lieutenant because there was this thing going on at the time called the Vietnam War. I had serious questions about it. And when they pushed me to come join them, I filed as a -conscientious objector."
It turns out Ford wasn't so much on the sidelines of the mid-Sixties Californian counterculture as slap bang in the middle of the movement, probably in a teepee, naked to the waist, puffing on a peace pipe and painting his face purple. "My brother-in-law at the time was the editor of the Psychedelic Review and he was my touchstone for all that sort of thing when we first moved out here. He was based in Santa Cruz. I was immediately taken by it. I went to the first Human Be-In [1967] and I was a security officer, for want of a better word, at the Monterey Pop Festival." Did he drop acid, indulge in free love? "Sure, but I was married and had a young child. I managed to persuade Bill Graham who ran the Fillmore Auditorium [a venue during the mid-Sixties in San Francisco that was a focal point for psychedelic music and counterculture in general], to allow me to sell the posters he was making for the -concerts and make money for myself and for him. "I was always working. I wasn't enveloped by the hippie lifestyle totally. For me it was mostly about an independence from the ideas of government at the time, a resistence against the war and my strong feelings over race relations. But at the same time, I was working at Columbia Pictures where the first thing they asked me was whether or not I could ride a horse. So I was a hippie that went to work in a suit. There was a tension between things and I was perfectly OK with flipping back and forth between these two different worlds."
You can be forgiven for it sounding like Ford failed into acting. The actor never wanted to be a movie star. He didn't want to be famous or follow in the footsteps of James Dean or Marlon Brando. "The dirty little secret is that I never went to the movies. I didn't have any idols. I didn't identify with any heroes or movie stars. I think people find this slightly offensive but it's just the facts. When I went to the movies as a kid, we went to see Saturday matinees. My parents took me to see Bambi and it scared the shit out of me. I don't have heroes."
The man largely responsible for Ford's success was, of course, George Lucas who cast him in American Graffiti (1973), the first film Ford remembers that he "actually enjoyed making". His casting was luck, rather than anything more calculated. "I had no idea who George was. I did an audition for American Graffiti and he was sitting at the back of the room and he was never introduced. I never did figure out he was the director until much later. It was his producer, a mentor of mine called Fred Roos, that was my first connection. Certainly that relationship with George has been hugely good for me, but despite what people think we're not particularly chummy."
After American Graffiti proved to be a surprise hit, Lucas went on to work on the script that would turn out to be Star Wars: A New Hope. Although hard to believe in 2015, no one in Hollywood back then believed Lucas' sci-fi fairy tale inspired by Flash Gordon would gain traction. "I didn't think the film was going to be successful," Lucas has commented. "I showed it to all my friends early on, but it was mostly [filled with] stock footage of old war movies, and all kinds of stuff and they saw it and [said], 'Poor George. What were you thinking?'"
One man, however, did believe. His name was Steven Spielberg, who helped Lucas "fix up" Star Wars, despite the little faith in it. When Star Wars was close to debut in May 1977, Lucas and his friend were -preparing to go to Hawaii to, "ignore the reviews and sit on a beach". Before the pair jetted off, Lucas received a call from Alan Ladd Jr, the then president of 20th Century Fox, the film's original distributor and someone else who believed in the movie. Ladd called Lucas to tell him, "It's a fantastic hit! Every single paper! There are lines around the block!" but still Lucas refused to get excited. It wasn't until after the first weekend, when CBS was filming Star Wars "specials" with screaming kids queuing round the block that Lucas conceded they had a hit on their hands. A $775m global hit.
Sitting on the beach that first week back in May 1977, Lucas got into discussing future projects with Spielberg. Spielberg, who had already had a huge hit with Jaws (1975), was jabbering on about how much he -desperately wanted to make a James Bond film, having pitched himself to Cubby Broccoli the year previously and been turned down. (I ask Ford whether, if Spielberg had been successful, he would have ever played Bond: "I mean, I would have. But I don't know if I am polished enough for the Bond character.") Lucas, however, had other ideas. He wanted to make a film based on the rip-roaring cliffhanger programmes of the Thirties, something combined with the Orientalist nature of the matinee serials of Lucas' youth. Spielberg's interest was piqued.
When the pair got back home in late '77 they called scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan and the trio assembled in a little bungalow in Sherman Oaks, LA, to hatch the film. Amazingly, a rare transcript exists of these first discussions, with Lucas spitballing the film's main themes and identifiers: "The hero is a bounty hunter of antiquities," Lucas begins. "A doctor with a bullwhip." At one point, hours in, Kasdan asks, "Do you have a name for this person?"
Lucas: "I do."
Spielberg: "I hate this but go ahead."
Lucas: "Indiana Smith."
Despite initially being offered to the actor Tom Selleck, Ford won the part of Indiana after Selleck had contractual clashes with Magnum PI. George Lucas, so far as Indiana Jones is concerned, believes in something Alfred Hitchcock called the "MacGuffin". For Lucas, the MacGuffin is a sacred object: the Ark of the Covenant (Raiders), the Sankara Stones (Temple Of Doom), the Holy Grail (The Last Crusade) and the more contentious -alien-formed crystal skulls (The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull). Ford knows the MacGuffin to be "a symbol of people's beliefs. An -emotional investment. Something the audience can be pulled in by other than the action - that is part of the signature of the MacGuffin." At first, I wonder whether The Force was Lucas'
MacGuffin in the Star Wars films, although Ford is quick to correct me: "There is not a MacGuffin in the Star Wars movies, so to speak. It's always a physical object and an object with some sort of spiritual resonance or belief attached to it."
The more one gets lost down the -wormhole of Star Wars mythology, however, the clearer it becomes. In these new instalments, the MacGuffin isn't The Force, or a lightsaber, or the Millennium Falcon, or even a wookiee's emotive seal bark. It's Ford himself. It's Solo. If not for the characters then certainly for the audience. This is Lucas' legacy, despite not being directly involved in the new films. Han Solo is our symbol of belief. He, despite all the cragginess of a pantomime villain, has come to represent the film's emotional core. The rookie Jedis will provide the bang and the flash - the excitement - while Ford will now supply the heroic depth. Something of a paradox for a man who, himself, doesn't believe in heroes.
Ryan 178 Run A21: "Engine failure, request immediate return."
Control tower at SMO: "Ryan 178 Run A21. Clear to land."
Ryan 178 Run A21: "I have to go to three."
Harrison Ford doesn't really want to talk about the crash that very nearly ended his life in March 2015, mainly because he can't remember much between that last radio call to the tower at Santa Monica airport and waking up five days later in hospital. One thing he will clear up, however, is this: "I didn't crash. The f***ing plane crashed!"
You can learn a lot about Harrison Ford by asking about his love of flying. He took his first lessons back in college but he ran out of money after just three. "I think it was $11 for an hour or something, for an airplane and an instructor. I didn't pick it up again until I was 52. I was worried I was getting old and I couldn't learn anything any more. I didn't only want to be an actor in my life. No dissatisfaction with that career, I just wanted some other experience. Airplanes are expensive but at a certain point it was clear to me that maybe it would be cheaper to own my own, than for Warner Brothers to keep flying me around - no such thing as a free lunch. I have a love for airplanes. It's the hole in daddy's armour and, yes, where all the money goes."
Ford's two-seater vintage training plane took off from Santa Monica airport and within one minute he knew he was in serious trouble. "It was pretty simple," he explains. "There was one major issue. I didn't have to think about anything but one thing. In that way, it wasn't as scary as you might think. It was, "I only have one problem right now and that is that I don't have an engine." I had to find somewhere to land and I can't make it to the airport. All this happened very fast you understand."
Ford has had near misses before, although nothing of this severity - reports underplayed the seriousness of the actor's injuries. So, given the risks, why does Ford fly? "I've later come to understand that what I love about the experience of flying is freedom and responsibility. The notion of taking responsibility for your own safety and your passengers imposes a kind of rigour on your situation. It is that combined with the freedom of flight, the joy of seeing, of being part of the third dimension. It's understanding the visual complexity of the thing, the joy of creating this body of knowledge, of flight, that you didn't know anything about and then applying it in practice - that is the appealing thing to me. People think it is about danger or the thrill of it. But it's not about risk, for me, it is about mitigation of risk." A -controlled risk that leads to once inconceivable improvement. Or, in other words, fortune and glory - via a strict health and safety procedure.
Pulling up outside Ford's residence, I can sense the actor's relief that our time is up. Put it this way, I'm certainly not asked inside to play volleyball in the garden with Calista. Ford walks me back to his gates and warmly shakes my hand. I tell him I can't wait to see the film. He smiles. I turn to walk back to my rental and that's when I hear it. "Me too, kid."
I very nearly glance back. Kid. He called me kid. For the first time all day, a flicker. One word, that's all I needed. That "kid", uttered in that tone, in his voice, fires my memory banks like a proton torpedo fired into a thermal exhaust port.
All of a sudden I'm sitting cross-legged on a cream carpet in my pyjamas. My brother is with me, sitting in front of a TV the size of a filing cabinet. Static from the screen feels fuzzy over my fingers. It's New Year's Day, 1987, around lunchtime. My parents are hungover. I am eight years old. I'm eating Bourbon biscuits and drinking phosphorescent orange squash from a plastic beaker the size of a cake tin.
There's a delay after the last advert, a moment of still just before the main feature presentation. Fade to black. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." Cue John Williams' score. The crawl. Skywalker. Vader. Leia.
Han f*ing Solo.
Walking away from Harrison Ford's house, finally, I'm home.
Originally published in the January 2015 issue of British GQ
