Chapter 6, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: From Artisan to Artist

‘Harrison has an immense understanding of the entire movie-making process. You can’t fool him. He always knows exactly what is happening. His contributions were tremendous, on a story level as well as to his own character. He brought many ideas to me. In fact, it got bloody embarrassing. They were so good there was no way I could wriggle out of using them.’ Ridley Scott, director of Blade Runner

The release of Blade Runner in May, 1982 (September, 1982 in Britain) marked a definite attempt by Harrison Ford to change his image. The fan-following built up by such light entertainment vehicles as the Star Wars pictures and Raiders of the Lost Ark were puzzled by the singular lack of humour in Ford’s performance. So much so that they stayed away in droves. Blade Runner was not initially a commercial success.

Ford fans were puzzled by the lack of humour
in the actor's Blade Runner performance.

But Blade Runner was perhaps Ford’s most important film up to that point. Certainly, it was his first opportunity to sustain an Acting performance in a starring role. The insight and depth he brought to the character of Rick Deckard showed that Ford was capable of far more than the wisecracking characterisations of Han Solo and Indiana Jones would lead audiences to suspect.

More than that, the backdrop against which the drama of Blade Runner was played out, although futuristic, was grittier and more realistic than the fantastic environments of Indy and Solo.

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

No matter how skilled a film’s performers and technicians are, unless the blueprint from which they work – the script – is tightly crafted, the final movie will suffer as a result. Most movie people agree that just about all the problems encountered during the shooting of a film can be traced back to difficulties left unresolved by the scriptwriter – yet when everything goes swimmingly, it’s the director who gets all the credit.

The script of Blade Runner was based, loosely, on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by respected science fiction author, the late Philip K. Dick, who died tragically on March 2nd, 1982, shortly before the completed film of Blade Runner was released.

No, it's not real ... but don't you wish it was?

The need for the script to be ‘right’ is so universally recognised by filmmakers that it often takes longer to produce a screenplay that everyone is satisfied with than it does to shoot the actual film. Blade Runner is no exception. Work began on the transfer of Dick’s story to the screen almost a decade before the film was released.
‘It all began years ago,’ Dick told Starlog. ‘Martin Scorsese and Jay Cocks were both interested in Androids, but they didn’t option (purchase the film rights to) it. That was the first movie interest in any property (story) of mine. Then later, Herb Jaffe optioned it and Robert Jaffe did a screenplay back about 1973. The screenplay was sent to me and it was so crude that I didn’t understand that it was actually the shooting script. I thought it was a rough. I wrote to them and asked if they would like me to do the shooting script, at which point, Robert Jaffe flew down here to Orange County. I said to him then that it was so bad that I wanted to know if he wanted me to beat him up there at the airport or wait until we got to my apartment.’

The first scene of Blade Runner opens with this arresting visual ...

The Jaffes made little progress with their attempts to put Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on the big screen. But the Jaffes weren’t the only film folk interested in the project. Some time in 1974, Hampton Fancher approached Dick with a view to obtaining the film rights to the novel, but as the rights still rested with the Jaffes, Dick was unenthusiastic. Then, in 1977, the Jaffes let their option on the film rights lapse and within a year, Fancher and his partner Brian Kelly found themselves in possession of the movie rights for Dick’s novel.
Kelly approached Michael Deeley, Oscar winning producer of The Deer Hunter with a view to raising finance for further development, but the reception was cool. Deeley felt that there would be too many problems involved in translating Dick’s complicated story to the big screen. Nevertheless, Kelly and Fancher persevered. Fancher produced an eight- page outline for the film which so impressed Deeley that he encouraged the partners to come up with a full script. ‘I hadn’t ever intended to write the screenplay myself,’ Fancher recalled, ‘but I was convinced that this was the only way to get the project off the ground.’
‘Lord knows,’ commented Dick, perhaps uncharitably, ‘I didn’t think much of his screenplay.’ But despite Dick’s reservations, Kelly and Fancher took their script to Deeley once again. ‘He loved it,’ said Fancher.
Deeley began to hawk the script around the production companies in Film City. ‘People were interested,’ said Fancher, ‘but they wanted changes. They’d want a happy ending or they’d want something else changed. It was pretty precarious there for a while. I think there were about four or five drafts written before Ridley Scott came into it. When Ridley came in that sort of wrapped it up because of the Alien reputation. That’s what it needed for the studio to get down to business with it.’ On the strength of Ridley Scott’s participation, Michael Deeley had put together a deal with Filmways. At this point the title of the project had changed from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to The Android.

The smarmy blade runner Holder (Morgan Paull)
runs the Voigt-Kampff test on Leon

At the time Scott was approached to direct Blade Runner, he was scheduled to helm Dino De Laurentis’ multi-million dollar adaptation of the best-selling series of Dune novels by Frank Herbert. But delays in the production made it possible for Scott to squeeze Blade Runner in before beginning work on Dune. (For the record, Dune was later filmed by the team of director David Lynch and cinematographer Freddie Francis).
What was it about the script that convinced Ridley Scott to take on the project? ‘What appealed to me, having just done Alien which was very interesting, was the involvement in just developing that future environment further. I love that whole process, almost as much as any other part of movie making. I just didn’t want to step off onto ordinary ground again. What I felt was great about the script was that it was dealing with the near future. It had to be a familiar city, which it is. A lot of aspects of that city are familiar right now. In fact, a lot of people who will see the film, will experience that kind of future themselves. I also liked the aspect that there was a real character in there, rather than a two-dimensional cardboard character, which happens too often with science fiction films. Because the film is usually dominated by a monster or event the characters do, essentially, take second place.’
After Ridley Scott was signed to direct, a major revision of the script, by now called Dangerous Days, began. Initially, Fancher was resistant to some of the changes proposed. And as a co-owner of the project, Fancher was in a position to dig his heels in. But pressure to alter portions of the script became so great that Fancher realised the only way out of the situation was to bring in another writer.
Enter: David Peoples.
As Fancher remarked later, ‘I was surprised when I got Peoples’ script. Those things that Ridley had wanted that I thought couldn’t be integrated into the script had been rendered by Peoples in ways that were original, tight and admirable. I really liked it. But we never actually collaborated. He came in on very short notice and he had a lot of work to do, but he did it very fast and very well.’
Peoples had been brought into the project during November 1980. Shooting was still several months away. ‘I read the script,’ said Peoples, ‘and immediately felt that it was so good that I was disappointed, because when they came to have a meeting I told them I couldn’t make it any better. It was a terrific script. I don’t know which ones Phil Dick read that he didn’t like, but certainly the one I read was absolutely brilliant. And that was the one I worked from to make the changes Ridley wanted, to make it more his vision.’

Ridley Scott directs extras in a Los Angeles street scene.

Throughout this process of re-writing, Ridley Scott kept a watchful eye on the developing script. Another title change was instigated.
‘The final title actually came from an obscure science fiction paperback (by Alan Nourse),’ Ivor Powell, the associate producer told me. ‘This paperback had something to do with doctors in the future, when doctors and medicines are banned. There are all these illegal doctors who go out to administer medical help to the sick, and the people who supply them with instruments when they run out are called blade runners. Hampton Fancher gave that name to Deckard in his script as a code-name. I’m not sure whether it was Hampton or Ridley who came up with the idea of calling the film Blade Runner.’
Dutifully, the filmmakers bought the rights to Alan Nourse’s Blade Runner novel, only to discover that there was another book of that name by William Burroughs. Originally Nourse’s novel was to be filmed and Burroughs had been hired to adapt the script. But when the movie fell through, Burroughs had his version of the story novelised and published in book form. Blade Runner’s producers were forced to purchase the rights to that version of the story, too.
In the meantime, David Peoples was running into problems. During his revision of the script many of the sets and vehicles were either under construction or already built.
‘One time I changed a scene,’ said Peoples, ‘and somebody said, "Jesus, you wrote the ambulance out!" I said, "So what?" and they said, "Well, it’s already built."’
Peoples gives full credit to Ridley Scott as the true architect of Blade Runner. ‘If anybody was authoring it at this stage it was Ridley. He was dominating, supervising and caring about what went on here. Then, down the line, Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer made some really nice contributions in the way of dialogue. I would sometimes be writing a scene that Ridley would be shooting the following week, and twice I guess, I was writing stuff that was going to be shot that day.’
 
Next: Casting Blade Runner

Chapter 5, Part 3 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

‘Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?’

Most people would think that an actor who also did so many of his own stunts, like Harrison Ford, would have enough on his plate in a film like Raiders of the Lost Ark. Not so. The folk who made Raiders knew that the more severe the trials suffered by the hero, the more the audience would be rooting for him. Also, a hero with a failing seems more vulnerable and easier to identify with for an audience. So the filmmakers gave Indiana Jones a fear of snakes and needless to say, Indy met more than just a few snakes during his adventures in Raiders. The Well of Souls was filled with them.

‘Steven Spielberg kept wanting more and more snakes,’ said Ford, ‘but he had to make do with six thousand garden and grass snakes flown in from Holland, and used bits of garden hose to fill the spaces the boas and pythons couldn’t.’

Fords’s co-star, Karen Allen, wasn’t mad about doing the scene in the Well of Souls at first. ‘Harrison has on his boots and gloves, and leather clothes, and I have naked arms and nothing on my legs or feet. In the beginning it was tough, because I just couldn’t stand the snakes on my feet. But I got used to them.’

Producer Frank Marshall, who shot some of the snake footage, wasn’t wild about reptiles, either. ‘I had to cure myself of a common phobia of snakes. But once you see other people, like a snake handler, not worry about it, then you touch one. Then I got to be real comfortable with them. Some of the shots I did were a real challenge. Snakes aren’t afraid of anything, they’d even go right into the fire. So we had to invent a way to get them to stay away from the fire.’

Though most of the snakes used in the scene were harmless, the crew did use a couple of cobras, whose bite can kill, to add a little real danger for Indy.

‘When we used the cobras,’ recalled Howard Kazanjian, the film’s co-executive producer, ‘we had a hospital gurney on the set, and outside the stage we had ambulances with open doors. On the end of the gurney was an open medical kit with a hypodermic needle placed into the phial of serum from India.’ This does sound like a typical piece of studio hype.

The publicity folks obligingly airbrushed the cobra's
reflection out of the picture in this still, but
you can see it quite clearly in the movie.

In the shot where Indy comes face-to-face with the angry cobra, it’s pretty easy to see the cobra’s reflection in the sheet of glass that separates them. The gurney and the hypo were probably for the unfortunates whose job it was to handle the snakes off-camera.

Harrison Ford dismisses Indy’s fear of snakes with his characteristic easy smile. ‘They don’t bother me at all. When I was a kid, I worked in a boy scout camp as a nature councillor, I used to collect them. Used to run and catch every snake we could. And I’m amazed that that’s the most frightening scene for most people.’

But, as I said, all heroes must have a failing. There is something the intrepid Ford doesn’t like. ‘Spiders!’ he told Movie Star magazine. ‘Not because they’re creepy, but inside my house they multiply, and then their kids have kids. Ugh. All those spiders all over the place.’

One particularly gruesome scene in Raiders does just happen to have a few spiders in it. The scene in the Temple in Peru. But unlike the scene with the snakes, it was the spiders that had to be watched out for rather than their human co-stars. ‘It’s funny how people think tarantulas are so dangerous,’ said producer Frank Marshall, ‘when in fact they’re very fragile creatures. If they fall or you drop them, they die. You have to be very careful with them. We did lose one of them one day when two got in a fight – a battle to the death.’

But for Ford, it was the snakes that had the last laugh: shortly after the opening of Raiders, Ford told author Tony Crawley of a strange incident. ‘Back home,’ said Ford, ‘just the other week – you’re not going to believe this – I got bitten by a damn snake in my garden!’

‘I put as much of myself into the characters as possible.’

The only other thing Harrison Ford had to do in Raiders of the Lost Ark was portray the character of Indiana Jones. Director Steven Spielberg had nothing but praise for Ford’s abilities as an actor. ‘Harrison is a very original leading man,’ he said. ‘There’s not been anybody like him for 30 or 40 years. In this film he is a remarkable combination of Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Don Juan and Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He carries this picture wonderfully.’ 

Ford effortlessly conveyed the many aspects of
Indy's character - scholar, brawler, adventurer, scoundrel.

Ford was well aware of what was expected of him. ‘It’s a question of responsibility to define the character for the audience, to make the film as good as you can.’

But he had a good ally in Steven Spielberg. ‘Steve allowed a kind of collaboration that was really a lot of fun for me. I like to become really involved as much, and as long, as possible. If I had a little bit of an idea, Steve added to it, and then I added to it, and then he added to it, and it built into something we both thought was better than before ... or so stupid we both ended up rolling about on the floor with laughter.’

And, in the spirit of Indy’s line in the movie, ‘I’m making this up as I go,’ Ford and Spielberg were making changes to the script even during actual shooting.

‘My only impulse to change lines comes when the words are impossible to get out of my mouth,’ said Ford. ‘The process of film-making involves so many situations and personalities that it becomes a very liquid medium. The physical presence of actors and crew are concrete factors, but the script should relate to them more like a road map of probabilities than a rigid blueprint.’

The biggest change Spielberg and Ford made to the script was to delete the ‘Sword vs the Whip’ duel that was written as a climax to the battle in the marketplace in Cairo. In the film, Indy comes face to face with a giant of a swordsman. The swordsman performs an intricate routine with a huge scimitar. Indy, unimpressed, pulls out his revolver and shoots him. Not sporting, but efficient.

‘I was in my fifth week of dysentery at the time,’ recalled Ford later. ‘The location was an hour and a half drive from where we stayed. I’m riding to the set at 5.30am, and I can’t wait to storm up to Steven with this idea. I’d worked out we could save four whole days on this lousy location this way. Besides which, I think it was right and important, because what’s more vital in the character’s mind is finding Marion. He doesn’t have time for another fight. But as is very often the case, when I suggested it to Steven – “Let’s just shoot the sucker” – he said, “I just thought the same thing this morning.” Sure, the idea was nothing. Putting it on film, that’s the most difficult part.’

The whip vs scimitar battle would have been fun, but Ford
and Spielberg were right to drop it. Indy had to save Marion ...

That scene also told the audience much about Indiana Jones. The world-weary expression on Indy’s face as he draws his gun, sums up the character’s directness. As Ford explains, ‘Indy is a kind of swashbuckling hero type, but he has human frailties. He does brave things, but I wouldn’t describe him as a hero. He teaches, but I wouldn’t describe him as an intellectual. I wanted to avoid any elements in the role that might be too similar to Han Solo. But Indy doesn’t have any fancy gadgetry keeping him at a distance from enemies and trouble. The story is set in 1936, after all, and he’s right in there with just his battered trilby and a bull-whip to keep the world at bay.’

Star!

‘All I care about is good acting,’ George Lucas was once quoted as saying. ‘Star value is only an insurance policy for those who don’t trust themselves making films.’ But when Raiders of the Lost Ark opened in America on July 12th, 1981, that’s exactly what Harrison Ford had plenty of.

‘There’s more excitement in the first ten minutes of Raiders,’ said Playboy’s Bruce Williamson, ‘than any movie I have seen all year. By the time the explosive misadventures end, any moviegoer worth his salt ought to be exhausted.’

Just about all the reviews were of the same opinion. Raiders was a masterpiece of popular cinema. ‘Surely destined to go down in history as one of the great, fun movies,’ said Britain’s trade journal, Screen International.

‘Raiders represents Spielberg’s best work in years, a return to the briskness and coherence that have been missing since Jaws,’ said Time magazine.

At the press screening I attended in 1981, the opening twelve minutes received a standing ovation from the several hundred jaded film hacks in attendance. Now that’s a reaction.

The film’s reception at the box-office was nothing short of exuberant, which came as no great surprise, ending up as the highest earning movie of 1981. Its position in the all-time box-office hit list is just as impressive, with the film at the 40th position earning a US gross of over $242 million.

At the 1981 Academy Awards, Raiders was nominated in the categories Best Music, Best Cinematography, Best Director and Best Picture, and won for Best Sound, Best Special Effects, Best Art Direction and Best Editing. The film also earned Ben Burtt and Richard Anderson a Special Oscar for Achievement in Sound Effects Editing.

Ford himself was happy about his involvement in the film and the end result.

Indy and Marion share a Gone with the Wind moment
as they're reunited after all those years.

‘Raiders is really about movies,’ he explained. ‘It is intricately designed as a tribute to the craft. I’m quite in awe of the film, and the way it was accomplished. Steven set out to make an epic film, technically complex, on a short schedule. He finished twelve days early and under budget. He didn’t waste any time in retakes. Steve was very fast and efficient, and that’s the way I like to work.’

Yet his experience on Raiders did leave Ford with one cautionary thought ‘I occasionally wonder how much longer I can perform in heavy action roles,’ he told an interviewer. ‘Working in sub-zero blizzards and 130 degree deserts is incredibly demanding, physically. Sometimes I think the most difficult part of being in films is being cool as an airplane rolls over your leg – and acting like it doesn’t hurt at all.’

As Harrison Ford’s next film project drew closer, his attitude had mellowed a little ‘With me,’ he said, ‘the last film is always the toughest. I’ll soon be down on record as saying Blade Runner was the toughest.’

By the time Ford had finished with Raiders in late 1980 and returned to his home in Benedict Canyon, Melissa had moved in with him and the tabloids were inexplicably in another feeding frenzy. One of the first guests they welcomed as a couple was British film director Ridley Scott who was courting Ford for the lead in his next picture, a science fiction detective yarn based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Chapter 5, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

Keeping Indie independent

Despite his enthusiasm for the project, one aspect of Raiders bothered Ford. ‘My only immediate reservation about playing Indiana Jones,’ said Ford, ‘was that in the script the character was a little bit like Han Solo. Steven Spielberg and I wanted to make sure that the characters were spread apart. We did that by making use of the opportunities that existed in Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay.’

Time was too short for a re-write of the script. Yet Spielberg recognised in Ford a native ability with dialogue and wanted to implement some of Ford’s suggestions. What happened was like a scene out of a Let’s-make-a-movie movie. ‘The production was based in London,’ said Ford, ‘and Steve and I sat on the plane from Los Angeles and went through the script, line by line, for fourteen hours. By the time we got to Heathrow, we’d worked out the entire film.’

It’s just as well that they had, for no sooner had Spielberg and Ford arrived in Britain than the entire cast and crew were whisked off to La Rochelle in France to spend the first five days of the movie’s shooting schedule filming the submarine hijack of the Bantu Wind. It was during these five days that Ford was to get his first taste of the stunts he would be required to perform in the course of portraying Indiana Jones. ‘Swimming to the submarine didn’t involve danger,’ said Ford, ‘it only involved discomfort.’ The worst was yet to come.

Steven Spielberg directs Harrison Ford in the Peruvian Temple set
that features in the strong opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Star Wars had put the phrase ‘special effects’ into everyone’s mouth. Suddenly, after Star Wars opened, reviews were peppered with the words. It was as though George Lucas had invented the concept all by himself. With Raiders, Lucas was to elevate another previously ignored movie art to star status. Stunts.

Much was made, at the time, of the fact that Harrison Ford did many of his own stunts for the film. ‘Hell,’ he quipped, ‘if I hadn’t done some of the stunts in Raiders, I wouldn’t have been seen in the movie at all.’ Yet strangely Ford is no kind of keep fit freak. ‘People always ask me how I keep in shape. Every time the question comes up, I can manage to sneer. It’s a common enough question, considering Raiders. And I say, being in movies is enough exercise for me.’

In reality, Ford was lucky enough to have some of the best stuntmen and stunt directors in the business working with him. Stuntmen are always used for the most dangerous ‘gags’ for the simple reason that if the star of the film were to hurt himself and hold up shooting, hundreds of thousands of dollars would be wasted.

‘There were some very capable stuntmen doing some of the action bits, but I probably did a good deal more action stunts than an actor normally would do. That was important because we wanted to have our fights always be character fights, instead of just having whatever spectacular event a stuntman could come up with. Indiana Jones fights in a certain way, which Steven (Spielberg) let the stuntmen and me choreograph. Some of Indy’s battles are incredible. “How can Indy possibly do all this?” We had to take the edge off that with a bit of humour and at the same time not make fun of the material. So Indiana Jones had to be a character with a sense of humour. It’s Indy’s way of looking at life that makes our fights unique!’

Glen Randall was the stunt co-ordinator on Raiders. Says Randall, ‘They talk about the dangers stuntmen go through, wrecking cars and airplanes, but I think the stunt that gets the most people hurt in this industry is the simple fight routine. When you throw a punch, you’re throwing it with all the force you’d normally use to hit someone, but you’re missing them by inches. There are a lot of stuntmen who just cringe when they find out they’ve got to do a fight with an actor who’s not had a lot of experience doing them – ’cos nine times out of ten, they’re going to get hit!’

Harrison Ford raced the boulder ten times
- astonishing that he won every time.

One of the most spectacular thrills in Raiders is in the opening sequence when Indy races the giant rolling boulder for the exit in the Temple. It was Ford himself outracing the rock. ‘Looked a little scared that scene, didn’t I? I’d have to have been crazy not to be. It wasn’t a real boulder, but it wasn’t cardboard, either. It took 800 pounds of plaster to make it roll right. And if I had tripped, I could have been in big trouble. The director thought at first we ought to use a stuntman - but I thought I could do it and Glen Randall, our stunt coordinator, agreed. We all felt the more action scenes I could personally do, the easier it would be for the audience to identify with and believe in the character. But if I didn’t trust the stunt guys who were manning the safety devices and looking out for me, I never would have done it. No way!’ The scene was shot from five different angles, twice from each angle. ‘So Harrison had to race the rock ten times,’ said Spielberg. ‘He won ten times and beat the odds. He was lucky. And I was an idiot for letting him try!’ 

Indy’s escape from the Well of Souls provided an opportunity to the filmmakers for a really spectacular stunt. In an effort to break a hole through the wall of his prison, Indy topples a huge statue of a jackal god and rides it as it falls, a tip of the hat, perhaps, to Slim Pickens’ riding the Atom Bomb to his last round-up in Dr Strangelove. Harrison Ford, intrepid but not stupid, knew the time to step aside for professional stunt double Martin Grace.

As Glen Randall explained, ‘The Jackal was 28, maybe 29, feet high. Plaster of Paris but still incredibly heavy. And we put big hydraulic rams on one leg and hinged it at the bottom so we knew exactly the plane it was going to fall in. It could only fall one way, if everything went right. We had a huge breakaway wall for it to fall through.’

But for all the planning, something went wrong as the stunt was filmed. If you watch closely during this scene in the movie, you’ll see ‘Indy’ lose his footing for an instant as the statue begins to topple. ‘Yes, it went too soon,’ agreed Martin Grace. ‘And that’s when you have to think very fast. I was actually still hanging down when it started going. I should have been actually on my position ... Stunt people are usually very fast thinking people. In situations like that you have to think very fast and get it together. We’ve got sort of lightning reflexes, very sharp minds and that’s a great combination to come up with the goods.’ Grace emerged unscathed.

With Ford doing so many of his own gags, it’s no surprise that he had a couple of near misses himself.

‘There’s a scene where I run through the jungle,’ Ford told an American magazine, ‘swing on a vine, let go the vine, fall into the river, grab onto the pontoon of a seaplane that’s taxi-ing, get onto the wing and climb into the cockpit as it was taking off – and the plane crashed on take-off.’

Of course Ford wasn’t hurt. But it does show that no matter how careful you are, accidents will happen.

Ford and George Lucas sit in the shade beneath
the Flying Wing aircraft on location in Tunisia.

Harrison Ford must have been on a lucky streak during the filming of Raiders. He had had another near miss on location in Tunisia during the shooting of the Tannis Dig sequence. Ford told the story to Prevue, the magazine published by Raiders’ concept artist Jim Steranko. ‘Indy has a fight which takes place in and around the propellers of a Flying Wing airplane. The engines are running full tilt and one set of wheels is chocked, so the plane’s going round in circles. The bad guy is supposed to throw me down in front of the wheels and I was supposed to roll over backwards to get away from the wheels.

‘All day long the technical crew was having trouble with the plane. It weighed a couple of tons, so they were powering it with low-gear, high-torque electric motors – the kind that can push through a brick wall without slowing down. They had to stay out of camera range, at the end of a cable 50 yards away.

‘I still wanted to do the fight myself. I’m able to add bits of character touches to moments like these, and when the audience recognises the actor, it adds credibility to what is normally straight action stuff. We rehearsed the scene several times, then decided to shoot it.

Ford wanted the audience to see it was really him fighting
the tough German soldier beneath the Flying Wing.

‘Everybody’s ready and the take begins. I go down and start to roll away – and my foot slips, right under the rolling plane’s tyre.

‘Everybody was yelling, “Stop! STOP!” while the tyre crawled up my leg. Luckily the brakes worked – inches before my knee was crushed – but I was pinned to the sand.

‘I’m not normally a worrier, I know they’re not going to kill the main character in a twenty million dollar film. I also know Indy wouldn’t look good with a peg-leg. I was a lot more careful about stunt work after that!’

And he’d have to be. Still to come was the hazardous chase in which Indy starts by leaping from a horse onto the speeding German truck that’s carrying the Ark, and ends with our hero falling from the front of the truck, crawling hand over hand beneath the vehicle, then being dragged for a couple of miles down the road in the dirt before climbing up the tail board. You’d think for that Ford would insist on a stuntman. He did, and he got one ... for the long-shots. In the close-ups, there was Ford, hanging onto the rear of the truck, scraping up the gravel road on his belly. As usual, Ford was dismissive. ‘It couldn’t possibly be dangerous,’ he said at the time, ‘because I have a few more weeks shooting the picture.’

It's pretty unlikely that it's actually Ford in this shot
- almost certainly stuntman Martin Grace.

Being so closely involved in so many of the gags on Raiders has given Harrison Ford a stuntman’s outlook as far as ‘falls’ are concerned. ‘The stuff that always turns out to be dangerous is the stuff nobody thinks about. It’s not the dangerous stunts – which you think about, protect yourself, calculate and worry about, so that you take the danger out of it – it’s the stuff you didn’t think was dangerous that sneaks upon you.’

Chapter 5, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Matinee Idol

From the Stars to Star

‘Harrison Ford is more than just an actor playing a role in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He was involved in a lot of the decision-making about the movie as we went along. And this wasn’t by contract, it was because I sensed an exceptional story mind and a very smart person and called on him time and time again.’ Steven Spielberg, director of Raiders of the Lost Ark

‘The little film that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to make together is growing by the minute. Shooting begins of Raiders of the Lost Ark on May 15th, 1980 at George’s happy hunting ground of Elstree Studios – and already, before a single shot is completed, they have four sequels in the planning stages,’ was how British fantasy film magazine Starburst announced the start of work Lucas’ follow-up to the Star Wars saga in February, 1980. The report gave Lawrence Kasdan as the script writer, Frank Marshall as producer, but no hint as to the cast.

Before long, rumours were circulating that Raiders of the Lost Ark was not a new project at all, but the third part of the Star Wars saga. Said Empire Strikes Back producer Gary Kurtz of that idea, ‘I can categorically deny that. It’s not science fiction at all. It’s a Thirties action adventure type story about a search for a lost treasure. A typical Clark Gable, soldier-of-fortune kind of movie.’

No more news issued from the Elstree set of Raiders until the movie opened in America on May 25th and at London’s Empire cinema on July 30th, 1981.

FROM THE SANDS OF HAWAII TO THE SANDS OF THE SAHARA

The tale of Raiders’ genesis was reported both in Dale Pollock’s Skywalking (the George Lucas biography) and in Tony Crawley’s The Steven Spielberg Story. Both books told of Lucas’s retreat to the Hawaian beaches to forget the horrors of making Star Wars, and of Spielberg’s joining him there with the news that Star Wars had been a monumental hit. Over a sandcastle, the world’s two most successful filmmakers hatched a plot to make a movie that would mix the mythic qualities of the occult and the derring-do of the Saturday matinee serials and out-Bond Bond in the process. The co-author of the original story of Raiders, Philip Kaufman, was originally slated to direct, but when he dropped out of the project, Spielberg stepped in.

At this stage, the project still had no writer. Until Spielberg introduced a young Chicago advertising copywriter, Lawrence Kasdan to Lucas. Spielberg had read a screenplay by Kasdan called Continental Divide and was trying to acquire it to produce for himself.

Behind the scenes on location in Tunisia, with Karen Allen,
Spielberg, Ford and Rhys-Davies.

‘When Spielberg first read it,’ said Kasdan, ‘he told my agent, “I’m doing a movie with George Lucas and I think this guy would be great to write it. Would it be all right if I showed George Continental Divide?” And we, of course, agreed. Then I came in and met George – he had read the script and liked it – and at that first meeting, George hired me to write Raiders.’

Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan spent a week thrashing out the basic plot of Raiders. These sessions were preserved for posterity on tape and at the end of the week Kasdan went off to write the first draft script.

‘I left those meetings feeling I was in pretty good shape and then sat down and realised, Uh-oh, this is going to be hard!’ said Kasdan. And hard it was, at least hard enough to keep the young writer occupied for a full six months.

Finally, Kasdan took the finished script in to show Lucas. What happened next came as something of a shock. The scriptwriter working on Empire, Leigh Brackett, had died suddenly. Lucas desperately needed a writer to take over. Could Kasdan handle it? ‘But you haven’t even read Raiders, yet,’ protested Kasdan. Lucas only smiled. He was following his instincts – which were rarely wrong.

Meanwhile Spielberg had read Kasdan’s Raiders script and was delighted. ‘Larry didn’t stick with our story outline one hundred percent,’ commented Spielberg, ‘A lot of the movie is Larry’s own original ideas, his characters. George provided the initial vision, the story and the structure of the movie. Then George and I together provided key scenes throughout the film. And Larry essentially did all the characters and tied the story together, made the story work from just a bare outline, and gave it colour and some direction.’

With the script in the safe hands of Lawrence Kasdan, Lucas and Spielberg could turn their attention to who was to play the key role of Indiana Jones.

The auditions for the movie were to be held at Lucasfilm’s West Coast offices. ‘We wanted an unknown, originally – a total unknown. Conceitedly, George and I wanted to make a star out of Johnny the Construction Worker from Malibu. We couldn’t find a construction worker in Malibu, so we began looking at more substantial people in the film industry.’

Both Lucas and Spielberg had a picture in their mind’s eye as to the kind of hero they were looking for. Lucas saw Jones as a scruffy playboy, the kind of adventurer who, on duty, dressed like Humphrey Bogart in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Spielberg’s Jones was more of a grizzled alcoholic, gruffly romantic and ruggedly handsome.

Steranko's visualisation of Indiana Jones made it into the
film pretty much intact.

Lucas and Spielberg then approached well-known Marvel Comics artist Jim Steranko to produce some concept paintings to nail down a visual appearance of the character of Indiana Jones and his world. Steranko came back with four paintings, which defined the appearance of Indy, from the fedora hat, which Steranko had added unbidden, to the leather jacket which Lucas had asked for and the Sam Brown webbing, again Steranko’s addition. Lucas and Spielberg were so impressed with the artist’s work that they asked him to produce a further fifty paintings, one for each major scene in the movie. But the catch was that the artist would only have fifty days, a deadline that would be gruelling, to say the least. Steranko, not wanting to turn in sub-standard, rushed work, declined the assignment.

The filmmakers’ first choice for the role was TV actor Tom Selleck. Selleck was enthusiastic but aware that the new pilot he was working on, Magnum P.I., might turn into a full series for CBS television. CBS didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to take up the option for the first series of the show. ‘The show had sat there and nobody wanted it. And the option was about to lapse,’ recalled Lucas. Itching to get on with Raiders, Lucas contacted Magnum production company Universal with a request that Selleck be released from his contract. But while Universal were agreeable, CBS were suddenly alerted that the two biggest names in Hollywood were interested in ‘their’ star for a movie and instantly picked up Selleck’s contract for Magnum P.I. So Lucas and Spielberg still had no lead actor for Raiders.

‘We were stuck,’ said Spielberg. ‘We had three weeks left to cast the part of Indiana Jones, and there was nobody close. Then I saw The Empire Strikes Back and I realised Harrison Ford is Indiana Jones. I called George Lucas and said, “He’s right under our noses!” George said, “I know who you’re going to say!” I said, “Who?” and he said, “Harrison Ford! Let’s get him.” And we did!’

Harrison Ford was able to play the many sides of Indiana
Jones' character with ease - he was at the same time
brawler, scholar and sophisticate

According to Skywalking, Harrison Ford had read the script for Raiders shortly after Kasdan had finished it but had remained cool towards the project. ‘They could find me if they wanted to,’ Ford is quoted as saying. Nevertheless Ford must have known that the part was perfect for him. ‘It was clearly the most dominant single character in any of George’s films,’ said Ford, ‘quite in variance with his theories about movie stars and what they mean.’

Chapter 4, Part 2 - Harrison Ford: Return of the Hero

On the set Irvin Kershner, the director of The Empire Strikes Back, would find that scenes didn’t work and would have to alter carefully storyboarded sequences at the last minute. And because of these alterations he was forced to give precious shooting days over to rehearsals of the new sequences and relighting of the sets.

The animatronic puppet that played the character of Yoda also proved to be one almighty headache. ‘Actually there’s very little of Yoda in the picture,’ Kershner told Starburst’s John Brosnan, ‘and his scenes only took about ten days of filming, but they were very long days. He was monstrously difficult to work with and, on average, it took us three-and-a-half hours to shoot just two lines of his dialogue. The rehearsals took a lot of time too because we had a bank of tv monitors and three, sometimes four, technicians to manipulate Yoda. Frank Oz was coordinating it with me and we were both wearing earphones and mikes. The set was built four or five feet above the floor so we could have all kinds of mechanisms underneath Yoda ... and it took endless rehearsals because you’d start and one of Yoda’s eyes would go in the wrong direction or one ear would suddenly fall down, and I’d have to say, “Up with the left ear,” or “Now take the left eye and move it around to the right ... that’s right, now focus it a little closer.”

"Who's scruffy-looking?"

‘Frank Oz would be watching the tv screens and I’d be watching the screens and the creature but we were the only ones who could hear what Yoda was saying. The crew and Mark Hamill heard nothing – they didn’t know what was happening. Finally, we had to put a tiny earphone on Mark – a tiny miniature earphone with a very fine wire going back behind his ear so he could hear what Yoda was saying.’

Nevertheless the results were worth the bother. Yoda is a very convincing creation on the screen and the character won over the hordes of Star Wars fans instantly.

In the meantime, the problems that Kershner was experiencing were costing the production money. The ‘standing still’ budget (the money it cost to keep the production in business without shooting a single foot of film) was a staggering $100,000 a day. It was left to George Lucas to try to find the extra money from somewhere to ensure completion of the picture. Eventually he was forced to turn to 20th Century-Fox for help, something he wanted to avoid at all costs. And with the mounting financial pressures on The Empire Strikes Back, relationships between Irvin Kershner, George Lucas and Gary Kurtz became strained.

WORKING WELL

Yet through all this, Harrison Ford had only good things to say about Irvin Kershner. ‘He was wonderful,’ Ford enthused. ‘He’s a different kind of director. But we also had a very close relationship on the level of freedom to contribute.’ Kershner, a director sensitive to the needs and talents of his actors, encouraged every contribution Ford was willing to make. ‘Occasionally, I feel very sure about the changes,’ says Ford, ‘like the “I love you”, “I know” scene. I knew that my last speech had to be a strong character line. I convinced Kersh to give me the “I know” decision and I’m grateful he did. When George finally saw the sequence cut together, he said, “It’s a laugh line. I’m not sure it belongs there. This is a serious, dramatic moment.”

‘I said, “I think it really works.” and Kershner agreed with me. So George said, “Okay, go with it.”

‘From what I’ve seen and heard, the “I know” line really does work. It relieves a grim situation without generating laughs or diverting the drama. It also serves to make Solo’s plight more poignant and memorable.’

The Ford/Fisher chemistry was the chief reason
that Ford's dialogue changes worked.

Harrison Ford has no qualms about altering a line of dialogue that a writer might have spent months on if he feels it will improve the end result.

‘Writers sometimes have to live with a script so long,’ he says firmly, ‘that it begins to suit them too well – they can’t see the validity of changes.’

Lawrence Kasdan wasn’t too happy with some of the changes that had been made to his script – sometimes on the very day of shooting. ‘Han and Leia’s relationship is not at all what I had envisaged,’ Kasdan told the American magazine Starlog. ‘I could be the only person who feels this way, but I thought their romance had a touch of falseness about it. Han and Leia’s scenes were among what I was proudest of in my script, but they hardly remained. Their being changed had a lot to do with the circumstances of filming, Kershner and the actors’ feelings about doing their roles again. I was one of the people who wasn’t crazy about Harrison Ford in Empire.’

When The Empire Strikes Back opened in America on May 21st, 1980, Star Wars fans across the country had been queuing for three days. The film recovered its cost three months after that and eventually went on to pull in nearly as much in ticket sales as the original Star Wars movie. Not bad for a film that caused just about everybody connected with it so many sleepless nights.

GOOD PRESS, BUT ...

The critics’ reception of The Empire Strikes Back was only a little short of a standing ovation.

Variety wrote, ‘Having already introduced their principal players, the filmmakers now have a chance to round them out, assisted again by good performances from Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher. And even the ominous Darth Vader is fleshed with new – and surprising – motivations.’

The Washington Post thought, ‘the total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that’s something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.’

The San Francisco Chronicle said, ‘The emotional landscape of The Empire Strikes Back is the richest in the Star Wars trilogy. Every character is more developed, more familiar, more quirky in this movie. Han, the smart-aleck, now is in a full-court press to woo Princess Leia, and his repeated mocking of her “royal highnessness” goads her into a classic mating ritual of teases and glances – and wet kisses.’ 

Ford and "Her Royal Highnessness" Carrie Fisher
horse around on the Millennium Falcon set.

Yet some did point out that the ending of the film was no ending at all and smacked of the same kind of thinking behind the cliff-hanging endings of the old Saturday morning serials – a cheap shot to get the audiences back for the third part of the trilogy. Harrison Ford backed the filmmakers’ decision in the face of such comments and answered them smoothly.

‘I have no real defence for that argument,’ he admitted, ‘but what obligation is there to tie up every question with an equal answer? The cliff-hanger is because the trilogy was really constructed in the classic form of a three-act play. Naturally, there are going to be questions in the second act which have to be resolved in the third. I guess it really depends on what you go to a movie for. I figure there was at least eleven dollars worth of entertainment in Empire. So if you paid four bucks and didn’t get an ending, you’re still seven dollars ahead of the game.’

Audiences agreed and voted with their cash. Empire was safely the biggest earner of 1980 and its worldwide box-office of almost $534 million means that it’s the 39th highest grossing movie of all time.

The Academy nominated the movie in the categories for Best Art Direction and Best Score and awarded The Empire Strikes Back the Oscar for Best Sound, as well as a Special Achievement Oscar for the Special Effects.

The accusations that Empire was too serial-like could have been an omen of Ford’s next project. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Harrison Ford would go on to star in George Lucas’s homage to those same Saturday morning serials in the brilliant 1930s-style adventure movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Chapter 4, Part 1 - Harrison Ford: Return of the Hero

... and back again 

‘I’m very cautious of the word “star”. I do my job. I have been very lucky. Now I have to figure out how to milk it without letting it dry up.’ Harrison Ford

On March 7th, 1979, the Unit Publicist of The Empire Strikes Back released the following bulletin to the world’s news agencies: ‘American actor Harrison Ford has reached the snow stricken pass at Finse, Norway, to start work in The Empire Strikes Back in a manner to justify the claim that the show must go on.

‘He arrived in the engine compartment of a snow-clearance vehicle, the only thing that could move along the Oslo-Bergen single track railroad which avalanches and collapsed snow tunnels have blocked.

‘Ford had flown from London to Oslo to catch the train which travels a circuitous route across some of the most hostile winter terrain in Europe. At Geilo, a sizeable ski resort 30 miles east of his destination, the train was stopped in blizzard conditions.

‘The railroad had decided to return its train to Oslo. But the filmmakers needed Harrison Ford for scenes in the morning. So they radioed the train to unload the actor who then, by two improbable taxi rides, reached Ustaoset, just 23 miles from Finse. That was where the snow plough found him, to bring him along the track between 50 foot high snow drifts to Finse, which he reached at midnight.’ 

In retrospect, the makers of The Empire Strikes Back should have taken Harrison
Ford’s hectic arrival at the first location of the film as an omen of things to come. ‘Empire went about $6 million over budget,’ star Mark Hamill later said, ‘and ten weeks over schedule, which drove George (Lucas) crazy because he doesn’t like to see waste.’ Lucas would have been particularly wary of waste on Empire, as it was financed with his own money, a fact he pointed out frequently to the cast and crew alike.

The Empire principals horse around on a Norwegian glacier.

The script for The Empire Strikes Back was written by Lawrence Kasdan after he’d done the screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kasdan explained the beginning of his involvement with the Empire project in the American magazine Starlog.

‘I had absolutely no indication that my writing Empire was even being considered. Once I got the job I was excited because I liked Star Wars very much. I thought it was great art, in that Star Wars hooked into the archetypal images registered in our subconscious of how children perceive the world.’

Kasdan had been brought in after the death of respected science fiction and film writer Leigh Brackett, best known for her screenplays for The Big Sleep (1946) and Rio Bravo (1959). Before engaging Kasdan, George Lucas had completed a second draft, based on Brackett’s first draft version. Kasdan hadn’t read the complete Brackett script. ‘I only skimmed it. It was sort of old fashioned and didn’t really relate to Star Wars. George had the story very well outlined, but there were sections in his script which, when I read them, made me say to myself, “I can’t believe George wrote that scene. It’s terrible.” I later learned that George wrote stuff like that simply so that whoever wrote the next draft would know that a scene covering approximately the same kind of material that his sequence dealt with belonged at that point in the script. My job was to take George’s story and make it work through altering the dialogue and the structure. Naturally a movie is not a screenplay, but you can’t make a good movie without a good script.’

FILMING EMPIRE

After the nightmare George Lucas had gone through writing and directing Star Wars he decided that kind of involvement in so complicated a film project was simply more than he was willing to take on. His idea was to complete a rough draft of the script for Empire then turn it over to a professional writer for completion and polishing up. Then, with a professionally produced screenplay, he would turn his attentions to finding a director with the experience and the enthusiasm to helm the movie. He was looking for someone he knew and could trust to remain faithful to his original vision. He finally settled on Irvin Kershner, who had been one of his film teachers during his college days at USC in California. 

‘I knew George and (Empire producer Gary) Kurtz at the University of Southern California,’ Kershner confirms, ‘where I took courses and also taught. Through the years I occasionally saw them, but we weren’t close friends.’

Harrison Ford on the Hoth hangar set between takes.

Irvin Kershner, or ‘Kersh’ as he was called by the Empire crew, had started his working life as a professional musician. ‘Before all this, I played violin and viola for chamber music and orchestras. I wanted to be a composer, originally, so I started with music. Then I went into art and photography. I travelled for the UN, UNESCO, for Syracuse University, for USC, for the State Department, and made hundreds of documentaries. I always did my own photography, until I began working in Hollywood.’ Kershner’s film debut was with the 1958 film, Stakeout on Dope Street. From there he went on to direct such varied movies as Loving (1970), Raid on Entebbe (1977) and the John Carpenter scripted horror thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).

Kershner was brought in on the Empire project while Leigh Brackett was still working on her screenplay. ‘She was about halfway through the script when I became involved,’ said Kershner, ‘and we decided to let her finish the thing before getting into meetings with her about the re-write – because I knew I’d want a re-write. So while I waited, I had discussions with George and some of the art people who were starting on the initial drawings, just sort of slowly getting started. And when she handed me the first draft, she said she was going into hospital that weekend for a check-up – and she never came out.

‘So suddenly we had a first draft script on our hands and a definite start date for the picture on March 5th, 1979, which meant we’d have to get moving. So we took the script and started reading it and making a few changes – then George said, “You know, we’ve got to bring in a writer. Someone who is strong on dialogue and who can take on the burden of getting it whipped into shape.” So we brought in Larry Kasdan, and for months we would meet at my apartment in Los Angeles and go over it section by section. He would go off and re-write a section for a few days or a week, then he’d come back and we’d go over the pages he’d done, then he’d do another section. We did a very extensive re-write but it was still basically her script.

‘When we’d polished it to the point that I thought it was now workable I came over to London and began pre-production, which for the first few months consisted of making drawings. I visualised and drew up the whole film to create the flow of it, to get the feel of the sets and the actual staging of scenes and even the cutting. It had to be very precise – so precise that drawings were made before the art director began to make the sets. Then we began to incorporate how the special effects would be done and I had to keep altering the drawings accordingly.

‘It took about six months producing those drawings – we ended up with a book a foot thick. I sent copies to George and to all the technicians so everyone knew what they would be doing. With this book it was possible to get the flow of the picture established, which was the most important thing of all. Because as soon as you have a picture with a lot of gadgetry, blue screens, matte shots, super-impositions, etc, it tends to become very stiff if you’re not careful. The actors become as stiff as the gadgets themselves.

Ford glowers at the camera for a publicity picture on the Hoth set.

‘That was a major problem because the whole picture is special effects. People don’t realise that almost every shot has something in it that’s a special effect, and about half the effects were done completely on the set. Yoda, for instance was a total special effect and all done on the set. We added nothing to him later. Then there were the mechanical effects like the water effects and the fogs – there were so many things that we created right there ... but, of course, there were many shots where I could shoot live action and then send the scene back to the studio in San Francisco for the opticals to be added. It was really a locked down situation on many of those shots. I mean, there were shots where we had to use the VistaVision camera (a special camera in which the film runs through the gate horizontally instead of vertically, giving a clearer image definition), it had to be exactly four-and-a-half feet off the ground, it had to be pointed no more than fifteen degrees up, the light had to come from the right, it had to be orange – all because of the special effects that would be added later – and then I could be free as I wanted within that frame.

‘Then we reached the point where, in some shots, all I had was a completely black set and a few actors. It looked silly – nothing but a couple of lines drawn on the floor for the actors and that was it. I wouldn’t see the finished scene for maybe six months after I shot it, then I get back a piece of film that’s been married and the whole thing comes to life – it has a background and something flying around and other moving elements. It was a similar situation with some of the snow battle scenes – all I had were some men running towards me, smoke bombs, a few explosions and one man stumbling and falling in the foreground. And then the special effects team start working on it – they put in the three huge Walkers, which was a remarkable job, and then later they put in the laser blasts coming out of the Walkers, one of which hits the man I’d had fall over months before ... so it was all working backwards.’