Harrison Ford enters a room at the Carlton Hotel with not even the most pianissimo of fanfares. Other contenders for Last Surviving Movie Star – however hard they pretend to have humility – find it hard to shake the following caravan of hullabaloo.
Now 80, neatly dressed in a crisp grey suit, Mr Ford, famously a self-taught carpenter, just quietly makes himself there.
“Hello.”
Over the last day or two, the Cannes film festival has been in a collective kowtow before Ford’s apparently unfussy presence. Confirming the event’s still-robust clout, the folk behind Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, fifth and allegedly final film in the gung-ho sequence, elected to premiere by the lapping Mediterranean. At that first screening of James Mangold’s romp, Ford was presented with a surprise Palme d’Or for lifetime achievement.
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“I’m very touched and I’m very moved,” he said from the stage. “They say when you’re about to die, you see your life flash before your eyes and, on the screen, I just saw my life flash before my eyes! A great part of my life, but not all of my life.”
It is easy now to mistake Indiana Jones’s long journey as inevitable. But there was, 42 years ago, no guarantee of the first film’s success. Yes, Steven Spielberg had directed Jaws, the most successful movie of all time, and followed that up with the celebrated Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But 1941, his fourth theatrical feature, had just bombed in the most spectacular manner imaginable (a level of failure he hasn’t experienced since).
Raiders of the Lost Ark, inspired by the creaky serials on which Spielberg and his collaborator George Lucas had grown up, did not seem like any sort of safe bet. Years later, Jon Rhys-Davies, the Welsh actor who returns as gruff sidekick Sallah in the new film, recalled the poisonous whispers.
“Steven had just had a relative critical failure with 1941 and the knives were out – the whizz-kid had clay feet, he was just a flash on the pan,” he said. Lucas remembered the studio saying: “If you can get another director in there who we have more confidence in, then you can do it.” All of which now seems scarcely believable.
Ford himself was not first choice for the lead role. The costume designer had already fitted Tom Selleck with an outfit when he and his moustache were summoned back to Magnum PI. All of which leads me to ask if Ford had any conception that, over four decades down the line, he would still be playing the sardonic archaeologist.
“What was the last part?” he says when I dare to note Spielberg had recently “stumbled”.
I stutter out the stuff about 1941.
“I never think that way. Ha ha! That’s the kind of thing you guys think about. I just want to get through the f**king day with some degree of self-respect left,” he says, with a chortle.
“And that usually occurs when there’s a connection with a very strong filmmaker. And I have had the very good fortune of working with the old school and the new school. I went to kindergarten ... Umm ... I went to preschool with film giants. And now the world has changed and there’s a new stripe of genius. The story of my career is about how much there is to learn and how many great teachers are out there. And how the experience changes you every time.”
One of his earliest teachers was, of course, Steven Spielberg himself. This is the first film in the sequence the great man has not directed. He was on board until as late as 2020, when Mangold, the clever, cine-literate director of Logan and Le Mans ‘66, took over the reins. It must have been strange not having his old pal around.
“It was all strange,” Ford says. “It’s always been strange. But we have a long relationship. Steven has incredible grace and generosity. That is his core. And we talked a lot. Steven’s fingerprints are all over this movie. Not in a bad way.”
The whole emotional and dramatic value of the early part of the film – the first 20 minutes of the film – is not just to stimulate the nostalgia of seeing the original character still alive and kicking
Mangold does not disagree with that thesis.
“We’re following the DNA of something he built,” he says of Spielberg. “You’re having a continuous dialogue. I often say, in regard to Steven, that I’ve been learning from him long before I met him. I was making Super-8 movies while watching his films, and studying them shot by shot. So this became an opportunity to meet your heroes on an equal footing and play with them. I hardly could have dreamed I would actually become a movie director, let alone be working with my heroes.”
There was a time when Ford was accused of grumpiness in interviews. The warmth with which he has been received this week confirms the watching world has, after some decades, finally connected with his dry sense of humour and taste for creative self-deprecation. Raised in suburban Chicago, of Irish and Jewish descent, he began his career doing summer-stock theatre in rural Wisconsin. He moved to LA in the mid-1960s and secured minor roles on TV and in film. You can spot him in the background of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point from 1970.
He came close to the lead in Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, but the studio bumped him. (It was round about this point that he took up carpentry as a side line.) Then came three big hits. He was among the ensemble in American Graffiti. He was the breakthrough star of Star Wars. He cemented A-list status with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ford’s films have grossed more than $9.3 billion worldwide. Only six other actors can beat that.
And here we are in the Carlton. Is he keen on leaving the franchise on a high note? Is there a responsibility to finish with a bang?
“Not necessarily on a high, but to complete the human story of a life,” he says. “Because we have spent 40 years with this guy. It’s almost a lifetime. I want to see him face the challenge of age. For a guy like that, for an adventurer, to be reduced to this life ... Umm ... Though I value teaching very much, the value of teaching is apparently lost on the students he’s teaching. They’re not so much interested in the past. They’re interested in their future. They don’t understand yet that their future is built on our past.”
After a zippy prologue set in the aftermath of the first film, Dial of Destiny does, indeed, land Indiana Jones among uninterested students on the eve of the first moon landing. Mads Mikkelsen plays a former Nazi who – as former Nazis did – is now helping out with the US space programme. Phoebe Waller-Bridge turns up as Jones’s goddaughter, an antiquarian and sometime thief, who has an eye on the eponymous, apparently all-powerful dial.
One of the (many) criticisms directed towards Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released in 2008 to measured applause, was the disappointing absence of Nazis. They are back.
[ Harrison Ford: ‘I’m 80, and I’m playing 77. It’s a bit of a stretch’Opens in new window ]
“The whole emotional and dramatic value of the early part of the film – the first 20 minutes of the film – is not just to stimulate the nostalgia of seeing the original character still alive and kicking,” Ford says of that de-aged wartime prologue. “But it’s also about visiting a black-and-white world. There are white hats and black hats. Nazis are not nice. They are not people to be admired.”
He gestures landwards – and, presumably, over the Alps and onwards to the eastern end of the Continent.
“We’ve got a f**king war going on here – 400 miles from here,” he says. “It’s insane. We can’t live that way. We can’t live on this planet that way. It’s ... It’s ... But I digress. In the second part of the film the world is not black and white any more. It’s shades of grey. Umm, not 50 maybe. But at least a half dozen. Ha, ha! It’s complicated. And these kids are growing up in a world without moral compass.”
James Mangold also sees the end of the 1960s as a turning point in American culture. Politics were never black and white. But, in that era, it became harder to even pretend to that binary divide.
“The world has changed. People are thinking about other things than in the past,” he says. “Rock’n’roll has arrived. Modernism has arrived. Space travel has arrived. Realpolitik has arrived. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Wars where we don’t understand what they’re about. It’s a completely different moment than the moment we were in only five minutes earlier.”
Ford is one of the few main cast members to be an adult during that period. Most of the rest will have grown up with Indiana Jones. Mads Mikkelsen has been around for a while, but even he was still in school when the first film emerged. He tells me that, at 15, he and his brothers rented a “movie box” containing five titles – a thing in Denmark, apparently – and, after viewing Raiders of the Lost Ark, didn’t bother with the other four. It must have been disconcerting to encounter the character in the flesh.
“I got confused,” Mikkelsen says. “I was supposed to meet Harrison. We had to read through the script. I was just jumping into my trailer and he came out of his trailer in full costume: hat, whip, jacket. I was meeting Indiana Jones instead of Harrison. Standing there, grumpy. ‘What am I doing here?’ It was like ...”
And he hums a few bars of John Williams’s indestructible score.
Ford’s appearances at Cannes have confirmed that he remains the best sort of quiet riot. Striding the red carpet with his wife Calista Flockhart, he has skipped no opportunity for a gag. He has been emotional at times – genuinely touched by the acclaim – but the main sensation has been of a man embracing his senior years in upbeat fashion. You see some of that with his recent performance as an ageing psychiatrist in the Apple TV series Shrinking. Apparently you saw a great deal of that on set.
“He is the youngest person I’ve ever met who is almost 80 years old,” Mikkelsen says. “He behaves like a 16-year-old boy. I don’t know if you were at the press conference today. They mentioned names. My name comes up. People start clapping. And he just whacks me. Ha, ha! This is the inappropriate 16 year old boy. You feel a man full of passion standing right in front of you. This is what he is. He’s the annoying big brother. I’m maybe the little brother. So I’m also like that. There has been a lot of that going on.”
(Looking at the press conference again, it seems more like a cheeky nudge than a whack. But you can see Mikkelsen chortling as he rocks away from the older star.)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, perhaps wisely, does not overdo cracks about the character’s age. True, one of his first scenes finds him yelling at younger neighbours when they blast out The Beatles’ always annoying Magical Mystery Tour at an unacceptably early hour of the morning. But there are just enough “I’m getting too old for this” gags to confirm the filmmakers understand they’re dealing with a character born in the 19th century (1899 according to certain canon) without putting too much of a crimp on his action scenes. Ford is older than Jones, but he still looks as if he could handle himself in a dust-up.
“I was ambitious for a story that featured a reality in the context of the characters,” Ford says. “And that reality most specifically is the presence of age. I wanted it to be about that, because that’s what I’m about right now. And it moves me and it stimulates my imagination.”
There seems little chance of Ford retiring. Next year, he takes over the role of Thunderbolt Ross from the late William Hurt in Captain America: Brave New World. There is surely no actor of his generation the people at the Marvel Cinematic Universe would rather have in the role. He feels there is not enough discussion of ageing in mainstream entertainment.
“We investigate that in various ways in the movie,” he says of Dial of Destiny. “But we don’t do it in popular film that much. This is not an endless stream of jokes about old farts. This is this is more complex and textured. I owe that to what Jim accomplished in the screenplay.”
Dial of Destiny is, as you’d expect from an entry in this series, a breathless chase from chaotic opening to epically over-the-top conclusion (honestly, you have no idea about the craziness of that ending). The story takes us from a horse chase through New York to adventures in Greece and North Africa. Waller-Bridge gets a chance to nod at Indiana Jones’s spiritual descendant, Lara Croft. But, for all the fun, it seems clear Mangold and Ford really have thought about the morality and politics of the thing. Our current concerns about extremism look to be poking through the film’s shiny coating. Ford again mentions the Ukraine conflict.
So get it together, friends! What knits people together is a common human experience in the dark for two hours – with good music. Let’s get back into the theatres
“I’ve seen a lot of things in my life that I can’t explain. I can’t explain evil,” he says. “I can’t explain why it’s tolerated. I can’t understand why we are f**king sitting here and that war is going on right over there. We allow it. We act like it’s not f**king there. And the line continues. It’s not so much what people believe. It’s how hard they believe. It’s how much they believe. If you believe something without attention. We’ve been disaggregated purposefully. There’s a commercial process to divide us against each other.”
It is hard to avoid the conclusion he’s talking about current divisions in the United States. He doesn’t sound angry. He sounds sad and confused that important nuances seem to have been kicked aside. He doesn’t raise his voice. He speaks quietly as if trying to make sense of his own disappointed arguments.
“It’s like, inviting the devil to a wedding. You just can’t do that. You’ve got to allow the middle. You can’t create ‘the other’ purposefully and then feed it to the masses – day after day after day. And create this bitterness and this anger and this divisiveness and this discontinuity in humanity. It’s impossible. So get it together, friends! What knits people together is a common human experience in the dark for two hours – with good music. Let’s get back into the theatres.”
It is quite an extraordinary tirade, but one fuelled by an apparent desire for compromise and balance. There is little bitterness in the 21st century incarnation of Harrison Ford. There is an embrace of warmth. There is an openness to investigation. And there remains great humour. In the press conference Mikkelsen mentioned earlier, an Australian journalist suggested, not unreasonably, that he was “still very hot”. Ford now pauses modestly and smiles his way to a perfect answer.
“It was very dark in there. Ha, ha!”
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is in cinemas from June 26th
