He’s fought Nazis, cultists and everything in between in his many years at the top of the Hollywood tree, but now Harrison Ford co-stars alongside Daniel Craig in Cowboys and Aliens, playing a feared cattle driver in the Wild West whose town comes under fire from alien ships.
The Hollywood legend had an interesting answer when asked what brought him to the film. “To be fair, I don’t really care what the genre is. I’m in it for the money,” he said wryly. “No, I was playing a part of the Western side of the story, so that really is what attracted me. But in particular it was a special character, and the opportunity to work with all of these wonderful people.”
His character, Colonel Dollarhyde, starts the film as something of a villain, which is a big contrast from the heroes he usually plays. “I don’t know if it’s any more fun,” he said when asked what he preferred playing, “I thought it was interesting for the character in the telling of the story overall. It was fun. I didn’t know where it was going as I read along in the script but I was pleased by what I read and I thought it was something different for me to do.”
Having been in the business over thirty years, the 69-year-old has seen many changes in the industry, but he believes the revolution in computer effects can only be a good thing. “Obviously, we now have the ability to replace a man in an alien suit with a computer generated alien and what I was pleased with in Jon (Favreau, the director) and his group’s creation of the alien is that it didn’t move like a man in an alien suit. They created a movement for the aliens that wasn’t humanoid, which was interesting."
Big blockbusters like this are always touted for sequels, and while Ford has starred in his fair share of sequels, he believes they were always for the right reasons. “When we did the sequels of Indiana Jones, my ambition was that we take advantage of the audiences’ knowledge of the character and extend and complicate that knowledge,” he said. “That led to bringing in Indiana’s father and finally bringing in the son he never knew, those kinds of things. I wasn’t the only one who was ambitious for that but it’s something I felt very strongly about.”
Cowboys and Aliens is out now. To read all James' reviews of the latest releases, visit www.basingstokeobserver.co.uk
