rahulsingh: Harrison Ford goes mum on 'Star Wars' sequel

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Harrison Ford goes mum on 'Star Wars' sequel

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LOS ANGELES -- It already had a 2015 release date from Disney and a director --J.J. Abrams--and, then last week, Harrison Ford let slip that a rumoured Han Solo/Luke Skywalker/Princess Leia return for Star Wars: Episode VII was "almost true" although "not in the bag yet."

But this weekend while discussing his new movie 42, Ford was sounding like a guy who might have spoken prematurely.

"I've suddenly developed really, uh, bad hearing and, uh, find myself at a loss for words," dodged Ford, when asked if that highly-anticipated reunion with Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill was any closer to being a done deal.

"It's - uh - I really can't talk about it now."

He was, however, after decades of "no comment" or quick dismissals, uncharacteristically willing to open up about the original movie that launched the franchise and his career.

At the time, when he landed the role, did he have any inkling of what that very first Star Wars was to become?

"Well, you know, I was lucky to get a job at that time," reflects Ford, who had been making the ends meets in between acting gigs by doing carpentry work for the likes of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. "And the reason I thought it was going to work was not because we were bringing something new or something original, but because we were bringing something old. We were bringing a fairy tale, with a beautiful princess and a wise old warrior and a callow youth and the necessary leavening of a smart ass. So I thought, you know, it could work."

But when Ford and the rest of the cast first showed up on set, there was concern from some quarters that Lucas and company would be unable to transport moviegoers to a galaxy far, far away.

"We made the film in England in front of these highly-trained professional craftsmen doing the behind-the-scenes jobs and they could not figure out what the [expletive] we were doing and how we thought we were going to get away with that," explains Ford.

Sitting back in his chair, he laughs that, unlike with the franchise's subsequent budgets, it was certainly debatable whether there had been sufficient financial backing.

"If you leaned up against the set at the amount of money we were spending you'd likely knock it over," Ford says. "And when you went to flip a switch in the Millennium Falcon, it would stay up for a very short period of time before it drooped back down because the switches without the springs were about eight cents-a-switch cheaper."

But when he ultimately saw that all that money had been saved for the special effects, Ford had a real sense of the film's potential.

"The minute that ship flew over the audience and the rumble of the speakers in the theatre accompanied it," he says, smiling, "I knew that this was something people were going to have to pay attention to."