Harrison Ford Quotes - Page 3

There comes a point when you've exhausted your opportunities playing good guys. I've been around long enough, I think I'm entitled to explore a bit. But what I saw there was an opportunity to play a character different from what the audience's expectation was. A chance to take their crude experience of me - of my iconography, if you will - and turn it on its ear at an appropriate juncture in the film to be useful to the process of telling the story.

For some directors, I'm the actor from hell.

Really, what are the options? Levi's or Wranglers. And you just pick one. It's one of those life choices.

My goal was just to work regularly. I didn't ever expect to be rich or famous. I wanted to be a working character actor.

All I would tell people is to hold onto what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You've got to find it on your own terms.

Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth.

What's important is to be able to see yourself, I think, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

I get mad when people call me an action movie star. Indiana Jones is an adventure film, a comic book, a fantasy.

The capacity to create [visual] effects in the computer has made the job easier, but it has also introduced the complexity that you can with a few more keystrokes generate such a busy canvas that the eye doesn't know where to go. You lose human scale on an event and you're just wowed by the kinetics and the visualization. But, often in those cases I feel you lose touch with the human characters and what it is that they would feel and how they might feel, and that's still the most important part.

I don't mind doing interviews. I don't mind answering thoughtful questions. But I'm not thrilled about answering questions like, 'If you were being mugged, and you had a lightsaber in one pocket and a whip in the other, which would you use?'

It's always nice to anticipate working in something that you know people will have an appetite for.

Failures are inevitable. Unfortunately, in film they live for ever and they're 40 ft wide and 20 ft high.

I'm still interested in perfecting whatever talents I have and continuing to grow as an actor and continuing to be useful to the telling of the story.

Everything I do, I'm sort of half in, half out.

I have the ordinary experience of having the blender bottom come off in my room upstairs. I have the ordinary experience of being anonymous when I'm in an airplane talking to air-traffic control, and they don't know who they're talking to. I have a lot of common experiences. What's important is to be able to see yourself, as having commonality with other people and not determine, because of your good luck, that everybody is less significant, less interesting, less important than you are.

I don't want to be a slave to electronic devices. I don't want to be connected to my friends. I don't want to send snapshots of my dog and cute pictures of my family life to my friends and family. I don't want to be liked, by pushing a button. I use all of this technology to basically replace devices that I had in the past which worked just fine.

Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid.

With the CGI, suddenly there's a thousand enemies instead of six - the army goes off into the horizon. You don't need that. The audience loses its relationship with the threat on the screen. That's something that's consistently happening and it makes these movies like video games and that's a soulless enterprise. It's all kinetics without emotion.

What I think is important for a young person is to figure out how to be useful and not be so concentrated on themselves, but to see what they can do to make the overall collaboration with all the other people involved in a movie work better.

[After playing Indiana Jones and Han Solo] hero image concerns me a little, though not for my sake. All it means to me is that I have a responsibility not to get caught doing anything terrible and thereby jeopardise my credentials. Not that I do terrible things, like running over dogs or anything like that. It just makes you think twice before you say or do things in public.

The trick of this thing and the beauty of this thing is that it's a cowboy movie first and then stuff happens. Even after stuff happens it doesn't change - it hasn't suddenly changed into another kind of movie. It's still a cowboy movie. And that's what's incredible about it because nobody has done that before, that's new territory.

I knew that there was an aspect to this story that was beyond the typical and that it was something very important about America, about our culture, and about bringing a story to a new generation that perhaps didn't know the details of it, (and) hadn't had the visceral experience that this film is [42].

I believe that the racial injustice which existed such a short time ago probably would have persisted longer if the color barrier had not been broken in baseball.

What I observed about my fellow actors was that most gave up very easily.

I continue to develop some things for myself and also take advantage of good parts as they come along.