Harrison Ford had some delightfully Harrison Ford-like words for fanboy film "products"
Harrison Ford, your movie star dad who’s just trying to get a minute alone, for crissakes, has been forced to put on a collared shirt and be dragged to interviews all this week, in promotion of his new movie Paranoia. But, much as Harrison Ford was asked by a Comic-Con audience—and the waking world—only stuff about Han Solo, this New York Times Magazine interview spends approximately two obligatory questions on Paranoia, before getting to the gristly meat of Ford’s opinions on fanboy culture. And as you might expect, Harrison Ford is not that into it.
After Ford laments, “Now people see a movie on their iPad, alone, with interruptions for snacks,” interviewer Adam Sternbergh points out that, well yeah, but surely events like Comic-Con prove that “the level of engagement is just as high, if not higher”? Also, who doesn’t like snacks? Harrison Ford, probably:
It’s another form of engagement. I think the success of Comic-Con is based on the partnership between the fans and the service providers, the entities—I won’t necessarily call them filmmakers—that supply the film product that supports their particular interest, whether it’s vampires or science-fiction fantasies or Transformers or whatever is going on.
Of course, even though he's right and hilariously nasty about it, one might find this sort of talk ironic from Harrison Ford, who attended Comic-Con to promote the science-fiction fantasy Ender’s Game, starred in some of the very films that inspired Comic-Con and the “product” packaging of film in the first place, and very recently signed on to another Expendables sequel while expressing interest in returning to further, fan-servicing editions of Indiana Jones, Star Wars, and even Blade Runner. Though one would, of course, not say that to Harrison Ford.
Anyway, while Ford is still open to reprising all those products, you probably shouldn’t hold out hope for Regarding Henry 2: Give My Regards To Broadway, or whatever. “I think the smaller-scale movies, which I like very much, would be harder to conceive another iteration of,” Ford says, immediately shooting down Sternbergh’s suggestion of revisiting John Book, still living on the Amish farm of Witness. “He left, man,” Ford says. Rewrite your fan fiction accordingly, then don’t send it to Harrison Ford.