Harrison Ford Refused One Specific Direction In Air Force One's Script
Wolfgang Petersen's appealingly preposterous "Air Force One" required a specific type of leading man to work. The 1997 action-thriller is basically "'Die Hard' on a plane," so you couldn't cast an unstoppable hunk like Arnold Schwarzenegger as a U.S. president forced to save the day when his personal ride is hijacked. (Not that filmgoers would have necessarily bought Arnie as a politician at the time — we were kind of naive that way.) What you needed was someone who specialized in playing John McClane-types, ergo the sort of action star whose characters were charming and handsome yet far from invulnerable. The film's creatives had the right idea when they tried to recruit Kevin Costner, but the Oscar-winner himself had an even better idea when he passed the script on to Harrison Ford.
We don't love Ford because he's unstoppable. In fact, his characters are imminently stoppable and frequently in over their heads, be they Han Solo, Indiana Jones, Rick Deckard, or Richard Kimble. What we love is that the actor's onscreen counterparts can take hit after hit and keep going, whether that entails getting the stuffing smacked out of them by Nazis or having to plunge down a gigantic dam and shake it off like a champ. Ford's characters simply can't stop, won't stop until they've saved the day, no matter how many scrapes and bruises they have to accumulate along the way. If someone they care about is in danger (or there's a killer that needs to be brought to justice), they'll groan and grimace up a storm, sure, but the last thing they're going to do is sit down and catch their breath.
It's something Ford knows all too well, which is why he objected to a very specific moment in Andrew W. Marlowe's "Air Force One" script.
The people love to watch Harrison Ford get beat up
Once a group of terrorists led by Gary Oldman (doing his best hammy European villain accent) lays siege to the titular aircraft in "Air Force One," it's pretty much a non-stop sprint for Ford's President James Marshall, right up until a climax that features some of the most delightfully bad visual effects involving an airplane this side of "Money Plane." As such, when Marlowe's script called for Marshall to briefly pause and collect himself, Ford knew it had to go. Marlowe regaled the anecdote to Syfy, explaining:
"I had something in the script about, '[Marshall] sits down for a moment just to gather himself.' And [Ford] said, 'Look, I'm not going to sit down. I appreciate your writing that, but I feel like my family is in crisis and I can't sit down until it's over.' He also said something about his character that I really enjoy, because he knows who he is as an actor, and he knows how audiences respond to him. He said, 'People don't come to the movies to see me beat up other people. They come to the movie to see me get beaten up and then get up again. So let's make sure that we're capturing that when we do this.'"
Ford's never forgotten that, either. Even in his 80s, the actor was still getting knocked about in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny." Memorably, he declared his retirement as the titular crusading archeologist at 2022's D23 by announcing, "This is it. I will not fall down for you again." Having spent an additional two and a half decades after "Air Force One" falling down every which way, it's high past time he took a moment to gather himself for real.