Harrison Ford talks about ‘Call of the Wild’ and surviving the digital revolution in film

Harrison Ford’s scene partner in The Call of the Wild, which opens Friday, is the figment of some animator’s imagination, a “dog” that isn’t really there.

Lately there’s been a lot of that in Ford’s career.

In Blade Runner 2049, his character hangs out in Vegas with credible facsimiles of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, leftover footage of the late Carrie Fisher (as Leia) was digitally integrated into the movie, making an immortal character even more so.

Ford has made more than 50 movies, been photographed from every angle, and so he exists as data that could be reconstituted and repurposed by animators (much as the very late James Dean will be in Finding Jack).

How does the legendary actor feel about the fact that in the coming world of necro-cinema and reanimation, there may always be a Ford in our future?

“I do believe in intellectual property rights, and the right to a persona and an identity,” said Ford, in a tone suggesting no animator should try it while he’s alive.

“But I don’t know the answers to all of the ethical questions we’re going to deal with in the future. My biggest problem with CGI isn’t an ethical issue. It’s that with a keystroke you can multiply a bad guy or a good guy until you’ve got an army of them that stretches to the horizon.”

Too many directors, he said, are overcrowding the screen with digital multitudes that overwhelm the eye and underwhelm the heart.

“You can employ gravity-defying kinetics and you can do all kinds of things that people obviously can’t actually do, and if you don’t maintain human scale, and you just get absorbed in the spectacle of it, you lose the potential of giving the viewer something to relate to. That happens occasionally, and it’s bad,” Ford said.

He and animator Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon) tried to do just the opposite in The Call of the Wild, a mixture of live-action (Ford is definitely real) and animation deployed in an adaptation of Jack London’s classic story of man and dog bonding and surviving in the 19th century Yukon of the Gold Rush years.

The animation is used to place Ford and his “dog” (actually a human acrobat with a digital motion-capture makeover) in a vast, unspoiled frontier, framed in a way that accentuates their isolation and amplifies their removal from civilization.

“That’s called art,” Ford said. “That’s called design, and that’s storytelling. There’s a lot of CGI, but the job is real, and the job is still storytelling.”

The story that Ford wanted to tell here was a throwback to the kind of outdoorsy adventure that Hollywood used to routinely crank out for a younger audience, a genre that, he said, “got steamrolled by the machinery of commerce.”

He and Sanders wanted to recapture the matinee magic of those movies, using CGI.

“I was amazed at the capacity that is available to generate something that has such an emotional impact — you really feel the power of nature that comes across. The ruggedness of nature, you feel the environment as a character in the film,” he said.

All of the “wilderness” scenes are painted on by digital artists. Ford got no closer to the Yukon than Santa Clarita, 45 minutes from Los Angeles, but no matter, thanks to the Sanders team, the movie brings the natural world to life.

“I love working for that audience, because I know what it can mean to a kid to discover nature, the majesty of it,” he said.

The Call of the Wild plays to a slightly younger demographic than most of his movies, but he’s unabashedly proud of making what he called “family” movies throughout his career.

“My career has really been built on family films. It’s a fact that Star Wars and Indiana Jones have become staples of family life, passed down from generation to generation. And that’s extended the life of my career,” said Ford, who’s now 77.

Yep, 77.

“It’s not like it hasn’t been extended enough and I need to make another one, but I just love working for that audience.”

He also loved working in Philadelphia, back in 1984, when he came here to research his role in Witness as police detective John Book, who protects an Amish child (Lukas Haas) targeted by a corrupt cop (Danny Glover) who’s killed another officer.

Ford remembers convening in town with director Peter Weir, who went off to Lancaster County to work on the Amish aspects of the story, while Ford stayed in town and rode around with a homicide detective, compiling research for material that in many cases ended up in the movie.

"It was an … interesting experience. We drove past this place and I said, ‘What’s that?’ and he said, ‘Oh, that’s a rough place, we don’t want to go in there,’ and I said, ‘Yes, I do,’ and he said, ‘OK, we’ll do it the way it would normally be done. You go in the front, and I’ll go in the side door,’ ” Ford recalls.

So Ford, in his I’m A Detective sport jacket, pushes through the front door, and gets glared at by an extremely unfriendly crowd of folks who didn’t recognize him as Indy, or Han, or Rick Deckard.

“I was not as recognizable in that context as you might want,” he said.

To boot, the side door turned out to be locked, and Ford saw the handle rattle uselessly as he contemplated the premature end of his career.

He survived, of course, and the experience ended up in slightly different form as a scene in the movie (the Happy Valley bar). Ford went on to give a career-best performance — the only time he’s been nominated for an Oscar.

So far. He’s working as hard as ever. He’s making another Indy, for Steven Spielberg, later this year, and he is super pumped.

“Absolutely. It’s great, making those movies.”