In 1965, the future interpreter of Han Solo and Indiana Jones had met French filmmakers Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda, with whom he had even watched Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon.
Currently starring in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fifth and final installment of the famous saga, Harrison Ford is now an octogenarian star, who is undeniably one of Hollywood’s most legendary.
Yet, like any actor, he was once one of the unknown youngsters, desperate to break into an impenetrable environment and start a career as an actor by landing small roles.
When he was only twenty years old, in Hollywood, he then met Jacques Demy, famous director of the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and his partner the filmmaker Agnès Varda, as well as the had told the latter to our microphone in 2008:
“Jack [Demy] had spotted a young actor who was under contract with Warner but who was not filming”told us the filmmaker, evoking the Hollywood shooting of the comedy-drama Model Shop.
“He was 20 or 21. And [Jacques] said to me: ‘Take your camera 16, give me his tests.’ It was Harrison Ford. So I did the tests, we see them in my film. And the studio said, ‘This guy has no future.’ And they made him take Gary Lockwood. So Harrison Ford laughed a lot about that.”
Even if the studio therefore preferred Lockwood, already famous for having played the protagonist of 2001, a space odyssey, Harrison Ford obviously rose to fame a short decade later with the role of smuggler Han Solo in Star Wars. But before being approached by George Lucas, the budding actor – who had also put aside his dreams to become a set carpenter – continued to see the two French filmmakers.
“Demy was the first to believe in me so much. And that, I will never forget”did he declare at the microphone of Le Figaro in 2013not hesitating to describe the director as “his friend.”
STUDIOCANAL/GmbH Harrison Ford had a small role in “Apocalypse Now”
This friendship between the future Indiana Jones, Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda also gave rise to a most unusual anecdote, as Ford also told at Figaro. Indeed, on July 21, 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, the three friends had watched the sequence together, at the home of Demy and Varda:
“I remember strong moments, like when we watched the first steps on the Moon in the residence of Jacques and Agnès in Beverly Hills”said Harrison Ford.
BORDE-MOREAU / BESTIMAGE
“Agnès had her back to the television, refusing to watch because she was convinced it was a sham, that it had all been shot in the studio!”
Ironically, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, in theaters now, is set in the exact same time frame. At the beginning of the film, we can thus see the adventurer trying to lose his pursuers in the middle of a parade in honor of the Apollo 11 mission.
(Re)discover the trailer for “Model Shop”, Jacques Demy’s film in which Harrison Ford could have played…