Keeping up with Indiana Jones

You hear that Harrison Ford is not an easy man to be in a room with. Combative as an interviewee, defensive as a person, you read that he is pernickety, brusque, that he challenges every question. He doesn't want to give anything away. That is part of his charisma.

I am in the beachy luxury of the old Spanish-style hotel Casa del Mar in Santa Monica, chosen no doubt because he lives nearby, to be in a room with him. It's a shock. He's more sexy in the flesh. His face more rugged and real. He smiles a crooked but welcoming smile. His black shirt skims a taut stomach. Lots of working out. Age will not wither him. His hair is thick and in a ruffled crop. I tell him how much better he looks than the night before when I saw him on TV at the Academy Awards.

'Less well dressed,' he offers in his low, rasping, almost gravelly whisper. More handsome, better hair. 'What was wrong with my hair last night?' he says. 'It's the same. It's freshly washed. Nothing different.' He's suspicious of everything already. There's an eruption of uneasiness and gentleness at the same time. Something controlled as well as something wild. That's often what he brings to his heroic roles.

He's best known as being the hero. That's what he's good at, mixing ordinariness, even haplessness, with luck and strength that comes out of nowhere. The winner against the odds. He's not showy or glossy. He doesn't package or sell himself. He once said empathy was not a talent but a disposition. All of the above may have combined to make him one of the best-paid heroes of all time. His films have grossed over $1bn and he is the only actor to have made over $100m for each decade that he's worked.

And here he is, about to reprise his most famous hero, indefatigable archaeologist Indiana Jones, the role that first moved him to the super league of actors in 1981. The trilogy has been one of the biggest-grossing box-office takes of all time. But what's it like for him to be reviving Indiana Jones, 27 years after his first raid? The actor who was voted the sexiest man alive as a thirtysomething surely finds different challenges now he is 65. He looks at me with yellow-grey eyes. 'I like your hair too,' he says, although you see the circles of his mind rhythmically turning as he's thinking how to answer, correctly, that time passes yet a hero remains the same. You see him measuring the rhythm of his sentence in his head before he says it.

His staring makes me feel the silence with the same question, slightly different. Does he feel a different kind of hero? Does he feel different about doing all the intense physical stuff?

'No,' he says. 'It was fun. I was never so interested in the heroic part of it. This guy is an extraordinary character with an active imagination that's just involved in a chain of events where some elements twist into something else...' He seems to like the stress, the haplessness. Indiana Jones, like Harrison Ford, doesn't like to take credit or blame. He likes to just do the job.

'We didn't shoot it like a Matrix style, where if you hit somebody, they end up in this big space and you didn't feel the hurt, you don't feel the fear. We are more old school. I feel as fit as I did 20 years ago. They have figured out new things in safety so myself and the stuntman can do more. For instance, when you see a car and a bus converging and we are in the middle on a motorcycle we are on a thin wire with a special harness...'

Do you get a thrill from doing those things? 'No,' he says. Pause. 'It's just fun. There's not a lot of CGI, it's mostly done with real physicality, real sets, some things put to scale.'

You ride motorbikes anyway, don't you? 'Yes,' he says, distracted. 'But I don't drag through the stuff he does. The fun is figuring out how to do it safely, the things that are outside your normal range of experience.'

He uses the phrase a few times, 'outside your experience', as if for him, that's the excitement of the journey. Why, I ask, since he so obviously loves his Indiana Jones persona, and making these movies, did it take so long? The last film was 19 years ago. 'We started talking about it 15 years ago and over that period of time three scripts have been produced. It took the three of us, George [Lucas], Steven [Spielberg] and me to commit to course and none of us was fully satisfied with what was produced and then we were all doing different things.'

He shrugs, as if there was no tension in that disagreement, as if it's perfectly normal to reprise a role after two decades. There have been other heroes and villains: most successfully in Air Force One, The Fugitive, Patriot Games; the most critically acclaimed in Blade Runner. He can do comedy, as long as he's not being too funny (Working Girl), and super scary (What Lies Beneath - including taut sex scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer). He is never raunchy. He usually does decency better than devious, but he can manage that too. It has been said that it's his ordinariness that is so winning. But there's far too much tangible conflict going on inside him for me to buy into that.

He's never made an independent movie. He once said, 'I simply have no particular yearning to do the same work for less money.' He once referred to his audiences as 'my customers'. And the expectation now is that Indiana Jones IV will be the biggest money-maker of the year. Bringing all the players back together was obviously a big deal, but he seems resolved not to be ruffled by that or explain why they couldn't agree. Or perhaps he just wants to enjoy the moment of being back on the ride, escaping disaster, being outside of his experience.

He tells me about a stunt that almost went wrong, that involved driving a military vehicle through a wall that was rigged with explosives. 'It was supposed to look like the car was causing the wall to fly through the air and that I was driving through it, but it came just a millisecond before I went through... And I looked down and right next to me on the seat there's this big-assed box of explosives that had survived. If it had gone off, it would have caused a stitchable.' He uses the term 'stitchable', as in cut, as if he's old friends with stitchables.

'I didn't get hurt on this one at all. I've got war wounds but they are all athletic or stupid, not because of a heroic willingness to endure pain or take risks.'

His most defining scar is across his chin, a great gash which has never been treated by a cosmetic surgeon. It came from driving into a telegraph pole. 'It was stupid. I was on my way to work in the knickknack and oil painting department of Bullock's department store. I was on this twisty Laurel Canyon road when I realised I had my seat belt off. It was an old Volvo coupé. The seat belt was hung on a peg over your shoulder. As I was fumbling to get it off the peg I ran off the road, hit a kerb, went up on two wheels and crashed into a telephone pole. I got this from the steering-wheel on my way through the windshield. That was not heroic, it was stupid. Heroes are people who rush into burning buildings, who throw themselves on a grenade, who save starving people, who selflessly devote themselves to others.'

He looks at me closing his mouth to a full pout as if to stress that's not him. He's not up to that job. 'I've never had lofty goals - I just do the best job I can,' he once said.

There's an insecurity about Harrison Ford that translates on screen to vulnerability inside toughness, like a thread that runs through his work: daredevil hero, conflicted president, brain-damaged lawyer, frantic husband or thwarted lover. He doesn't like to be seen to try too hard. His sentences and movements are purposeful, sparse. There is a heaviness around him that may come over on screen as strength and solidity, but as he rocks awkwardly in his chair you wonder if it's not damage.

He seems to feel me thinking about his vulnerability. 'If the person you play behaves heroically, they also have to have humility and vulnerability and be deep enough in the shit of it all to have to save themselves. That's a character I prefer to play, a guy who's in over his head, who survives because of his tenacity, or his wit, or his dumb luck. That's more interesting.'

Tenacity is interesting. 'I think it is.' Is that him? Is that how he is? He smiles a long, slow smile. He said the word tenacity with a strange kind of pride, wilfully dismissing any other of his talents. 'I certainly have tenacity, and in enough force to measure out through not just the last 15 or so years, but the apprenticeship before I made enough money, before I was able to say I was a full-time actor.' I don't know why he said 15 years when he's been a full-time actor for 30, but he's lost track of time. It was a long time before he could say he was a full-time actor.

Harrison Ford grew up in the nondescript suburb of Des Plaines, Chicago. He left town with his new wife when he was 22, to come to Hollywood. He won a small contract as an actor, which he had to supplement with other work, mostly as a carpenter, and he approached his new career with hands-on hard work, no overintellectualised method acting. He has been dismissive of acting as therapy in the past, the idea that playing someone else gives you the chance of getting some emotional exercise. The last person he would choose would be himself. Nonetheless, he is emotionally present, even if he doesn't want you to think he is. He never drifts off. He is very much on, alert, astute, assessing every second. Extremely driven at all times, even if he's not sure where he's going.

His first marriage was perhaps a casualty of this drive, or perhaps he was just too young. He married Mary Marquardt, a cheerleader he met in high school, in 1964. He had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in favour of pursuing the Hollywood dream, or at least his version of it. They had two children to support, Ben, now 40 and a renowned Los Angeleno chef, and Willard, 37. After working at Bullocks he became a carpenter, a good carpenter who, like the hero of a Hollywood fairy tale, was rediscovered as an actor when he was cabinet-making for George Lucas. He put him first in American Graffiti and then Star Wars, and that was the start of the accidental hero trajectory, the one that fits in so well on screen and so uncomfortably off.

There are many interviews in the past where he has said the biggest regret was the failure of his first marriage. But that was before the second one had failed too. He has said, 'Sometimes I think I have been a better actor than husband or father. I had to leave my family behind in order to make money for us to eat.'

Mary Marquardt now suffers from MS. She doesn't believe that he was a bad husband. In a recent interview she talked about how Ford still more than provides for her financially. 'Harrison has been a true friend and a great love. He has stood by me quietly, asking for nothing in return, through my darkest days.'

It is impossible to imagine that Ford was not conflicted, if not tortured, when both marriages fell apart. He met his second wife, ET screenwriter Melissa Mathison, when she was an executive assistant on Apocalypse Now in 1979. They were married for 17 years. They have a son, Malcolm, 21, and daughter, Georgia, 17. Much of the marriage was spent in Jackson, Wyoming. He rebuilt woodland and redirected trout streams. They watched eagles. He was out of the public eye and enjoyed that. The marriage floundered. There was a separation, a brief reunion and a divorce. The disruption of it must have been hard for him, as this is a man who also talked about not liking his furniture to be moved even a few inches. He depends on what is solid.

Colin Farrell said recently that if he wasn't an actor, he'd be a carpenter because he likes making things. Is there a link between building a character and an apprenticeship in carpentry? His eyes sparkle, and he moves from a nervous, hunched position in his chair to a welcoming, open one. He likes this question. 'I think so. I think it's a way to organise your thinking around something, making something. It is gratifying to take a piece of lumber and make it into something else. It's the same thing with acting, you take these disparate bits and put them together and make this character. It's purpose-built to serve the story, just like you build a piece of furniture for utility. It's a practical mindset that many actors have, not all. But there's a strain that runs all the way down from me to [Laurence] Olivier, who had this similar sense. We all have to find our own way,' he says, 'but it's interesting when you discover that others have the same idea of it as a craft rather than some strange artistic process that is not available to any but the most gifted of us. It's a hard slog sometimes. You have to know what you're doing and why you are doing it, and that you are in service to an idea, a conversation between you and the audience. It's always about the story,' he says, loving the idea that he is lost in something bigger than himself.

Has he ever been unable to find a way in, had actor's block? 'No. It's always been fun for me. It used to be more difficult because I had less of a sense of how to work with people to gain the kind of confidence and understanding that allows you to help them.' In other words, being an actor taught him how to be. 'You have to learn about people to make it work.' Were you naturally good with people growing up, I ask. 'No,' he says, looking at me with the grey-yellow staring eyes again. He knows that I must have read he was bullied at school. That boys took him up to the top of the hill, beat him up, then rolled him down.

'I wasn't very sociable. In fact, one of the things that I found in acting was something I could do with people because I didn't like competitive sports, teams, so there was nothing...' the voice trails. Does he mean acting was a way of dealing with people without actually being yourself, but a self you could make available to other people? 'Yeah, that's part of it as well. I also discovered I could scare the bejesus out of people, but my own knees were knocking. I couldn't control my own emotions even when I was pretending, so it was a matter of self-discipline, doing something that at times scared me, and then I found I actually loved working. I loved stories, and this is my way to being part of a group of storytellers. I felt the power of the story, the power of literature, identifying elemental themes, the things that concern us all, then disguising it in a revelation of plot and characters. And then I thought, "Shit, this is it, this is the stuff of life, give me a piece of this,"' he says beaming, twinkling, theatrical even, but affecting. 'I was working with a group of people and it was the first time I found a sense of community in my life, in a culture that I was part of.' His hands lay open on his jeans. That element of fear that he talks about, and overcoming it, learning from it, is that what still drives him? 'No.' He is comfortable in his pause. What is he afraid of tackling? 'Nothing really. I enjoy the performing up until the point they ask me to sing,' he laughs. 'I'm not interested in being scared any more. When you get scared you close up and it's all about opening up,' he says.

What about the notion that if you are afraid of something, you should do it anyway, it's good for you? 'I don't identify with those things,' he says sternly. He has a way of shrinking you instantly, making you feel bad for talking to him in slogan psychology. He corrects, 'I would fear going to war but I don't have any reason for doing that. I would fear going into a fire, and I'm not going to do that.'

The silence becomes awkward again, filled with unasked questions and a rearranging of barriers. He wobbles about in his chair. His black shirt skims his body, showing off his shape, which is lithe and strong. He looks good not just for 65, but just good. He holds back his emotions in such an obvious way; anger, pain, self-righteousness and fear of being judged are all set out there in front of us. Now he is sitting in a squashed up position doing something strange and tense with his arm. His eyes dart the room and then back to me. He softens. 'I'm not afraid of flying, for instance, because I've learned to fly and I was taught properly. People think that my attraction to it might be for the thrill. I'm not so crazy about that. What I'm interested in is understanding what the risks are, mitigating them by having the required skills, practising those skills, planning the event and knowing where the danger is.' Pretty much his reasoning for dangerous acting, working with the stuntman, not CGI.

Does he feel afraid when other people are flying the plane? 'Oh,' he smiles, 'I far prefer to fly myself. I'm not afraid but I'm a do-it-yourself kind of guy.' Does he still have his ranch? I imagined him there, tramping through the woods and over the mountains in conversation with no one but himself.

'I have what they refer to as a ranch. I have a piece of land in Jackson, Wyoming, that is largely forest rather than cleared for pasture. It's full of wildlife and streams and the like. It's on the Snake River and it's much the same as it was 150 years ago,' he says dreamily. 'It's in the mountains and it's...' His voice stops. Do you spend much time there? 'I don't now because I have a seven-year-old in first grade, so we are nailed to the school schedule and she is doing a series in television that is very successful, so she has to be here.'

The 'she' is Calista Flockhart, his girlfriend since they met at the 2002 Golden Globe Awards. He had never seen an episode of Ally McBeal. The neurotic lawyer and her pin thinness had made Flockhart extremely famous. Much was made of the fact that she was 22 years younger than him, although she looks more womanly now. They have been together six years and though the barbs coming their way may have softened, you feel that they'll forever be scratching in Ford's head. People didn't seem to accept them as a couple. It wasn't what they would have imagined, but a few years prior to Calista, people were shocked to find Ford drinking tequila slammers. He was pictured in nightclubs or strip joints and once was even said to have a woman's bra on his head. Perhaps it was because people had him down as boringly trustworthy, a grafter, not a player.

Wasn't it frightening to change his life by stepping into a new relationship? 'No. It's exciting exploring new relationships. I had been out of the relationship business for a couple of years when we met, except for relationships with my kids, that is. I hadn't had a serious relationship...' There's a pause, as if he might be thinking of a different way to put that. 'As an actor I've always taken risks. I open myself up to possibilities.' Those possibilities came after a long phase of being out on the town. Suddenly here he was in public, a man who had always loved anonymity. There were reports of flings with Minnie Driver and Lara Flynn Boyle. He inherited her from Jack Nicholson and seemed to be enjoying releasing his inner Jack on the world. Isn't that the time that people refer to as his mid-life crisis, I ask? 'I don't know what they are talking about. I went out more since there was no reason to stay at home. Not a big deal. I think they were looking for some new development to introduce into the Harrison Ford story, so they went for that and the appearance of an earring was enough for them to generate the whole mid-life crisis thing.' Yes, indeed, reams were written about the small, black glittering thing that still sits in his ear.

He could have got a tattoo or something like that? 'No I couldn't because then I wouldn't be able to be buried in the Jewish cemetery.' But he is not Jewish. 'I'm half Jewish. My mother. And that's the half that makes you Jewish. But I don't want a tattoo anyway. The earring came after I had lunch with a couple of buddies - Jimmy Buffet, the singer, and Ed Bradley, the guy from 60 Minutes. Both had earrings, pirates the both of them.' He likes that word, 'pirate'. He smiles conspiratorially as he says it. 'I walked away from lunch saying, "You know what, I'm going to get my ears pierced, just to piss people off." And I went down to the first jewellery store on Madison Avenue that offered to punch a hole in your ear for the price of an earring and suddenly I had one.' I admire its glitteringness. 'It doesn't much matter to me, but I liked it a little bit that people say, "Wait a second, what's going on?" Although I don't go out of my way to get people to comment,' he says, and stops, realising he has contradicted himself, saying he loves attention, he hates it. He loves the woods, he likes the parties. He particularly liked the idea that such a tiny thing could trigger huge hysteria.

I tell him I like the idea that someone who embraces a riven masculinity could introduce something to his persona that's a little feminine and a little camp. He looks uncomfortable, pauses, laughs, first of all nervously, and then wickedly, as he says, 'I think I was introducing the naughty.' And here we see what is perhaps the most natural Harrison Ford, the playful. Who would Indiana Jones be if he were not playful? He continues, 'Those two buggers were genuine pirates. They were brilliant. Ed had to wear a suit to work and he had this big-assed earring and you weren't supposed to do that if you were on 60 Minutes. That's what I liked. It was a little tiny case of being a rebel.' Was that new for him, to rebel? 'Oh no. I think I always had the rebel, I just didn't have the earring.'

If you had a superpower, what would it be? 'I would love to be invisible.' Yeah, of course you would. We laugh. 'Yeah, that's problematic, isn't it.' You wonder about the premier action hero, one of the biggest-grossing actors of all time and his desire to be invisible. I'm sure the real Ford has been concealed, buried, mutated within Indiana Jones and all the others - all the brave ones. Perhaps that's where he went to be invisible. 'Perhaps,' he says. By now, though, he's not looking tortured or stiff. He's funny and easy to be in the room with. 'Don't you think it would be great to have that super power? I wouldn't use it just to sneak into changing rooms. I would be able to observe human nature without being observed.' Would he sneak into changing rooms as well? He laughs. 'I don't know if my earring would be invisible.' We imagine the little dot swooping around the changing room and women trying to swat him like a fly. 'I'd like to fly too. Everyone has flying dreams. They are the most spectacular. Have you seen those guys who wear squirrel suits? It's a suit that has a web here,' he points to under his arms and between his legs. 'They jump off mountains. I would never do that. I like having engines.'

The conversation has wound itself back to engines and action, and I turn it back into something more interior. When he's in a relationship does he like to observe but not really know himself, I ask? 'It looks like we are running out of time,' he says, deadpan. The publicist has been in and out several times now to end it. But he has been enjoying himself, he says. Two more questions, I say, one simple, one less so. 'Let's start with the less simple one,' he says, consciously unpredictable.

When you are in a relationship do you prefer to be the person who loves most or is loved most? He rocks back in his chair, thinking. 'I don't know if it ever works quite that way, because the ambition is for it to be equal. That's the thing that keeps you in it.' But it's never equal. He doesn't disagree, he continues thinking. Not tensely, or avoiding the question, but wanting to give the right answer. 'I think there is only one appropriate answer and that is to be the person who loves the most. That gives you the greatest potential to be loved.' Some people define themselves by their capacity to feel. Some people by their need to receive. 'Yes, but I don't think I could make it either way if it was just that for a length of time, although I understand both emotional positions and I think I have been there in both of them. I don't fall in love easily but when I do, by God, I both have the need and expectation for it to be equal. Now can I have the easy one, please?'

What characteristics of your parents have you inherited? 'My father's work ethic and my mother's insecurities. My father is Irish and my mother is Jewish. The only thing that held the family together is that they were both Democrats, so I was raised Democrat.' His eyes twinkle when remembering his parents. 'It was a great upbringing.'

Challenging, perhaps? 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,' he says, giving me one final quizzical look, making those words seem real and not a cliché. It's as if he wants me to wonder what it was that didn't kill him, or maybe he's just looking at my hair. I'm not sure if goodbye is going to be a smile or a handshake but it turns out to be a hug, a firm, all-embracing one. I feel a tingling going up and down my entire body. When I leave the room I realise I have blushed from the inside out. Whatever he's learned, whatever he's lost, whatever he closes or opens, you felt a real person in that hug, not necessarily one that always wants to be invisible.

· Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull goes on general release in the UK on 22 May