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Carpentry taught him things he could never have learned in acting school. The first was the work ethic, which he had not grasped while growing up in the protected world of a Chicago suburb. Once so lazy that he had flunked out of Wisconsin's Ripon College in his senior year, he became accustomed to picking up his hammer and saw early in the morning and continuing until the job was finished. "Now I find it difficult to enjoy myself when I'm not working," he says. "And I am not able to distract myself when I'm waiting around on a set. I sit and stare at the walls or walk around and bump into my trailer."
The second thing he learned was to approach a role from the ground up, as if he were building a house, or raising a barn, as he helps to do in Witness. "I'm a technical actor, and my approach to both jobs is almost totally technical," he explains. "There's no magic involved, only work and circumstance." Ridley Scott, who directed Ford in the 1982 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner, observes that, like a good carpenter, Ford is obsessive about small things. "After going over the story line, he'll turn to the details," says Scott. "He wants to know not only what the character looks like but what he'd wear, right down to the kind of shoes and the type of gun he would carry, where he would live and how." In researching the character of John Book, Ford spent two weeks following a real Philadelphia detective, participated in two police raids and tipped a few glasses with the men in blue. "When I began, I wasn't confident about myself," he says. "But now I have enough confidence to feel I'm capable of doing the job. It took a long time and experience."
Carpentry is still Ford's hobby and, as he describes it, his delight. Han Solo and Indiana Jones made him rich. "I am very, very rich," he tells a reporter. "That's what you wanted to hear, isn't it? Usually, I just demur. People would like to know exactly how rich I am, but it's none of their goddam business." Of course not, but it is safe to guess that he is probably rich enough to buy Louis XIV's favorite armchair--and everything else in the palace of Versailles. But who would want such froufrou when he could have a genuine Harrison Ford bedside table? "It looks like a bedside table, and that's why I like it," says Ford, sounding like a boy in the first stage of puppy love. "It's a simple piece with turned legs and a band-sawed skirt. I just like the work itself."