Revered movie stars get the opportunity to work with the world’s greatest filmmakers after they climb to the top of the A-list, but Harrison Ford was working with them long before he became a big star. The actor got his start in the 1970s working with legends of New Hollywood like Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.
Throughout the 1980s, he played Indiana Jones for Steven Spielberg and the titular Blade Runner in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi masterpiece. Over the course of his half-century-spanning career, Ford has worked with plenty of directors who rank among the all-time greats.
Denis Villeneuve
In the early 2010s, Denis Villeneuve broke into Hollywood with grisly crime thrillers like Dune (which recently snagged 10 much-deserved Academy Award nominations).
He directed Ford’s return to the role of Rick Deckard in Blade Runner 2049, a long-awaited sci-fi sequel that seemed impossible to pull off and ended up being just as acclaimed as its groundbreaking predecessor.
Robert Zemeckis
While Steven Spielberg is the filmmaker most closely associated with cinematic nostalgia, a close second would be Robert Zemeckis, the visionary behind Back to the Future trilogy.
Zemeckis directed Ford alongside Michelle Pfeiffer in the underrated haunted house thriller What Lies Beneath, in which the ghosts in a couple’s home symbolize the fractures in their marriage.
Alan J. Pakula
Alan J. Pakula started his career as a producer on hit movies like To Kill a Mockingbird before taking to the director’s chair to helm his own projects. Best known as the director of Meryl Streep’s star-making drama Sophie’s Choice, Pakula also directed a political paranoia trilogy – Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men – throughout the Nixon istration and post-Watergate eras.
Ford worked with Pakula on one of his last films, Presumed Innocent. It might not be as iconic as some of Pakula’s better-known movies, but Presumed Innocent was praised by critics as a solid legal thriller.
Sydney Pollack
Sydney Pollack is one of the most versatile directors in Hollywood history, capable of helming both crowd-pleasing high-concept comedies like Tootsie and award-worthy dramas like Out of Africa.
Pollack cast Ford in the Humphrey Bogart role in his 1995 remake of Billy Wilder’s Sabrina. The movie suffered from inevitable comparisons with Wilder’s original masterpiece.
Francis Ford Coppola
Thanks to The Godfather trilogy, Francis Ford Coppola was one of the major pioneers of the New Hollywood movement (and one of its biggest box office draws). Coppola is a true independent filmmaker, financing and producing his own movies to avoid any interference from studio executives.
Ford played small ing roles in two of Coppola’s finest films: Apocalypse Now, the gonzo Vietnam War epic whose opening exposition scene features Ford as “Colonel G. Lucas” (named after George Lucas).
Kathryn Bigelow
Kathryn Bigelow has a proven track record in both sides of filmmaking. She’s earned critical acclaim and box office success with both mindless popcorn action flicks like Zero Dark Thirty.
The submarine movie that Bigelow made with Ford, K-19: The Widowmaker, is somewhere in between these two distinctive directorial styles.
Mike Nichols
Along with Coppola and a handful of other pioneers on this list, Mike Nichols is The Graduate made him one of the very first architects of the movement.
Nichols cast Ford in a couple of movies. After playing a ing role in Melanie Griffith’s story in Working Girl, Ford took the lead role in the J.J. Abrams-penned Regarding Henry.
George Lucas
George Lucas first caught critics and audiences’ attention with his coming-of-age gem Dazed and Confused following the antics of a group of teenagers over the course of a wild night in Modesto, California, in the 1960s (the time and place in which Lucas grew up).
Ford played a standout ing role in American Graffiti, then took a larger part in Lucas’ follow-up movie, Star Wars, as the now-iconic gunslinging space pirate Han Solo. Star Wars, of course, changed the face of cinema and its influence can still be felt today. Ford reprised his role as Solo in four sequels across a four-decade period.
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott has helmed some of the greatest movies of all time across a wide variety of genres: sci-fi horror masterwork The Martian – the list goes on.
Scott cast Ford to play the eponymous cyborg hunter in Blade Runner, his groundbreaking Philip K. Dick-based sci-fi masterpiece. The film pioneered the “tech-noir” by bringing the visual signifiers of the film noir into a dystopian futuristic setting.
Steven Spielberg
Ford teamed up with Steven Spielberg (and also reunited with Lucas, the creator of the character) to Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels.
Spielberg is responsible for a bunch of cinematic icons – E.T., the little girl in the red coat, the shark in Jurassic Park – but the fedora-clad archeologist-turned-explorer is by far the most iconic character from his filmography, and Ford’s pulpy, charismatic performance can take most of the credit.
