Harrison Ford In London to promote his latest film, Harrison Ford at 67 cuts an impressive figure. In person he’s calm, courteous and measured in his responses - a pretty stark contrast to the curmudgeonly scientist he plays in Extraordinary Measures.
The film is a dramatised account of a real story, as Harrison Ford explains, "I read a series of articles in The Wall Street Journal about a guy named John Crowley and his family. Crowley created a therapy to aid his children who suffer from a rare genetic disease called Pompe Syndrome. This film is based on the true story of him and his family. He quit his job as a mid level executive in a company, and went into business with the character that I play - who is not a real character but an amalgam of any number of scientists and researchers that helped Crowley. He created a drug that was able to be brought to market, went through the testing process and proved to be an effective therapy for his kids and now when it's administrated to infants who suffer from this disease, it allows them to live a pretty normal life.”
Ford’s fictional character, the maverick Dr Robert Stonehill has - theoretically - the key to managing the symptoms of Pompe Syndrome, which fatally affects young children. Set against this is John Crowley, played by Brendan Fraser, who as the father to two young children with Pompe, is racing against the clock to buy time for his sick children. His search for a solution homes in on Stonehill, whose groundbreaking research he thinks might help save his kids.
Trouble is, Stonehill, who cuts an unconventional outsider figure with his loud rock music, old jeep and beloved theorems, has never actually taken anything to the research stage before, and time is desperately short. So John Crowley first promises to find funding for research, and eventually puts his family's future on the line in a gamble that forces him to leave his well-paid job - along with its vital health insurance benefit - to establish a biotech company with Stonehill that will test what has so far been just theory.
"I thought it was a very interesting experience," comments Ford. "This was six years ago, before anybody was talking about the healthcare system and we couldn't have anticipated that it would be such a topic as it is today. But I was moved by his dilemma, and I was inspired by his determination to find a cure, or a mitigation of, his kids' disease.
"Pompe is a rare disorder, it's referred to as an 'orphan' disease because so few people suffer from it. And because of that, pharmaceutical industries, which are businesses, don't usually want to involve themselves in the research and development to treat such a small group of people because there is no reasonable expectation of profit."
However, Ford does not point the finger of blame at the pharmaceutical companies, saying: "The villain of the piece is not the pharmaceutical industry. If your pension plan invested in one, you'd want them to perform well. I think it's just too easy to cast them as the villain of the piece."
Extraordinary Measures describes itself as being inspired by true events, but dramatic license aside, this still leaves an awesome amount of difficult science and research and development red tape to condense into layman's terms. As Ford admits, "I spent a lot of time trying to understand this particular science that we're talking about, both because I had to understand it in order to speak the language, but also because as a producer I was involved in the process of trying to give visual expression to science, which is something that is largely practised in the head."
With no real-life basis, Dr Robert Stonehill is the fictional device that allows some of these complex matters to be simplified, as Ford explains, "I made him up out of those things to help tell the story. I didn't want to play a conventional scientist. The utility of this character to the story is to represent the conflict and drama and the necessity to forge an alliance with somebody who was not so easy to get along with. So I enjoyed the opportunity to create a character different to what peoples' expectations are of what I do."
I put it to Ford that there is something fundamentally American in this story about one man's determination to take on the pharmaceutical industry, even death itself. He responds: "Well I suppose we like to think of ourselves as that kind of people, but there is something about the ingenuity and the industry, by which I mean hard work, that's been part of the American experience - not that it isn't part of other people's experience as well. But this character does represent those positive aspects of the American consciousness."