Ryan's Hope Part One

By: Michael Tunison
Date: Monday, June 03, 2002

First of all, Ben Affleck wants to set the record straight on this whole "taking over for Harrison Ford" thing.

Yes, the star of PEARL HARBOR, just shy of his 30th birthday, is playing a younger version of Tom Clancy's CIA analyst hero Jack Ryan, the character famously portrayed by Ford in 1992's PATRIOT GAMES and 1994's CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. But as far as comparing himself to the action movie icon who brought Han Solo and Indiana Jones to life goes, Affleck can't bend over backwards far enough to diffuse that one at the beginning of an interview. Indeed, he practically genuflects at the mention of Ford's name.

"I certainly don't liken myself to Harrison Ford, or say, 'Hey, I'm the next Harrison Ford,' or, 'I'm as great as this guy is,'" Affleck says. "I'm a huge fan of his and only look at his career and what he did with humility. I wouldn't have done it if I was going to follow up and say, 'I have to follow what he did. To step in and continue that.'"

In fact, Affleck says his first reaction to the idea of taking the baton from Ford for the fourth Jack Ryan film, THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, was: "Well, this is impossible. It can't work.

"I can't play an icon, and I certainly can't follow one up," he emphasizes.

What Affleck reckoned he could do, however, was play a younger, wet-behind-the-ears version of the character years before he took on said iconhood. And that's what he agreed to do for SUM OF ALL FEARS.

"What I thought was interesting was... showing this guy when he was green and new and [a] little unsure of himself, making mistakes," Affleck says. "You see who this guy was before he kind of polished himself up when he was a little rough and uncertain and halting and wearing the wrong clothes to work and being admonished for that. That's the thing that Harrison Ford would never do, you know what I mean? So I thought, 'That I can do. I can play a guy who is learning on the job and still figuring it out.'"

That concept of the character jibed with the thoughts of Jack Ryan series producer Mace Neufeld who has overseen the films ever since 1990's Alec Baldwin-starring THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER - and the franchise's handlers at Paramount Pictures, who felt the films had run into something of a creative wall in the years following CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER. As in Clancy's more recent books, Ryan had achieved such prominence in the CIA by that time (in the novels he becomes the Agency's director at one point and even fills in as the president of the United States!) that efforts to get him into action in the field were becoming increasingly implausible.


"I think they had some difficulty, just dramatically speaking... in terms of trying to make it interesting," Affleck says. "Trying to make it dramatically compelling with a guy who'd done so much and kind of gone so far and was so clearly at the top of the heap. And if you're that senior an officer, for example, you wouldn't necessarily be in the field, and a lot of the movie takes place in the field."

Clancy's 1991 book version of SUM OF ALL FEARS, which deals with a terrorist scheme to use a lost Israeli warhead to trigger a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the U.S., actually takes place after PATRIOT GAMES and CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER in the fictional Jack Ryan continuity. Neufeld originally developed the adaptation with Ford and PATRIOT/CLEAR AND PRESENT director Phillip Noyce in hopes of following up the team's successful '90s installments. When that version of the film went nowhere, the idea emerged of restarting the series with a younger Ryan who would be both easier to challenge and more realistically available for field missions.

Enter Affleck, "a huge fan" of the Ryan books and movies who expressed interest in tackling the character if Ford wanted to bow out, that is. In fact, the younger actor went so far as to phone the action movie icon himself to make sure he had his blessing before proceeding.

"If Harrison Ford wanted to do the movie, I'd be buying a ticket," Affleck stresses. "You'd have to ask Harrison, ultimately, why he decided not to do it, because I'm sure he could have done it and it still would have been great. But I know they had already come across this idea that, 'If we start him over from the beginning, it gives us inherently so many more dramatic possibilities to make the movie interesting.' I think it was more about that than it was about trying to say, 'The guy should be young!'"

Check back for part two of CINESCAPE's Ben Affleck profile, in which the actor discusses meeting Tom Clancy, America's real-life terrorism fears and the possibility of returning as Jack Ryan in a future film.

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